Living Life with Less

My husband and I have spent a good portion of our lives trying to enjoy nature and the wilderness as much as possible. We have struggled to find a balance between earning a living and living a simple and happy life.

Earlier in our lives, we both held well paying jobs and earned good money. We drove a fancy sports car, and as quickly as we earned it, we spent our hard earned money and bought alot of things. We ate alot of fast food and we led a very fast life. We fell into the rat race trap and for awhile we bought into the hype of advertising and believed that buying things would make us happy. But the opposite happened, the more we spent the more stressed out we became. Looking around everyone was shopping and accumulating, every one's house was getting bigger and fancier. Every one's car was getting shinier and newer.

Being conservative and frugal became a sign of weakness, a sign a failure. Somewhere along the way society became money driven and greedy. Some life altering events allowed me to see that being materialistic and accumulating objects was pointless. In fact, I have learned that the less you have, the richer YOU become. We lose ourselves in things and in the struggle to earn money to buy things and in the bombardment of marketing that lie to us and tell us we need things - that we are less than without these things - that our lives will be better if not for these things. The less I have the easier life becomes and the more freedom I have. The more freedom I have, especially financial freedom (in the opposite sense of the common use of the expression!), the happier I become.

We need to turn back and go back to a simpler time. A time when people earned a little money to buy the extra things they could not supply for themselves. We need to go back to a time when life was less complicated and more enjoyable. Life has gotten too difficult, people are getting more and more stressed out. People don't have time for each other anymore; and families are becoming more and more scattered as people venture farther from their home town in search of employment.

Education is getting so expensive it will be available only to the elite and the wealthy. Competition for jobs will only get worse as the world's population increases. Food prices will continue to rise as supply and demand continually grows.

People have been herded in the cities, shutting down our small towns and killing the community spirit. The villages can no longer raise the children and the children are completely losing themselves in our cities. Cities are cold bustling noisy places where people shuffle about hurriedly and cut each other off in traffic. The vehicles keep getting bigger (despite our environmental problems) and their price tags keep climbing - the competition is never ending.

The rat race continues. My husband and I are tired of running with this crowd. We are opting for the simpler life. We want to work less and play more. We are downsizing and getting rid of most of our possessions. We have never been happier.  We believe there has to be better way, an easier way to live a happy life.

This post is a work in progress....your thoughts...and feedback are welcomed.