I suppose it is already obvious that when it comes to stripping back to basics, books are my weak spot. I always seem to acquire faster than I shed.

Me too. (I actually own a book on voluntary simplicity, but I've lost it behind another row of books ;-)

Can you recommend any books in particular on this subject? The bestseller on "simplicity" is Sarah Ban Breathnach's Simple abundance ... but I was appalled/amused to see how much of her advice is actually based on buying (more) things.

I Know what you mean about Simple Abundance--I looked at it once, but didn't get when I saw how it was going. Same thing with "Real Simple" magazine: Buy more stuff to make your life Simple. Drives me nuts whenever I pick it up. I think Your Money or Your Life is perhaps the best place to start--even if you don't want to go with the somewhat radical plan, it does lay out the choices and trade offs in a way that makes you think. Janet Luhrs Simple Living Guide is a good all round one, and Choosing Simplicity offers some good stories of people who have actually changed their life in a significant way.

Books are also my weakness! Honestly, I don’t know what else I’d do with my time without them.

I surmise that books are the weakness of anyone who has a LT account though, so we are all in good company here. However, I do find it a bit amusing that a group for voluntary simplicity has more that 17,000 books total. But hey, you can’t live the good life if you deprive yourself of what you really love, right? At least that is how I justify my enthusiastic book acquisition!

Anyway, chamekke, Affluenza : The All-Consuming Epidemic is one of the best books I’ve ever read. It is not a simple living book per se, but it is definitely an eye-opener with regards to our societies rampant consumption and destruction of our planet. Also, The Joy of Not Working has some good tips on how to cut back your work hours, how to save money, and what to do with your extra free time. And, it has been previously mentioned, but Your Money or Your Life is a must read! As quartzite pointed out, even if you don’t want to follow their financial plan, it is full of great tips and revelations.

Message edited by its author, Aug 11, 2006, 8:50pm.

Exactly, its about stripping away what doesn't matter so you can focus on what does matter to you, like books!

I am interested in a lot of aspects of the voluntary simplicity trend, but at the same time it strikes me as, well, a little, um, elitist. Has anybody else here ever felt a little frustrated by the fact that simplifying actually takes time and money? :-/ In many situations, cutting back on working hours would be impossible, and many people don't have that many possessions to begin with. Also, how does a person simplify if, for instance, she's the main caregiver for a critically ill family member? I'm not just trying to be difficult, here; I've really been mulling some of this over. Five years ago I had to have spinal surgery at a total cost of one hundred thousand dollars, covered by insurance from a family member's employer. But life was pretty complex for us at the time, and I retain a healthy dose of sympathy for anybody who just feels too tired or overwhelmed to simplify!

Whoops, part of that last didn't post! I inserted "shuts eyes and ducks quickly" after elitist--I'm really not out to aggravate everybody! :-#

I think there are a number of different threads in the voluntary simplicity concept and some of them are elitist. One lucky group has plenty of money, but is trying to ensure that the money does not rule their lives, or finding that plenty is never enough. A lot of people would be happy to have that problem. There are other threads, however, that focus on how to simplify your life in order to live and be satisfied on one income, or to manage on the income you have, without feeling driven by social pressure to consume beyond your needs or live a certain lifestyle. Some people have a concern for living lightly on the earth, and again some of those may be coming from an elitist angle. Others come at it from a spiritual direction, and I think this crosses a range of social strata. Simplifying isn't an answer to everything--after all, sometimes life happens and when it does its usually complicated. One way that simplifying may help even then is that by focusing on using solutions to lifes challenges other than throwing money at them builds up other resources in our lives that we can fall back on when life does happen, whether a winter's worth of canned peaches or social networks that provide support in times of trouble.

The best book about living simpler is Elaine St. James' Simplify Your Life. I have owned this book for many years and review it every time I am overwhelmed by the amount of clutter in my home, or personal life. She breaks it down into easy to read suggestions that you can actually accomplish and never require you to buy more stuff to simplify.

My favorite book in this genre is Living More with Less, which has a Mennonite perspective on things. It can be difficult to get through just because of how thoroughly plain you can imagine your life being if you followed all of its ideas, but as a sourcebook for thinking about different ways to live it's really good.

If I may play devil's advocate here and at the risk of sounding hyprocritical, because I am also a lover of books but there are people that think most books are a waste of a good tree. A lot of books are read once and put on a shelf, like a trophy, never to be read again. In this day and age there must be a better way of providing literature other then books. I wonder what we would do without them. Anybody?

Curl up and die?

No, seriously, I think that books have survived for several centuries of very rapid technological and social change more or less in their current form testifies to the fact that they are well designed for their purpose and meet real needs. Contrast books with those original wax cylinder sound recordings, for example.

