THE SIMPLE LIFE SERIES
Is a Simple Life an Easy Life?
The simple life isn’t necessarily an easy life, just look at the farmers of the 18th and 19th-centuries who settled the great plains. they had a simple life but it wasn’t an easy life by far.
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Is a simple life an easy life?
If you ask a hundred people, you will get a hundred different answers. The answers will range from living a minimalist life to homesteading to living off the grid to who knows what.
Through much of human history, frugal simplicity wasn’t a choice but a necessity, hence, it was also deemed a moral virtue.
If in your mind these are correct then who am I to say you’re wrong.
But . . .
Living the simple life isn’t just about having less material possessions although in a way it is and it isn’t. The pursuit of a simple life is about rejecting what is unnecessarily complicated.
It’s about pursuing people over things, enjoying the small things in life, and no longer chasing more, more, and more. It’s about being happy with what we have.
You see, part of living a simple life can be about less possessions but I want to concentrate on the abstract, the non-concrete, the state of mind part of living a simple life, or as the American social philosopher Richard Gregg calls it in his paper “The Value of Voluntary Simplicity,” in the Indian Journal Visva-Bharati Quarterly, Voluntary simplicity. This is an inner transformation of consciousness which is both prior to and essential for making progress toward simple living.
“…the way to master the increasing complexity of life is not through more complexity. The way is to turn inward to that which unifies all — not the intellect but the spirit, and then to devise and put into operation new forms and modes of economic and social life that will truly and vigorously express that spirit. As an aid to that and as a corrective to our feverish over-mechanization, simplicity is not outmoded but greatly needed.” — R. Gregg
In The Simple Life, French reformed pastor Charles Wagner writes, “simplicity presents certain…
