Simplifying: The New Thing in the 21st Century

Something changed after 9/11, roughly around the time the 21st century got going. People and companies started talking about minimizing, or doing more with less. A quieter shift in how people think about their lives seems to have pushed spending down. Businesses felt it right away. Convincing anyone to buy goods and services got harder, so many of them had to shrink. Given how much of what gets produced ends up wasted, or wouldn't really help people if they simply learned to rely on themselves more, the whole idea of cutting back might turn out to be healthy. Simpler living, less stress. In this piece I want to use personal growth ideas to ask a plain question: in a leaner economy, what do you actually need?

The health payoff from doing more with less can be large. After spending decades chasing a paycheck, plenty of Americans are flat-out tired from the long hours the rat race demanded. Some held down two jobs just to stay level with the neighbors. A simpler economy hands those hours back. You get room for self-development, room to figure out who you are and what you actually want from your days. That kind of reflection was nearly impossible in a market that never slowed down. I suspect that pace is part of why mental illness kept climbing. Pressure to keep up left no time for growth, so people never worked out what they wanted, and life turned into one long scramble to stay even.

Learning to live simply has a practical upside: you stop needing to work so much. Buy only what you truly need and a lower income will carry you, at least for a stretch. Find the cheapest place you can stand to live, take part-time work, and pour the extra hours into understanding yourself. Out of that come real career goals, and maybe the time to enroll in a college or university that moves you toward them.

Cutting back also lowers the stress that comes from grinding yourself down. You can declutter your surroundings and your relationships too, stepping away from people who are too toxic to keep around. Everyday life gets lighter and more positive. That matters because our brains come wired toward negativity from birth. Train the mind to notice the good and you strengthen the cortex, which makes you steadier when life goes wrong. That's when you start turning lemons into lemonade.

Companies gain from this as well. Hiring and training someone new is expensive, so a business can afford to pick only the people who hustle hardest to land the role. You almost have to think like an entrepreneur just to get hired now. For the employer, that effort signals the kind of work ethic you bring. Remember too that about 20% of a company's workforce handles roughly 80% of the work, which means trimming can actually help. When businesses do downsize, they tend to start near the top, just below the shareholders, with the highly paid executives. Those people usually have enough saved from their corporate years to launch something smaller of their own in the private sector.

Manufacturing is leaner too. Think of televisions that hang flat on a wall. That alone cuts the demand for furniture. Less furniture means less to move and less to clean, which frees up time for work and family. We might eventually live about as simply as people in Japan do.

Taken together, scaling back can surprise you with what it gives. Even the Library of Congress website describes the New American Dream as living as simply as possible, a strange idea next to the frantic rhythm of the late 20th century. The one condition is that people hold onto their ambition. Use the freed-up hours for growth and self-development, pick up some general psychology along the way, and apply it both personally and at work. All that reclaimed time is what makes this a spiritual age. It might even be the start of another Renaissance. - Erwin Wooten