
Live simply, {{username}}.
Do you even need all the things that fill your life? Couldn't you be satisfied with less, even just a little? Isn't happiness simply wanting less ?
Couldn't what you desire be much more easily within your reach?
It's said that Marcus Aurelius slept on the floor at the beginning of his reign, until his mother finally discouraged him not to.
Isn't the most important thing
in the essential things?
Love,
The elevation of the self,
To eat enough, to sleep well, to dress,
To be surrounded by family and friends.
As Seneca 1 says: For a great soul, nothing is great:
“Hold fast, then, to this sound and wholesome rule of life; that you indulge the body only so far as is needful for good health. The body should be treated more rigorously, that it may not be disobedient to the mind. Eat merely to relieve your hunger; drink merely to quench your thirst; dress merely to keep out the cold; house yourself merely as a protection against personal discomfort. It matters little whether the house be built of turf, or of variously coloured imported marble; understand that a man is sheltered just as well by a thatch as by a roof of gold.
Despise everything that useless toil creates as an ornament and an object of beauty. And reflect that nothing except the soul is worthy of wonder; for to the soul, if it be great, naught is great.”
Does that mean you have to live the life of an ascetic?
No, I don't think it does. But striving for more minimalism helps us focus on the essential things.
Stop wanting more and more and more.
Stop buying over and over and over again. Stop emptying your bank account for all the useless things that clutter your life. To quote a cult saying from the movie Fight Club, which I'm rephrasing here in my own way, "We buy sh*t we don't need, with money we don't have, to impress people we don't like."
Couldn't you, {{username}}, just settle for less?
To become, as counter-intuitive as it may at first seem, more.
The wise man lives on a thousand things, but he's content with himself.