Sustainable Happiness: Live Simply, Live Well, Make a Difference
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Sustainable Happiness: Live Simply, Live Well, Make a Difference
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781626563315 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Berrett-Koehler Publishers |
| Publication date: | 01/01/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 168 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
About the Author
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Sustainable Happiness
Live Simply, Live Well, Make a Difference
By Sarah van Gelder
Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.
Copyright © 2014 YES! MagazineAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-62656-331-5
CHAPTER 1
The Movement to Live Simply Is Older Than You Think
Roman Krznaric
When Pope Francis first assumed office, he shocked his minders by turning his back on a luxury Vatican palace and opting instead to live in a small guest house. He has also become known for taking the bus rather than riding in the papal limousine.
Simple living is not about abandoning luxury, but discovering it in new places.
The Argentinian pontiff is not alone in seeing the virtues of a simpler, less materialistic approach to the art of living. In fact, simple living is undergoing a contemporary revival—in part due to the ongoing recession forcing so many families to tighten their belts; but also because working hours are on the rise and job dissatisfaction has hit record levels, prompting a search for less cluttered, less stressful, and more time-abundant living.
At the same time, an avalanche of studies, including ones by Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman, have shown that as our income and consumption rise, our levels of happiness don't keep pace. Buying expensive new clothes or a fancy car might give us a short-term pleasure boost. But this doesn't add much to most people's happiness in the long term. It's no wonder there are so many people searching for new kinds of personal fulfillment that don't involve a trip to the shopping mall or online retailers.
Many people don't realize that simple living is a tradition that dates back almost 3,000 years, and has emerged as a philosophy of life in almost every civilization.
What might we learn from history's great masters of simple living as we rethink our lives today?
Eccentric Philosophers and Religious Radicals
Anthropologists have long noticed that simple living comes naturally in many hunter-gatherer societies. In one famous study, Marshall Sahlins pointed out that aboriginal people in Northern Australia and the !Kung people of Botswana typically worked only three to five hours a day. Sahlins wrote that "rather than a continuous travail, the food quest is intermittent, leisure abundant, and there is a greater amount of sleep in the daytime per capita per year than in any other condition of society." These people were, he argued, the "original affluent society."
In the Western tradition of simple living, the place to begin is in ancient Greece, around 500 years before the birth of Christ. Socrates believed that money corrupted our minds and morals, and that we should seek lives of material moderation rather than dousing ourselves with perfume or reclining in the company of courtesans. When the shoeless sage was asked about his frugal lifestyle, he replied that he loved visiting the market "to go and see all the things I am happy without." The philosopher Diogenes—son of a wealthy banker—held similar views, living off alms and making his home in an old wine barrel.
We shouldn't forget Jesus himself who, like Guatama Buddha, continually warned against the "deceitfulness of riches." Devout early Christians soon decided that the fastest route to heaven was imitating his simple life. Many followed the example of St. Anthony, who in the third century gave away his family estate and headed out into the Egyptian desert where he lived for decades as a hermit.
Later, in the thirteenth century, St. Francis took up the simple living baton. "Give me the gift of sublime poverty," he declared, and asked his followers to abandon all their possessions and live by begging.
Simplicity Arrives in Colonial America
Simple living started getting seriously radical in the United States in the early colonial period. Among the most prominent exponents were the Quakers—a Protestant group officially known as the Religious Society of Friends—who began settling in the Delaware Valley in the seventeenth century. They were adherents of what they called "plainness" and were easy to spot, wearing unadorned dark clothes without pockets, buckles, lace, or embroidery. As well as being pacifists and social activists, they believed that wealth and material possessions were a distraction from developing a personal relationship with God.
But the Quakers faced a problem. With growing material abundance in the new land of plenty, many couldn't help developing an addiction to luxury living. The Quaker statesman William Penn, for instance, owned a grand home with formal gardens and thoroughbred horses, which was staffed by five gardeners, 20 slaves, and a French vineyard manager.
Partly as a reaction to people like Penn, in the 1740s a group of Quakers led a movement to return to the spiritual and ethical roots of their faith. Their leader was an obscure farmer's son who has been described by one historian as "the noblest exemplar of simple living ever produced in America." His name? John Woolman.
Woolman is now largely forgotten, but in his own time he was a powerful force who did far more than wear plain, undyed clothes. After setting himself up as a cloth merchant in 1743 to gain a subsistence living, he soon had a dilemma: his business was much too successful. He felt he was making too much money at other people's expense.
