Why I’m Divesting: Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is

In January, Louis Byrd wrote Dear Black People, It’s Time We Divest from The American Experiment. In it, he talks about the Montgomery bus boycott:

”When our money stopped flowing, when those buses rolled empty through the streets, they learned what we had always known: their prosperity was built on our participation. They didn’t bend because of moral awakening or sudden conscience. They bent because we hit them where it hurt most — their pockets. And in that moment, we demonstrated not just our dignity, but our power.”

”What we need now is not a boycott — a temporary withdrawal of our patronage — but divestment: a complete and final separation of our money from their missions, our identities from their brands, our futures from their visions.

“The difference is profound. A boycott says, ‘Change, and we will return.’ Divestment says, ‘We recognize what you truly are, and we are leaving for good.’”
– Louis Byrd

I could quote the entire article. Go read it; it’s excellent.

I haven’t been able to get that word out of my head: “DIVEST.”

“When you divest, you do more than withdraw money — you withdraw consent. You declare that your convenience, your comfort, even your financial interests are not more precious than your principles.”
– Louis Byrd

Billionaires are only billionaires because of our money. And they care about nothing but our money. Wealth inequality is higher than it’s ever been, and while there’s nothing any of us individually can do to change that, we can stop blindly enabling it.

Elon Musk, an unelected bureaucrat, is mass firing working class people for the crime of having federal jobs. Why does he have this power? Because he’s the richest man in the world.¹ And yet… the President of the United States just did a car commercial in front of the White House, because the protests outside of Tesla dealerships have Elon scared. Tesla’s stock price has tanked.

Good. More of this, please.

But protests are one small thing. If we don’t like what we’re seeing, we need to change our daily spending habits, analyze our investment dollars. We need to withhold that cold hard cash from people who use it to make the world worse.

We need to be more conscious about our choices:

• Shop at small businesses and keep those dollars in your neighborhood.
• Eat at locally owned restaurants.
• Set up recurring donations to local organizations that lost their funding.
• Buy real art from actual artists.
  

Are these small things? Yes. But imagine if all of us did this.

Divesting is also a real-world crash course in why monopolies are bad and how homogenized our supply chains are. You think you have a choice between brands, but they’re all owned by 11 companies.²

Step outside your normal frame of reference.

Several years ago, I visited Ecuador. Absolutely love it, absolutely want to go back, would move there if it made sense. Incredibly beautiful country and wonderful people. But it is a developing country. There is no Amazon. There are restrictions on electronics. You can’t flush toilet paper. You have to be careful about drinking water.

International travel reframes your understanding of your own culture.

After coming back to the US, I was thinking about these differences, and there was one word that came to mind to describe Americans.

Comfortable.

Comfortable and complacent.

We are beyond spoiled. My iPhone case broke and I had a new one from Amazon within 24 hours. Expensive cat food just shows up to my house. If I wanted an outdoor kitchen for some reason I could buy one at Costco (for real – I was side eying a display model a couple weeks ago).

The rest of the world does not live like this.

I once heard someone say: in America, you can get anything you want, but nothing you need. We lack universal healthcare, our education system sucks, childcare is unaffordable/impossible to find, and we’re about to lose social security (which no one should be depending on anyhow – go get a Roth IRA).

But you can get a laser engraving machine shipped to your house in 2 days for less than $200 (the first product I saw when I opened Amazon).

All of the stuff is a distraction.

We’re #23 on the World Happiness Report. #62 if you’re under 30.

We don’t need more stuff. We need more time to think, more mindfulness, more empathy, more connection.

So what does divestment look like?

It looks like hitting pause before that questionable purchase. It looks like being thoughtful, and it looks different for everyone.

Personally, I divested from Amazon at the beginning of the year. We did NOT pay for Prime, but we did use Subscribe & Save every month. I deleted every single item from that list.

It took a while.

I knew that not using Amazon was going to be inconvenient, and in some cases, cost more money. But I have decided that my principles are more important than my financial interests.

I want to acknowledge two things here:

1. This is a privileged choice. I recognize that not everyone will be able to do this. But we can, so we will.
2. Amazon actually makes the bulk of its money through AWS (Amazon Web Services). I have never used their products in my business, and I don’t intend to. But many of the websites and apps you use every day run on their servers.
   

I haven’t used Facebook or Instagram in years. I will not advertise any of my businesses on their ad platforms. I am paying attention to everything I use, every subscription up for renewal, every purchase that isn’t essential.

We need to become active participants in making this a world we want to live in, by being intentional about who gets our hard-earned money.

I’ll be documenting what this looks like in real time on my website at smschumacher.com/divest. Every time we run low on a thing, and I have to find alternatives, I’ll share what I’m doing and why.

An example from this week: an author I regularly interact with (who freely shares his expertise), just self-published another book. Meaning it’s only available on Amazon. Ultimately I decided that I wasn’t going to NOT support him just because I’d be sending a couple bucks to an evil billionaire. I ordered the book.

This is the world we live in, and the lines are not always clean. But it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t at least try to be intentional about our choices. At the end of the day, that’s all we can do.

What’s one simple thing you can do to make your purchases match your values?

We’ve long had discussions about environmentally friendly purchases, buying used vs. new, etc., but this conversation could go so much deeper. I’m a minimalist,³ so I love the idea of buy once, use forever, and I also love getting rid of things.

This spring, I’m getting rid of meaningless spending by making meaningful choices.

Footnotes:
¹ Much of Elon Musk’s wealth is a direct result of government handouts.
² Burt from Burt’s Bees was a real guy, but now it’s owned by Chlorox. I buy my lip balm from Messner Bee Farm, where I could meet the bees, if I wanted.
³ Except for books, art supplies, and coffee paraphernalia… my weaknesses.