Simple living
Simple living refers to practices that promote simplicity in one's lifestyle. Common practices of simple living include reducing the number of possessions one owns, depending less on technology and services, and spending less money. In addition to such external changes, simple living also reflects a person's mindset and values. Simple living practices can be seen in history, religion, art, and economics.
Adherents may choose simple living for a variety of personal reasons, such as spirituality, health, increase in quality time for family and friends, work–life balance, personal taste, financial sustainability, increase in philanthropy, frugality, environmental sustainability, or reducing stress. Simple living can also be a reaction to economic materialism and consumer culture. Some cite sociopolitical goals aligned with environmentalist, anti-consumerist, or anti-war movements, including conservation, degrowth, deep ecology, and tax resistance.
History
Religious and spiritual
A number of religious and spiritual traditions encourage simple living. Early examples include the Śramaṇa traditions of Iron Age India and biblical Nazirites. These traditions were heavily influenced by both national cultures and religious ethics. Simplicity was one of the primary concepts espoused by Lao Tzu, the founder of Taoism. This is most embodied in the principles of Pu and Ziran. Confucius has been quoted numerous times as promoting simple living.Gautama Buddha espoused simple living as a central virtue of Buddhism. The Four Noble Truths advocate detachment from desire as the path to ending suffering and attaining Nirvana.
Jesus is said to have lived a simple life. He is said to have encouraged his disciples "to take nothing for their journey except a staff—no bread, no bag, no money in their belts—but to wear sandals and not put on two tunics". He also told his disciples that they cannot serve God and money at the same time, and explained that God is capable of providing them with the essentials for life, so long as they "seek his kingdom first". The Apostle Paul taught that people should be content with food and clothing, and that the desire to be rich is the cause of many kinds of evils.
Many other notable religious individuals, such as Benedict of Nursia, Francis of Assisi, Leo Tolstoy, Rabindranath Tagore, Albert Schweitzer, and Mahatma Gandhi, have claimed that spiritual inspiration led them to a simple living lifestyle.
File:Preziosi - Derviş cerşetor.jpg|thumb|upright|Ottoman Dervish portrayed by Amedeo Preziosi, 1860s circa, Muzeul Naţional de Artă al României
Sufism in the Muslim world emerged and grew as a mystical, somewhat hidden tradition in the mainstream Sunni and Shia denominations of Islam. Sufism grew particularly in the frontier areas of Islamic states, where the asceticism of its fakirs and dervishes appealed to populations already used to the monastic traditions of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Christianity. Sufis were influential and successful in spreading Islam between the 10th and 19th centuries. Some scholars have argued that Sufi Muslim ascetics and mystics played a decisive role in converting the Turkic peoples to Islam, mainly because of the similarities between the extreme, ascetic Sufis and the Shamans of the traditional Turco-Mongol religion.
Plain people typically belonged to Christian groups that practised lifestyles that excluded forms of wealth or technology for religious or philosophical reasons. Such Christian groups include the Shakers, Mennonites, Amish, Hutterites, Amana Colonies, Bruderhof, Old German Baptist Brethren, Harmony Society, and some Quakers. A Quaker belief called Testimony of simplicity states that a person ought to live her or his life simply. Some tropes about complete exclusion of technology in these groups may not be accurate though. The Amish and other groups do use some modern technology, after assessing its impact on the community.
The 18th-century French Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau strongly praised the simple way of life in many of his writings, especially in two books: Discourse on the Arts and Sciences and Discourse on Inequality.
Secular and political
, based on the teachings of the Athens-based philosopher Epicurus, flourished from about to. Epicureanism held that the paradigm of happiness was the untroubled life, which was made possible by carefully considered choices. Epicurus pointed out that troubles entailed by maintaining an extravagant lifestyle tend to outweigh the pleasures of partaking in it. He therefore concluded that what is necessary for happiness, bodily comfort, and life itself should be maintained at minimal cost, while all things beyond what is necessary for these should either be tempered by moderation or completely avoided.File:Thoreau's cabin inside.jpg|thumb|left|Reconstruction of Henry David Thoreau's cabin on the shores of Walden Pond
Henry David Thoreau, an American naturalist and author, made the classic secular advocacy of a life of simple and sustainable living in his book Walden. Thoreau conducted a two-year experiment living a plain and simple life on the shores of Walden Pond. He concluded: "Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify, simplify! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail."
In Victorian Britain, Henry Stephens Salt, an admirer of Thoreau, popularised the idea of "Simplification, the saner method of living". Other British advocates of the simple life included Edward Carpenter, William Morris, and the members of the "Fellowship of the New Life". Carpenter popularised the phrase the "Simple Life" in his essay Simplification of Life in his England's Ideal.