Those needs may be well above the most basic ones on the hierarchy of needs, but they are legitimate needs.

I have given away hundreds of books in places that were grateful to get them and where they are used over and over again.

Libraries are of course the traditional answer for the communal use of books, and a very good one, but personal collections have their uses, too.

As for trees, I think credit card application come ons and other forms of junk mail that end up in landfills are far greater waste of trees than people's well-beloved books.

If books didn't exist, we would have to invent them.

I love your point about credit card applications and junk mail! And how about the petroleum wasted to make all of those stupid AOL disks?

Anyway, it would be an out-and-out lie for me to say that none of my books are used but once; I can say that most of my books (being that most of my library is non-fiction) are read and referenced more than once. As far as fiction is concerned, I tend to buy only those titles that I like enough to read again.

I suppose that there are ways we could use technology--such as e-books and even audio books--to reduce the destruction of trees, but truth be told, it is harmful to the environment to produce computers and CDs too. Granted, it seems that everyone has a computer nowadays, and you can of course use a computer for several other tasks, but to me, it just doesn’t feel right curling up on the couch, and settling in to read my computer monitor. In other words, I guess I enjoy the experience of reading as much as I enjoy the words on the pages. In addition, there are many who do not have access to a computer, or the money to buy a digital-book reader, and thus need public libraries if they wish to read. Therefore, I cannot envisage ever doing away with real books, to do so would condemn millions to a life of illiteracy.

And without getting into too big of a political issue here, one thing we could do is use hemp to produce paper instead of trees. A tree that is cut down for paper will take anywhere from 50 to 500 years to replace, while hemp used for paper fiber can be replaced in as little as 100 days. The problem with this is replete in the fact that the timber industry means big bucks for a lot of people in this county, and the growing of hemp doesn’t fit will in America’s “War on Drugs,” so I doubt we’ll ever realize this option.

This puts me in mind of a wonderful short essay by Isaac Asimov. Unfortunately I no longer own a copy, but I believe it went something like this:

Wouldn't it be wonderful if we had complete flexibility whenever we wanted to read? Imagine a technology that is fully portable ... that will turn off when you stop reading, and turn on when you want to begin again ... that will allow you to go backwards and forwards in the story with ease ... that you can listen to in perfect silence without disturbing your roommates or neighbours?

We have that technology now. It is called a book...

Message edited by its author, Sep 27, 2006, 1:21am.

Now you see, this discussion is becoming interesting. When I think of living simply, I think of Thoreau's Walden or a novel called The Poet of Tolstoy Park where a man called Henry Stuart gives away all his possessions to family and friends, except for his beloved Tolstoy and moves away to spend the last year of his life in contemplation. What books would you keep if you could only take what you could carry with you?

Only what I can carry with me, eh? That is a hard one; I assume that in this scenario I am going away for a long time, if not forever.

1. Walden—for sure, though I’d bring my Portable Thoreau which includes Walden and many others.
2. Orwell’s Animal Farm, it’s small and easy to carry, and I don’t think I could get tired of it.
3. Hunter S. Thompson’s The Rum Diary, for the same reasons.
4. A Mencken Chrestomathy, heavy, but I enjoy reading from it often.
5. A book of short stories by Kafka, because I’d need something weird with me!
6. The Dhammapada, it’s very small and easy to carry, and I enjoy reading it often.
7. The Tao Te Ching, for similar reasons.
8. And Plato’s Republic because I enjoy it, and being away in solitude for a long time I would have the chance to read it from beginning to end.

I could probably carry a few others, but I could carry these 8 comfortably.

Hi! I just joined. This is an interesting discussion going on here.

Several times in my life, from young on, I went through periods of giving away all my stuff. I was driven by the notion that if a tornado hit, I would be overwhelmed by the sudden loss of all my things, and I felt that was a power I didn't want my things to hold over me. For the most part, I didn't regret anything I parted with.

Fast forward to today: I am widely known as someone who couldn't pass up a yard sale until this year, has too much furniture for the house with spares in the basement, has a growing yarn stash and three shelves of cookbooks. I have so many tools that I can't find the one I need. But, the only things I would save in a tornado are the valuables, which I can hold in my hand, because it's all replaceable.

All my furniture, by the way, was either free or purchased in a garage sale. I never spent more than $50 dollars for anything, and that was a bookcase!

My lingering problem now is organization. It seems people who consciously work to simplify also consciously work to organize. Can anyone recommend some realistic, useful books on organizing?

Julie Morgenstern's Organizing from the Inside out : the Foolproof System for Organizing Your Home, Your Office, and Your Life is pretty good.

