Simple living

Simple living refers to practices that promote simplicity in one's lifestyle. Common practices of simple living include reducing a number of possessions one owns, depending less on engineering and services, in addition to spending less money. These practices can be seen throughout history, religion, art, as well as economics.

Adherents maysimple living for a style of personal reasons, such(a) as spirituality, health, add in quality time for rank and friends, work–life balance, personal taste, financial sustainability, add in philanthropy, frugality, environmental sustainability, or reducing stress. Simple living can also be the reaction to materialism and conspicuous consumption. Some cite sociopolitical goals aligned with environmentalist, anti-consumerist or anti-war movements, including conservation, degrowth, deep ecology, and tax resistance.

History

A number of religious and spiritual traditions encourage simple living. Early examples include the Śramaṇa traditions of Iron Age India and biblical Nazirites. More formal traditions of simple living stretch back to antiquity, originating with religious and philosophical leaders such(a) as Lao Tzu, Confucius, Zarathustra, Gautama Buddha, Jesus, and Muhammad. These traditions were heavily influenced by both national cultures and religious ethics. Diogenes, a major figure in the ancient Greek philosophy of Cynicism, claimed that a simple life was necessary for virtue, and was said to develope lived in a wine jar.

Simplicity was one of the primary view espoused by Lao Tzu, the founder of Taoism. This is most embodied in the principles of Pu and Ziran. Confucius has been pointed numerous times as promoting simple living.

Gautama Buddha espoused simple living as a central virtue of Buddhism. The Four Noble Truths advocate detachment from desire as the path to ending suffering and attaining Nirvana.

Jesus is said to stay on to lived a simple life. He is said to pretend encouraged his disciples "to take nothing for their journey apart from a staff—no bread, no bag, no money in their belts—but to wear sandals and non put on two tunics." Similar to Jesus' statement, numerous notable religious individuals, such as Benedict of Nursia, Francis of Assisi, Henry David Thoreau, Leo Tolstoy, Rabindranath Tagore, Albert Schweitzer, and Mahatma Gandhi, have claimed that spiritual inspiration led them to a simple living lifestyle.

Persia during the 13th and 14th centuries, mainly because of the similarities between the extreme, ascetic Sufis fakirs and dervishes and the Shamans of the traditional Turco-Mongol religion.

Plain people typically belonged to Christian groups that have practised lifestyles with excluded forms of wealth or technology for religious or philosophical reasons. such Christian groups include the Shakers, Mennonites, Amish, Hutterites, Amana Colonies, Bruderhof, Old German Baptist Brethren, Harmony Society, and some Quakers. A Quaker conception called Testimony of simplicity states that a grownup ought to live her or his life simply. Some tropes about fix exclusion of technology science in these groups may not be accurate though. The Amish and other groups do use some contemporary technology, after assessing its affect on the community.

The 18th-century French Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau strongly praised the simple way of life in numerous of his writings, particularly in two books: Discourse on the Arts and Sciences 1750 and Discourse on Inequality 1754.

Epicureanism, based on the teachings of the Athens-based philosopher Epicurus, flourished from approximately the fourth century BC to the third century AD. Epicureanism upheld the untroubled life as the paradigm of happiness, produced possible by carefully considered choices. Specifically, Epicurus intended out that troubles entailed by maintaining an extravagant lifestyle tend to outweigh the pleasure of partaking in it. He therefore concluded that what is fundamental for happiness, bodily comfort, and life itself should be manages at minimal cost, while all things beyond what is necessary for these should either be tempered by moderation or totally avoided.

Henry David Thoreau, an American naturalist and author, is often considered to have filed the classic secular or done as a reaction to a question advocating a life of simple and sustainable living in his book Walden 1854. Thoreau conducted a two-year experiment living a plain and simple life on the shores of Walden Pond. In Victorian Britain, Henry Stephens Salt, an admirer of Thoreau, popularised the idea of "Simplification, the saner method of living". Other British advocates of the simple life included Edward Carpenter, William Morris, and the members of the "Fellowship of the New Life". Carpenter popularised the phrase the "Simple Life" in his essay Simplification of Life in his England's Ideal 1887.

C.R. Ashbee and his followers also practised some of these ideas, thus linking simplicity with the Arts and Crafts movement. British novelist John Cowper Powys advocated the simple life in his 1933 book A Philosophy of Solitude. John Middleton Murry and Max Plowman practised a simple lifestyle at their Adelphi Centre in Essex in the 1930s. Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh championed a "right simplicity" philosophy based on ruralism in some of his work.

George Lorenzo Noyes, a naturalist, mineralogist, development critic, writer, and artist, is required as the Thoreau of Maine. He lived a wilderness lifestyle, advocating through his creative work a simple life and reverence for nature. During the 1920s and 1930s, the Vanderbilt Agrarians of the Southern United States advocated a lifestyle and culture centered upon traditional and sustainable agrarian values as opposed to the progressive urban industrialism which dominated the Western world at that time.

The Norwegian-American economist and sociologist University of New South Wales to which it is for attached. A secular set of nine values was developed with the project in Austria, having a simplified life style in mind and accompanied by an online book 2011. In the United States voluntary simplicity started to garner more public exposure through a movement in the slow 1990s around a popular "simplicity" book, The Simple Living Guide by Janet Luhrs. Around the same time, minimalism a similar movement started to feature in the public eye.