To engage in a sustainable lifestyle implies surrounding oneself with fewer but better things, reducing consumption, and choosing well and ethically when purchasing anything. One must be prepared to repeatedly use — and choose to find pleasure in using — the same items, and in engaging in daily rhythms and rituals.
However, it seems that our late-modern cultural consensus is reluctant of repetition. Repetition is considered trivial and exasperating, and continuity is generally viewed as synonymous with dullness and elongation. Changeability, innovation, novelty — as well as the act of upgrading one’s belongings to new, high-performance products — is considered thrilling, even titillating.
Of course, repetition, if linked to monotonous routine work is draining and trivial. But finding beauty and satisfaction in daily repetitions, the daily chorus, can be aesthetically nourishing, and can be the key to a more fulfilling and more sustainable lifestyle in allegiance with one’s core values.
Investing in only a few good and nourishing things is a crucial effort in order to minimize the over-consumption of irrelevant, pollutive, short-lived things — and it is something we can all do.
Professor of Philosophy Yuriko Saito operates in her (very recommendable) book Everyday Aesthetics with a term that she calls the familiar strange. The familiar strange can be described as a gem-like aesthetic quality discretely hidden behind the mundane façade of familiar objects. This could be the beautiful lining in a bag that evokes pleasure every time the bag is opened, intriguing tactile elements in a piece of furniture that ensure tactile inducements, multifunctional elements in kitchenware that ensures flexibility, or a chair that instantly appears heavy but is made out of a very light material that triggers our senses.
However, even though there can be a lot of reasons to charge a design object with strangeness and thereby momentarily “force” the recipient out of the comfort of familiarity, which could for instance be done to applaud the edifying challenges of life, some objects should emphasize and celebrate the rewarding, non-trivial rhythms that our human lives are built around.
Saito argues that by seeking the familiar strange or pursuing to embed ordinary, everyday things with gem-like aesthetic qualities, thereby attempting to overcome the triviality of monotonous daily life, “we also pay the price of compromising the very everydayness of everyday”. By this statement, Saito emphasizes the quality and beauty of everydayness.
Everydayness can connote triviality and insignificance. But in Saito’s use of the term, the everydayness of everyday implies the on-going satisfaction of a fulfilling everyday life, and the pleasure of being accompanied by everyday objects that support nourishing rhythms and habits or that beautify the daily chorus.
When leading an everyday life that nourishes and fulfills us, we don’t have the need to flee from everydayness through pleasure hunts or over-consumption. Establishing a nourishing, rewarding everyday rhythm is crucial when striving to live sustainably and to reduce one’s consumption of feel-good, quick-kick trendy things.
Not everything should be extraordinary, amazing, and dramatic; no one would be able to cope with constant intensity and drama. Perhaps the Kierkegaardian Aesthete (who I wrote about in this article) would disagree, but let’s not forget that he is constantly on the verge of despair.
The vast majority of our lives consist of the rhythms and regularities of everyday life: working, cooking, eating, relaxing, exercising, socializing with family and friends, transporting oneself from a–b, and, of course, sleeping. Most of the objects we surround ourselves with should support those rhythms, and perhaps even improve them or sustain them, emphasize them and beautify them by embedding them with aesthetic nourishment in the shape of tactility, flexibility, and inclusiveness, or as Saito eloquently puts it:
“Thus, whether regarding history, landscape, objects, or experiences, the ordinary and mundane that are often overlooked need to receive equal attention as the dramatic and extraordinary.”
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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Photo credit: NordWood Themes on Unsplash