But you'll probably still need to throw out some stuff. (I know I do ;-)

Re message 16: I love that he gave everything but kept some books!

Getting Things Done is a great book on organizing. Be prepared to do a lot of work!

I'm going to tell you about my adventures in Using What You Have this past weekend. My house is a fixer-upper, and I have been without a bathroom sink for two years in my downstairs bathroom, due to various catastrophic circumstances.

But this past weekend, using my scraps of plywood and cement board from previous tiling projects, and by refinishing the existing cabinet, I have built a new and wonderful vanity/countertop. I purchased tile and a sink (half price at Home Depot) and I have had the faucet for a while awaiting this moment. I'm hiring a plumber to hook up the drain, because I really don't want it to leak, and I have a line on some free frosted glass for the back splash.

Had I contracted out this job, it could easily have been $2,000. Doing it myself, reusing and refurbishing the vanity and building my own countertop, I spent maybe $200 including the sink, tile, grout, faucet and stain. That doesn't include the plumber, since he's coming tomorrow and I don't know what the final bill will be.

#16 "What books would you keep if you could only take what you could carry with you?"

I love that question!! (see the next little bit)

#18 "As for taking only the books I could carry with me -- we currently have 54 books tagged "essential," so I guess I'd have to do some weight training."

I like the idea of tagging "essential".. I had been contemplating doing something similar, but couldn't decide on what the tag should say... now I know!!
_______________________________________

I have been a member of "freecycle" for a few years... it's been a wonderful resource both when I've wanted to clear out some un-needed items & also when I've needed something... Warning: some groups are good, some ok & some are awful... Mine is ok, but I know there are worse ones.

I also belong to paperbackswap.com ... a wonderful way to find a new home for the books you no longer want & a wonderful resource for getting used books (hard & soft cover)

I find both of these resources excellent... I've gotten more than a few books on organizing, simplicity, & storage from PBS... too many!! but more books are a good thing, right??

It is quite surprising what you don't need in life, though there is a lot to be said for having the right tool for the job! As always a comprimise is needed.

I'm not a fan of how to organise type books, they never seem to suit my particular circumstances.

It's not MY stuff that's clutter - it all belongs to my Other Half! Strangely they say the same.

i guess this topic hasnt been checked in a while but it s a nice discussion that was going on here I think :)

I was wandering if anybody had an opinion on wether simplifying the way you live materially can actually simplify your mental life, meaning do u think you can "unclutter" your mind by simplifying the way you live...

I dont know if that makes sense to anyone ...

anyway, great group :) !

#26: travellinghuman,

DEFINITELY!! simplifying materially has definitely simplified my life mentally...

I'm not saying that it would be true for everyone, but by simplifying & organizing the material "things" in my life, I can focus better on more essential issues & "things"...

example: using librarything cuts down on getting duplicates of books... I hope. (I'm still stepping over a couple of bookpiles, but it is getting better.)

I also am cutting down on duplicates by "swapping" them & swapping the ones I no longer want. Now the problem is the books I am receiving from the swaps.

But it is getting much better. mentally & materially.

That is a complex vs. simple question!

I think first of all it forces us to define what we mean by simpler in this case. One might argue that by simplifying your external life you provide more space for a more complex mental and or spiritual life, which is in fact that rational for simple living in many religious communities.

I suppose that ideally, simplifying externally would lead to simplifying mentally as much clutter and distraction is removed, but in time the mental space free is filled with things that are more meaningful, but about which it might be hard to define if they were simpler or more complicated. Other words such as richer or deeper might work better.

I have been working on this for years and am slowly being able to part with excess things (packrat tendencies from both sides of the family). I tend to make lists in my head and to worry about cleaning my house, "running my life," etc. Having fewer things to organize, maintain, and look for (still don't know where my birth certificate got to) does clear my head somewhat. I still haven't read Flow, but I have read Getting Things Done and think you could also find support for this based on cognitive load theory.

We bookworms, even when inspired by books like Affluenza, continue to want to ACQUIRE more and more books.
May I suggest another very small book called Seven Wonders: Everyday Things for a Healthier Planet. Two that are my personal favorites are the bicycle and the library card. Put your librarian to the test. If she doesn't have the book you're looking for, ask her about buying a copy FOR THE LIBRARY or securing a book via inter-library loan. You might be surprised at how easy it is. ONE copy of a great book can circulate a hundred times. Don't feel the need to HANG ONTO every good book you ever read. Catch and release people. Bookcrossings.com is a website similar to librarything, where you can track actual copies that you've released into "the wild" and feel good that someone else is enjoying your old copy.
Tracy Gittins, librarian who has ridden his bike to work daily in Utah, Japan, and now Belgium