The question was: what would scare JoyTech?

What would scare a company that wants people to buy all the useless junk they can possibly buy?

Last summer, Aurora got me reading about this thing called VOLUNTARY SIMPLICITY. It’s basically a movement of people who minimize their consumption to make the world, and their lives, better.The idea is that if you need fewer things, you need less money, and if you need less money, you don’t have to work as much, and if you don’t have to work as much, you get to spend more time doing the things that are really important.

Stop buying junk, stop producing junk, and start focusing on what’s really important. Sounds pretty scary to me.

Voluntary simplicity is also about cutting down your environmental footprint. I like this because I don’t want to be a superhero like Iron Man. He was supposed to be a genius, but he didn’t care how many resources it took to make and use his powered armor suits.

To be fair, Stan Lee did create Iron Man in the 1960s, back when people still thought nuclear power and wonder bread were the future.

Duane Elgin, who writes about voluntary simplicity, describes it as “a manner of living that is outwardly more simple and inwardly more rich, a way of being in which our most authentic and alive self is brought into direct and conscious contact with living.”

Am I the only one who sees the superhero reference here? Because that’s what being a masked adventurer is all about – LIVING, DOING, creating a new identity that makes you the most real person you can be…

I want my disguise to be something that brings out my authentic superhero self, and makes a statement about what I’m representing.

No capes, no tights, no flashy junk – but maybe something made out of junk - all the weird old stuff that I find on the street that can be reused in a cool way.

Something that looks like it came back from the end of the world.

Yeah.