Simplify, simplify, simplify

“It was not until culture neared the height of its material achievements that it erected a shrine to the Unattainable: Infinite Needs.”

I’ve been reading Marshall Sahlins’ essential book, Stone Age Economics, where Sahlins teaches us that neolithic societies were built on sharing, mobilization, and resource diversification rather than storage, ownership, and wealth accumulation.

Today, in our modern comforts, it is easy to put our noses up to such ways of being. But it isn’t weird; it is just different. In fact, when the argument can be made that hunter-gathers worked less hard and therefore had higher qualities of life (doing the things we profess to want to do/what we believe work enables: spend time with spouse, play catch with your kid, learn, leisure/recreation activities, etc.), it is a bit of counter-intuitive to what we have been brain washed to believe. No one in their right mind would want to go back. That’s fair to say when you count for modern technology such as toilets, clean water coming out of the tap, antiseptics, and so on. But this is the wrong question. A better one is to understand how they lived. If we took the modern comforts and subtracted our disease for more, what then? What if there was a middle way?

I happen to also be reading Waldon by Henry David Thoreau. I’ll leave this to ponder:

“Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify, simplify! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail.”