Why do you make the choices you make in life? What template are you following, and why? Who designed your lifestyle, and why is it better than this couple's?
And more importantly, how, exactly, is the standard of living of your amorphous blob of "people starving all over the world" affected more by people reusing centuries-old technology than the people fully invested in the constant churn of new commodities with an upgrade cycle of about 2 years?
And why level this criticism at these people? There are currently billions of dollars of capital deployed within 5 miles of where I'm sitting in San Francisco to make the lives of the richest people on Earth marginally more comfortable. The investment decisions made by the owners of that capital have a tangible impact on the direction our civilization goes in that one person wearing a different style of clothing definitely would not.
tl;dr get a grip.
And yet it impedes your own way of life...how exactly? If this couple were to stop living the life they chose to live, and instead lived exactly like you or I, how in the world would that improve the lives of starving, sick people in other countries, let alone their own?
The cognitive dissonance in your comment is staggering.
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> What they are doing is like the worst form of privileged hipsterism I can imagine.
Why such intense dislike? They may be odd, but they're not hurting you or anybody else. What's wrong with them doing what makes them happy? I just don't understand all the hipster hate.
> There are people starving around the world, dying because of lack of basic medical care, clean water, etc.
What does that have to do with this?
There it is, the inevitable disdain, the hallmark of the chronic hipster.
Should anyone be justified in doing anything, just because they want to, even if there's no direct positive effects on society?
I would guess virtually nobody would say absolutely no to this, of course, but are there then thresholds of type and frequency of activities over which the answer becomes an absolute no? What then are those thresholds? If the thresholds depends on other variables, like your own personal wealth now and in the past, then what are the values of those variables? Is there an absolute cap on the level of enjoyment one deserves out of life without helping others directly before one must stop, stay still at that level, and devote any further energies to helping others? What is that cap?
I think we all have internal intuition for these thresholds and values for ourselves, but you can't force these on any other individual, and certainly not on society as a whole. Entertaining that idea that you can or should be able to is dangerous.
Doing direct harm to other people for your own enjoyment obviously should be condemned and prevented - but passively not helping others and instead using your resources and time purely on your own private entertainment, as is the case here, should have no net negative effect on the world. Live and let live.
A person has no obliation to others, whatsoever, period.
Anyone who disagrees would have to overcome the burden of proof.
(Which you can't, by the way, since I know things that would contradict a positive argument for obligation to others as it is generally conceived.)
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Practically everybody makes moral assumptions purely based on emotions, possibly with some post-hoc rationalizations.
But our emotions didn't have to be what they were---they vary between time periods, cultures, and individuals. Emotions are the product of premises that one has accepted, rationally or (for the most part today) irrationally.
http://www.amazon.com/Victorian-Secrets-Corset-Taught-Presen...
Indeed, the author has no moral authority.
I'm a techy guy who lives at the very edge of the grid (we're the end of the line for PG&E). I feel no need to tell all of you about our PVC problems or tree problems or fire problems, etc. They strike me as someone with an agenda.
As an example of stuff I don't talk about, we just had a fire up here:
http://mcvoy.com/lm/2015-fire/index.html
2 miles away from my house, kind of scary. I could have made a blog post about that and gotten a lot of attention (maybe) as a techy guy next to certain death. Fire is a thing where I live, it's a scary thing.
Whatever. I chose to live out here. If that comes with some problems those are my problems.
I kinda agree with ebbv that these people seem like hipsters. I have much more respect for people who make hard choices that lead to tough lives and they own it. And show how they got past those problems.
Isn't that exactly what they're doing with their writing?