
Living With Less. A Lot Less. - pragmatictester
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/10/opinion/sunday/living-with-less-a-lot-less.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
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mixmastamyk
The negative posts here miss the point. Having too much stuff can be a burden,
just as too little can be a hardship.

In the book "your money or your life" I learned about the concept of
_enough_... the logarithmic curve of stuff vs. happiness. TL;DR: get yourself
up towards the front of the hump and stop there.

Though I've never been rich, I've gone thru the same phases the author
describes. The average (American at least) works too hard and has too much to
worry about. So yes, the advice to downsize is good for most. But don't take
it too far. He's not advocating sleeping on a dirt floor and giving up
electricity as a comment or two here seem to think.

Personally, I currently aim for the life my grandparents lived plus
smartphone, better healthcare, and more vacation time.

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michaelochurch
This is the worst kind of self-indulgent wankery. This guy's still rich. He's
just clued in to the fact that piles of stuff aren't "cool" anymore.

These hipsters who "hate suburbia" are the epitome of the suburban culture
they claim to despise.

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mixmastamyk
Suburbia? Sounds like you feel threatened for some reason, why is that?

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recursive
You're the one who did the hearing.

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digisign
Congrats on the most useless comment of the day.

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jsnk
To each his own for me. Having less didn't allow me to enjoy or experience
special things that having more somehow prevented from experiencing as the
author would describe. In fact, having more was way better than having less
for me.

Last 5 years, I moved around to various cities Canada and US every 4 to 8
months or so going to school and working on internships. By necessity, I had
to pack light, really light. No car obviously. I was a poor student. I had
only one furniture, a bed, and I got that only after I started to have lady
friends over. Before that, I slept in sleeping bag for months. I had very few
cloths and only thing I had extra were my underwear and socks. And I guess
only thing of value I carried around was my Macbook. I didn't even have a
smart phone until this last month. I used cheap Huawei prepaid phone drug
dealers use as their second phone. I probably had a little more stuff than an
average homeless person in that I had a roof over where I slept.

It was definately an "experience" alright. I had ended the life of plentifuly
that I took granted in high school, and went onto a subsistence living by the
North American standard of extreme minimalism for 5 years. Sure, I learned to
inspect what my true needs were and had a good discipline to spend on things I
needed, not wanted. However, was that learning worth 5 years of discomfort and
annoyance?

Since January this year, I finally decided to settle. I was done with school
and I found a good roommate to share furnitures and kitchenwares with. I had a
lot of fun decorating my room, living room and kitchen. It's been awesome
since then. I felt so much more comfortable with things around.

To put it bluntly, there wasn't anything romantic about living with less
stuff. I haven't experienced or felt different things that you would not feel
through living with plenty of things.

