Seems to me, the desire for ‘a simple life’ is largely born of the excess and priveledge of the modern developed world. The greater bulk of humanity struggle simply for a life at all – day to day; hand to mouth. It can get no more simple than the constant scrabble for food, shelter, companionship. It seems almost perverse, arrogant, contemptuous, to be among those who – sometimes through little more than the good fortune to be born to it; sometimes through a determined fight against adversity – having managed to surround themselves with the bounties of our consumerist society, profess a desire to rid themselves of the burden of possessions they have acquired and find serenity in frugal living. Yet I count myself amongst this number.
Certainly there are many who don’t share this sentiment. Many who have bought into the mindset of consumption at any price – preferably on credit. But what is it they actually purchase? Gadgets that complete tasks with less effort and greater speed, allowing them more liesure time to spend with other gadgets expressly designed to distract them such that they are not budened with the weight of ‘time passing’ – in a vicious and ever accelerating cycle of consumption-distraction-boredom-discarding-and further consumption. And most of the time wasting paraphernalia is manufactured in third-world sweatshops by those who are frantically struggling to survive. What must they make of it all – the bizzare assortments of plastic gewgaws, cheap and ugly domestic nic-nacs and ever more incomprehensible and miniturised electronic crap? All of which, having been shipped out this month, will come back to their shores with the next and be piled into vast mountains of waste to be picked over and scavenged from by others in similar straights?
So I think I can live with the perversity of desiring less than I could perhaps attain. Maybe, just maybe, by ‘making do’, by ‘going without’, by enjoying the pleasure of simply sitting and allowing ‘time to pass’, by genuinely desiring a more ‘simple life’, by truly believing that ‘less is more’, - maybe I’m actually making a difference? Somehow I suspect it’s not enough of a difference to stop the ugly, fuming juggernaut of contemporary Western society. Not on my own at any rate. But perhaps others might feel the same way?
A good friend recently coined a new turn of phrase. Quite literally ‘turned’ from the staple recitation of my parents’ generation and those before them that lived through the depression era, ‘Waste not, want not’ went the standard advice of my childhood. Keep the crusts and they’ll be handy for making crumbs. Save the newspaper to line the kitchen waste-bin. Wash and save the plastic bags and they’ll serve to take lunches to school. These were the thrifty ways we made our incomes stretch further. But my friend turned the words around and gave them a whole new relevence. ‘Want not, waste not’. Suddenly this is not about thrift – this is about saying no to the marketing behemoth forever berating you to ‘desire’, to ‘consume’, to believe that needless acquisition is a right that comes with no responsibilities attached (and probably with batteries NOT included).
Maybe (before it’s too late and the decision is taken away from us), we can reverse the connotation and put a positive spin on the previously dismissive assertion ‘He’s a bit simple’?
