The Barbershop

What is the goal of life? Cultural messaging has tricked many of us into thinking it is wealth and status, or career advancement. For us, it is the project of our marriage, our family, friends, and the good we can do in the world.

In the discussion of minimalism, I want to suggest it’s less about what’s in your home than what your home is used for. It’s not what you don’t have in your home, but the people you do. It’s not the values you say you believe, but your disposition towards your neighbor and to things.

Woods may be Californian by birth, and a Floridian by residence, but I believe there’s something in his latest comeback capable of stirring the soul of even the most reticent, celebrity-wary Middle American.

What this means is death. When our kids were little, parenting meant death to my independence: my time, my space, my very body, were no longer my own. Parenting meant death to sleeping in and going out on a whim. It meant death to plans carefully wrought and carelessly wrecked by fever and blowouts and ear infections.

"In order to implement vital system updates, you must install the Trans-Mog-Z Facilitator, available at any Big Horizon Automotive Intervention Center. This has been your first notice.”

Why have we persisted in peeing outdoors well after the advent of outhouses and toilets?

If we learn about ourselves and our homes through travel, we don’t just become better “citizens of the world”—we can become more conscious and thoughtful citizens of our own places.

Too many children grow up learning no lessons, organising no peers, and exploring no territory, unless it be shifting electrons around a screen, and the screen becomes their world.

I worry about our ever-expanding cult of safety and nod in agreement with so much of sociologist Frank Furedi’s description of the “Paradox of our Safety Addiction.” He argues that “the zero risk mentality breeds a culture of anxiety and a hunger for authority.”

Tributary streams remind us that every attitude flows to the sea. Our reactions to the streams of today’s circumstances feed the rivers of our everyday attitudes.