Nearing's 'Living the Good Life'

Helen and Scott Nearing’s ‘Living the Good Life’ is the auto-biography of a New York couple living the “simple life” in post-Depression America, after they leave the city and move to Vermont. Detaching themselves and their livelihood from consumerism and a market-driven business model, the Nearing’s success truly embodies the good life. What I ask, though, is is good life a result of the simple life, or is the simple life a result of the good life? What I mean by this, is Nearing's ideas and written beliefs surrounding community and behaviour something that could be quite easily inserted into twenty-first century life? And if so, how do we do it in a way that is enriching and fulfilling for those who want to try it?

It is, I believe, the fear of not fitting in that Nearing so briefly talks about that could be a major barrier to living a simple life in today’s world. Nearing speaks of his neighbours over their twenty years in Vermont; how they didn’t understand their vegetarian diet, how they disputed their ‘knock down and rebuild’ rather than ‘keep and repair mentality’. One neighbour, as I recall, openly called them ‘socialist’ - certainly not a compliment in 1930’s America. But the same mentality fits now. While the vegetarian and vegan life-styles have become more popular and widely accepted in the developed world (I say developed, due to many ”less-developed” countries having adopted vegetarian lifestyles already or being unable to support a fully plant-based diet) there is still major backlash to anyone who talks about their diet openly, or dares suggest meat eaters should reduce their meat consumption.

Surely fear is the driving factor behind this backlash. Fear of deviating from the known. Fear of doing something different - stepping out of their comfort zone. For so long, advertising driven by a profit-based market has told u, the consumer, that we have to eat meat, vegetables and carbs to be “healthy” and have a rounded nutritional input. Again, Nearing’s work comes to mind: what is healthy? The same advertisers who sell us large quantities of unnatural food are the ones who help push a dangerous and violent diet culture. Advertisers tell us to remove fructose, or sodium, or carbohydrates from our diets and those that listen to these advertisements do. It is of no value for major brands to tell the wider public to remove meat from our diets. The profit margin for an omnivorous majority in the developed world would be too large to take that risk. Comfort brings in money and stability - backlash against vegans and vegetarians drives this, values such as gloating and pettiness enable those who buy into the meat eater rhetoric to be praised when they do this in public space.

The same could be said for any of Nearing’s guidelines. Why buy your own land when a house is readily available? Why do your own labour when you can pay someone else to? Why plant your own garden when the closest supermarket for many is a fifteen minute drive away. The comfort and normalisation of a job would far outweigh the idea of trying to reject a capitalist trading and market system. The comfortably-paid office worker would rather choose a job they hate for a recurring pay cheque than pack up and attempt to work for themselves. Schools teach their senior students to prepare for university or a job straight away rather than a gap year or experience that would help them discover perhaps a different way to do things. Again we look at advertising: how could someone reject the life we have now for something simple, when the simple life may not have room or accessibility to retail bargains and fast-moving trends. Add social media to this, something Nearing couldn’t have imagined back in 1932, and even the most technologically-challenged person is still targeted online through spam emails, Facebook, or messenger apps. The capitalist market system breeds us to believe only in what is produced by it: it is propaganda we accept, because someone in a free and developed country wouldn’t believe they are falling prey to propaganda. The simple life goes against everything the developed world has built over the past six decades.

It is this that was a particular focus in Nearing’s work: simplicity, serenity, unity, and harmony. As quoted from the book, “these are four values a seeker of the simple life might reasonably expect to develop”. Are we as the modern person losing the ability to feel and act on these four values? Current affairs as it stands is what some would call ‘depressing’ to look at. Not that this wasn’t the case during the 1930’s - post-war, economic crash, developing world in ruins following exploitation by a race to world domination - but to ignore it now would appear, I believe, insensitive. How can you ignore the strife of others to live your own simple life? How can one expect to instil these four values when we’re constantly told by the media and advertising that there’s someone out there with things much worse? I would argue before being able to comprehensively incorporate these four values into our good lives, those who want to live it also need to find a certain empathy within themselves to do so. This will go further in their search for a good life also; an empathy for a neighbour can turn to empathy for the street. For the street, a community. And so on and so forth. Someone who lacks empathy surely can’t hope to live off the resources of the land, such as someone who lacks empathy would not truly understand the meaning of unity and harmony. These four values should be seen as a circle; not one without the other. By incorporating these four values more into our everyday lives, we too could live a good life.

Nearing, I think, would agree with this. Something that stuck with me was his idea of the “fundamental belief to be kind”. I think a community, with similar life goals and similar ethics, whose core attitude was kindness, would be something of a start towards a community Scott and Helen have achieved for themselves. Their attitudes, though meticulous and planned to the final moment, truly encompass ‘goodness’. “Every moment should be treated as an occasion”, live in the present so we may appreciate and craft the future. A mere two-hundred and forty pages has got me thinking twice about my outlook on my environment - the natural and the community. While mindfulness teaches us about what we put in our body and minds is what we exert, the same could be said about how we act towards those we live nearest to and the ground our feet tread every day. Perhaps a bit out of context, a quote from the book once again comes to mind: “We reap what we sow. Nowhere is this more evident than our treatment of the good earth”. We reap what we sow in terms of attitude also, how can we expect the Earth to be kind to us if we are not kind in return?