At the end of a short seminar about ecological living that I attended several months ago in Europe, a speaker did a concluding message saying that to be ecologically responsible: "one should learn to be happy with less". As I walked back I began to wonder what it meant. I certainly want to be much more ecological than I am right now, but can I maintain a feeling of prosperity, if I live with less?
Prosperity means different things to every person. For me, it is the ability to have a suitable house for my family, to do the hobbies that I enjoy, to meet with people that I like, to have comfortable rest, to be able to visit my friends and family when I need to, to feel healthy and to feel secure. I think everyone will need to feel prosperous to be happy - although each person will have his/her own elements of prosperity.
Let's say that I am a farmer in a small village in the 1940s. I would feel prosperous enough with the food from the neighborhood farms or wet market. I would be happy to receive slow, infrequent mails from a relative who lives overseas. I would be happy with an all-purpose doctor, for any kind of illness. I will be glad to have a house built with locally produced materials - as there is no way to import goods from far away. In this condition prosperity can be found locally, naturally and as a result they are environmentally friendly.
The contrast to this is if I were a 21st century urban man. I purchase my food products from the supermarkets, which are often bought from the importers. These importers in turn would buy it from a trading partner overseas. My relatives and friends may live thousands of miles away and I am dependent on the planes, cars and telecommunication equipments to keep in touch. I need my plastic gadgets - the laptops, the mobile phones, the music player, the video game consoles, the CD players because I live in a fast lane. If I am sick I can find all sort of specialist doctors, who in turn have advanced equipments made of high grade plastic and special composites to diagnose and hopefully cure me. The doctor will then give me medicines produced in another country made of various chemicals that is transported through air using plastic and paper packaging.
In this lifestyle, my sources of prosperity are scattered globally, and to reach them I need infrastructure, technology, organizations and money. The side-effect of this lifestyle, to name a few, are the pollution, the global warming and the destruction of natural habitats. As more and more of us begin to realize, these are very severe side-effects.
So I come back to the speaker's statement: to be ecologically responsible, we need to learn to live with less. But how? Do we need to abandon our modern lifestyle all together and go back to the ancient lifestyle? I struggled with this question for a while until I realized that I was looking at it the wrong way.
It never is a fight between the ancient lifestyle and modern lifestyle. It is a fight between simplicity and complexity.
In a life that is simple, we should be able to remember important things in our lives without having to have handhelds ringing to remind us about it. We should be able to know whether we are eating healthy or not by knowing where the food came from and how it was made - instead of through the "nutritional content" listed in the wrapper of the food. We also should have most of our time spent doing things that excite us - instead of things that make us money.
But, with the exceptions of the fortunate few, most of us do not live like that right now. We are doing the opposite to simplicity - we are creating more and more complexity. We are working harder - either to make ends meet, or to make more money. We are working faster, due to peer pressure and hyper-competition, without a time to be mindful. We let ourselves be bombarded by advertising, preaching, campaigning through the media. We become the "consumers" - people who is made to consume more each day, even when we do not need to.
Then comes the viscious cycle of complexity. Our lives have become so complex that we have to "outsource" important things to organizations and agencies. We know nothing about our food and medicine so we let the FDA to approve it. We have no time to think about our well being so let the health consultant does it. We have no time to think about our kids and the different types of education each of them needs - so let the school and government do all the work.
As complexity increases, down goes our prosperity.
I believe the solutions to the world's problem does not come from grand plans from the governments. It starts with each of us solving our own problems - by reversing our complex life and making it simpler each day. By living simpler - we will naturally live with less. Less excess, less waste, less misunderstanding. We need not to reject the progress of our civilization like the technology and the rule-of-law, but they are merely tools. They can be useful, but they can also be misused through bad intentions, and they alone will not bring prosperity.
So this is my take, for whatever it's worth to you: Prosperity is within anyone's reach, as long as one seeks for it through simplicity.
