More with Less

In his reflective preface to the 1958 republication of The Wrong Side and The Right Side, Albert Camus wrote:

“Although I live without worrying about tomorrow now, and count myself among the privileged, I don’t know how to own things… I cling like a miser to the freedom that disappears as soon as there is an excess of things.”

We think these words, written by a 45-year-old Camus only a couple of years before his death, are very wise. They reflect the wisdom of many sages before him who reached the same conclusion.

Henry David Thoreau, for instance, wrote in Walden: “I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of.” (Thoreau, by the way, had an absurdist streak, too. “Men labor under a mistake,” he once wrote, for “man is soon ploughed into the soil for compost.” But that is a story for another time…)

The idea has relevance for the absurd. We have often written than one can’t find happiness in things. It seems simple, but it goes against the powerful thrust of society’s pressures… bombarded as we are with ads encouraging to us to buy new cars and bigger houses and more stylish jeans… “You deserve it,” these modern sirens coo…

But it’s more than just advertising. People, too, expect you to buy new things. If you make a certain amount of money, you are expected to own a certain kind of house in a certain kind of neighborhood. Wealth is a nice car and new clothes…

Even before we could articulate the absurd, we resisted such pressures. We have always resisted this ceaseless drive for more things… for more money, for a better career.

We drive an old 96 Chevy. It has dents and scratches. The upholstery is coming undone. The carpet on the floors is worn nearly bare. We make enough money to buy a new car without any problems, but we choose to stick with the old one.

This is a pattern in our life in many ways. Our mother thinks us cheap… but that is not it. It is not frugality but rather indifference to many of the things society thinks we ought to spend money on.

We don’t value money in itself and we are willing to pay up for certain things, like good food and beer. A plateful of fresh oysters is a treat not to be passed up lightly. And we willingly pony up to travel to faraway places to collect new experiences. We think, now that we read Camus’ words again, that we implicitly understood what he was saying all along. Things are a burden. To invest your happiness in things is to invite disaster and to lose your freedoms.

“I don’t envy anyone anything,” Camus writes in the same preface. This is a trait we find very admirable. The complete inability to feel envy is a great thing. We likewise do not begrudge our neighbor’s desires for bigger houses or fancier cars. We choose to spend that money in other ways.

But we do recommend that you re-read Camus’ wise words up top. Living without concern for tomorrow is an absurdist point of view. Live in the present, live for the experiences of living and don’t be so quick to trade your freedoms for things. In end, we’re all headed to the same place – oblivion.

In an essay called “Irony,” written when Camus was only in his twenties, he ends with some wise words on the varying paths to the same destiny that all of us take. “Death for us all, but his own death to each. After all, the sun still warms our bones for us.”

This essay and preface and lots of other goodies are all found in the Lyrical and Critical Essays pictured here.