Simplicity!

This is a post from Jesse of Slow­ing Down:

In his book Beyond Civ­i­liza­tion, Daniel Quinn sums up what he sees as the dri­ving force behind civ­i­liza­tions fail­ure to curb it’s own destruc­tion like this:

Old minds think: if it didn’t work last year, let’s do MORE of it this year.

New minds think: If it didn’t work last year, let’s do some­thing ELSE this year.

So the short answer to the ques­tion I started the post with is: Sim­plic­ity is about chang­ing what soci­ety sees when it looks at con­sumer cul­ture. It’s about chang­ing what our felt needs are as a soci­ety, and mak­ing peo­ple real­ize that Keep­ing Up With The Jones’ is actu­ally drag­ging us down. It’s about mak­ing small changes to the way we live, that when added up will bring about the par­a­digm shift we are look­ing for.

If the need for “the next big thing” is what dri­ves our con­sumer cul­ture – and has been dri­ving it for the bet­ter part of the last cen­tury – has brought us to the brink of cul­tural collapse…maybe it’s time to try some­thing else?

Maybe it’s time to take a walk instead of see­ing a movie.

Maybe it’s time to make din­ner at home for you and a cou­ple of your clos­est friends, using local, in sea­son produce.

Maybe it’s time to give away a box of STUFF that you didn’t even remem­ber you had.

Maybe it’s time to rethink dri­ving every­where you go and try com­mut­ing by bus one day a week.

The lit­tle steps that each of us take every­day to move in this direc­tion are what’s going to cre­ate a tip­ping point. Once enough of us take one of these steps every day, or every week, what­ever feels com­fort­able for you – we will finally start to see the changes in our soci­ety that we long for. Once enough of us see that you can find true hap­pi­ness with­out hav­ing to buy it on credit…we can finally stop call­ing our­selves “con­sumers” and start to think about each other as “people.”

That, in a large nut­shell, is what sim­plic­ity means to me. You don’t have to become an ascetic, you don’t have to move into a cave in the moun­tains. You can start right here, right now by doing one small thing. And for each small thing you do, remem­ber that some­one else is doing their own one small thing, and some­one else is too…