June 22nd, 2008
A Life That Fits Into a Backpack
Welcome to The Marketer Who Went Off Consumption! Subscribe to my combined feed in a feed reader or by e-mail and you'll never miss a single post. Thanks for visiting!
When I moved into my new house last December, I was delighted. It’s a beautiful house overlooking the sea, walking distance away from office, in the costliest residential address in India. In fact, it’s such a lovely house that it was featured in a Mid-Day story on cool bachelor pads.
It would have been easy for me to look at the house as a symbol of how far I had come in life, especially in the context of where I had started from.
Instead, I remembered this paragraph from page 186 of Po Bronson’s life-changing book What Should I Do with My Life?, in which “boom wrangler” Heidi Olson explains her wanderlust —
I decided to go to Oxford for a year, because, well, it was Oxford. I told the other women at work, and one said, ‘I wish I could just up and go to Oxford.’ So I asked, ‘Why don’t you?’ She said, ‘I would, but I bought a couch.’ I always remembered that moment, and I never wanted to be that woman. I never wanted to be trapped by my past, my belongings, my commitments.
I decided then that I won’t let my lovely house turn into the couch that trapped me into a life of complacent comfort.
We derive our sense of identity basically in four ways — from the things we own, from the experiences we have, from the people we relate to, and from the things we create.
Sometimes, all the four elements of our identity are in sync. Often, the things we own enable us to have meaningful experiences with the people we relate to. Sometimes, the things we own even become the tools with which we create things and discover meaning.
There are times, though, when there are trade-offs, when the things we own stop us from experiencing life, relating to people, or creating meaning.
Two such related trade-offs are the time/ money trade-off and the experiencing/ owning trade-off.
Timothy Ferris differentiates between three types of consumption in his thought-provoking book ‘The 4-Hour Work Week’ — spending money to own things, spending money to enjoy experiences, and spending money to free up time for the experiences —
Tim believes that having new experiences is the key to happiness, that owning things distracts us from the pursuits of new experiences, and that time and not money is the limiting factor in having experiences. Most of us work too long, own too many things, and enjoy too few experiences. Tim’s mantra is to work as little as possible, own as little as possible and free up all your time and money for enjoying experiences.
I recently read three posts by blogger Scott H Young (I can’t believe he is only nineteen!) that echo Tim’s ideas. Scott says that there is a trade-off between comfort and fulfillment and the less money you need to live a comfortable life, the more time you’ll have to pursue and fulfill your dreams. Taken to the extreme, this may mean wanting to have a life that fits into a backpack, so that you are free to indulge your wanderlust, to travel the world in search of meaning, maybe even walk into the wild.
Sometimes, I too fantasize about a life that fits into a backpack.
Sometimes, I want to give away the life I have built over the last eights years — my job, my house, the cane furniture that I had designed myself, my bar with its three hundred glasses, the hundreds of books and DVDs I have collected over years — and live the rest of my life (or at least the next ten years) out of a backpack.
In my fantasy, the backpack contains a customized 17″ MacBook Pro, a Seagate FreeAgent 1 TB external hard drive loaded with movies, songs and audiobooks, an iPhone to stay connected, a dozen books, a pair of Nike+ running shoes with an iPod Nano to go along, a couple of Nike tracksuits, a dozen boxer shorts from Jockey, six pairs of slim fit blue jeans from Levi’s, a dozen Tantra t-shirts, a dozen shirts from Provogue in a mix of cotton and linen, and, perhaps, the perfect off-white linen jacket from Provogue.
In the middle of one such reverie, I look up from my laptop and watch the beautiful woman perched on one of my chairs with two extra cushions, intently working on her own laptop. I have known her for less than a month, but I’m already in love with her. I watch her until she looks back at me and raises an eyebrow in question. I reach out and kiss her lightly on the lips and wonder how I’ll fit her into my backpack.
Some trade-offs are such that they change other trade-offs.
