I've been thinking about "no product" living. We are now so used to commercial entities taking interest in all the vagaries of our daily lives that it seems unthinkable how people live 80, 100, or 180 years ago.

People making their own soap, their own clothes, growing their own food, building their own homes, making their own tools for their gardens.

It seems like everyone these days has a commercial interest in everything. There is a product marketed for EVERYTHING. Advertising campaigns relentlessly pound us with the ideas that if we are not buying these things, and if we do not NEED these things, we are backward, inept, and impotent.

In reality, it is just the reverse.

We don't need to BUY what we eat, what we garden with, what we live in, even what we power our homes or vehicles with. There is no one reason for the way our lives are set up today, just many small reasons, which are the many small, greedy visions of those who produce and convince us to buy, what we purportedly NEED.

Now we work to make money to buy things which we would have had of ourselves and our own resources... if we did not work to make money.

This is a destructive cycle, a catch-22. Spinning around in it reduces quality of life, both for individuals and society as a whole.