C.R. Ashbee and his followers also practised some of these ideas, thus linking simplicity with the Arts and Crafts movement. British novelist John Cowper Powys advocated the simple life in his 1933 book A Philosophy of Solitude. John Middleton Murry and Max Plowman practised a simple lifestyle at their Adelphi Centre in Essex in the 1930s.
Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh championed a "right simplicity" philosophy based on ruralism in some of his work.
George Lorenzo Noyes, a naturalist, mineralogist, development critic, writer, and artist, is known as the Thoreau of Maine. He lived a wilderness lifestyle, advocating through his creative work a simple life and reverence for nature. During the 1920s and 1930s, the Vanderbilt Agrarians of the Southern United States advocated a lifestyle and culture centered upon traditional and sustainable agrarian values as opposed to the progressive urban industrialism which dominated the Western world at that time.
The Norwegian-American economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen warned against the conspicuous consumption of the materialistic society in his The Theory of the Leisure Class ; Richard Gregg coined the term "voluntary simplicity" in The Value of Voluntary Simplicity. From the 1920s, a number of modern authors articulated both the theory and practice of living simply, among them Gandhian Richard Gregg, economists Ralph Borsodi and Scott Nearing, anthropologist-poet Gary Snyder, and utopian fiction writer Ernest Callenbach. Economist E. F. Schumacher argued against the notion that "bigger is better" in Small Is Beautiful ; and Duane Elgin continued the promotion of the simple life in Voluntary Simplicity.
The Australian academic Ted Trainer practices and writes about simplicity, and established The Simplicity Institute at Pigface Point, some from the University of New South Wales to which it is attached. A secular set of nine values was developed with the Ethify Yourself project in Austria, having a simplified life style in mind. In the United States voluntary simplicity started to garner more public exposure through a movement in the late 1990s around a popular "simplicity" book, The Simple Living Guide by Janet Luhrs.
Practices
Focus on spirituality
Certain Christian monasteries and convents, such as the Evangelical-Lutheran Sisters of the Holy Spirit at Alsike Convent, allow Christians to commit a certain period of time to living as a hermit in a hermitage. While living as a hermit, individuals reside in desolated cabins that do not contain running water, and focus on prayer.Those Christians who desire to live as a hermit, monk or nun may choose to enter the consecrated life.
Reducing consumption, work time, and possessions
Some people practice simple living by reducing their consumption. Lowering consumption can reduce individual debt, which allows for greater flexibility and simplicity in one's life. If one spends less on goods or services, one can spend less time earning money. The time saved may be used to pursue other interests, to help others through volunteering, or to improve their quality of life, for example, by pursuing creative activities. Developing a detachment from the pursuit of money has led some individuals, such as Suelo and Mark Boyle, to live with no money. People who reduce their expenses can also increase their savings, leading to financial independence and the possibility of early retirement.The "100 Thing Challenge" is a grassroots movement to whittle personal possessions to one hundred items, aiming of de-cluttering and simplify life. People in the tiny house movement chose to live in small, mortgage-free, low-impact dwellings, such as log cabins or beach huts.
Joshua Becker suggests that people who desire to simplify their lives begin by simplifying their homes.
Increasing self-sufficiency
Increased self-sufficiency reduces dependency on money and the broader economy. Tom Hodgkinson believes the key to a free and simple life is to stop consuming and start producing. Writer and eco-blogger Jennifer Nini left the city to live off-grid, grow food, and "be a part of the solution; not part of the problem."Forest gardening, developed by simple living adherent Robert Hart, is a low-maintenance, plant-based food production system based on woodland ecosystems. It incorporates fruit and nut trees, shrubs, herbs, vines, and perennial vegetables. Hart created a model forest garden from a orchard on his farm at Wenlock Edge in Shropshire.
"Food miles" is a description of the number of miles a given item of food or its ingredients has travelled between the farm and the table. Simple living advocates use this metric to argue for locally grown food, for example in books like The 100-Mile Diet and Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. In each of those cases, the authors devoted a year to reducing their carbon footprint by eating locally.
City dwellers can produce home-grown fruit and vegetables in pot gardens or miniature indoor greenhouses. Tomatoes, lettuce, spinach, Swiss chard, peas, strawberries, and several types of herbs can all thrive in pots. Jim Merkel says "A person could sprout seeds. They are tasty, incredibly nutritious, and easy to grow... We grow them in wide-mouthed mason jars with a square of nylon window screen screwed under a metal ring".