In a move not likely to be recommended at Harvard Business School, he decided to reduce his profits by persuading his customers to buy fewer and cheaper items. But that didn't work. So to further reduce his income, he abandoned retailing altogether and switched to tailoring and tending an apple orchard.
Woolman also vigorously campaigned against slavery. On his travels, whenever receiving hospitality from a slave owner, he insisted on paying the slaves directly in silver for the comforts he enjoyed during his visit. Slavery, said Woolman, was motivated by "the love of ease and gain," and no luxuries could exist without others having to suffer to create them.
The Birth of Utopian Living
Nineteenth-century America witnessed a flowering of utopian experiments in simple living. Many had socialist roots, such as the short-lived community at New Harmony in Indiana, established in 1825 by Robert Owen, a Welsh social reformer and founder of the British cooperative movement.
In the 1840s, the naturalist Henry David Thoreau took a more individualist approach to simple living, famously spending two years in his self-built cabin at Walden Pond, where he attempted to grow most of his own food and live in isolated self-sufficiency (though by his own admission, he regularly walked a mile to nearby Concord to hear the local gossip, grab some snacks, and read the papers). It was Thoreau who gave us the iconic statement of simple living: "A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone." For him, richness came from having the free time to commune with nature, read, and write.
Simple living was also in full swing across the Atlantic. In 19th-century Paris, bohemian painters and writers like Henri Murger—author of the autobiographical novel that was the basis for Puccini's opera La Bohème—valued artistic freedom over a sensible and steady job, living off cheap coffee and conversation while their stomachs growled with hunger.
Redefining Luxury for the 21st Century
What all these people had in common was a desire to subordinate their material desires to some other ideal—whether based on ethics, religion, politics, or art. They believed that embracing a life goal other than money could lead to a more meaningful and fulfilling existence.
Woolman, for instance, "simplified his life in order to enjoy the luxury of doing good," according to one of his biographers. For Woolman, luxury was not sleeping on a soft mattress but having the time and energy to work for social change, through efforts such as the struggle against slavery.
Simple living is not about abandoning luxury, but discovering it in new places. These masters of simplicity are not just telling us to be more frugal, but suggesting that we expand the spaces in our lives where satisfaction does not depend on money. Imagine drawing a picture of all those things that make your life fulfilling, purposeful, and pleasurable. It might include friendships, family relationships, being in love, the best parts of your job, visiting museums, political activism, crafting, playing sports, volunteering, and people-watching.
There is a good chance that most of these activities cost very little or nothing. We don't need to do much damage to our bank balance to enjoy intimate friendships, uncontrollable laughter, dedication to causes or quiet time with ourselves.
As the humorist Art Buchwald put it, "The best things in life aren't things." The overriding lesson from Thoreau, Woolman, and other simple-living ancestors is that we should aim, year after year, to enlarge these areas of free and simple living on the map of our lives. That is how we will find the luxuries that constitute our hidden wealth.
CHAPTER 210 Things Science Says Will Make You Happy
Jen Angel
In recent years, psychologists and researchers have been digging up hard data on a question previously left to philosophers: What makes us happy? Researchers like the father-son team Ed Diener and Robert Biswas-Diener, Stanford psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky, and ethicist Stephen Post have studied people all over the world to find out how things like money, attitude, culture, memory, health, altruism, and our day-to-day habits affect our well-being. The emerging field of positive psychology is bursting with new findings that suggest your actions can have a significant effect on your happiness and satisfaction with life. Here are 10 scientifically proven strategies for getting happy.
1. Savor Everyday Moments. Pause now and then to smell a rose or watch children at play. Study participants who took time to "savor" ordinary events that they normally hurried through, or to think back on pleasant moments from their day, "showed significant increases in happiness and reductions in depression," says psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky.
2. Avoid Comparisons. While keeping up with the Joneses is part of American culture, comparing ourselves with others can be damaging to happiness and self-esteem. Instead of comparing ourselves with others, focusing on our own personal achievement leads to greater satisfaction, according to Lyubomirsky.
3. Put Money Low on the List. People who put money high on their priority list are more at risk for depression, anxiety, and low self-esteem, according to researchers Tim Kasser and Richard Ryan. Their findings hold true across nations and cultures. "The more we seek satisfactions in material goods, the less we find them there," Ryan says. "The satisfaction has a short half-life—it's very fleeting." Money-seekers also score lower on tests of vitality and self-actualization.
4. Have Meaningful Goals. "People who strive for something significant, whether it's learning a new craft or raising moral children, are far happier than those who don't have strong dreams or aspirations," say Ed Diener and Robert Biswas-Diener. "As humans, we actually require a sense of meaning to thrive." Harvard's resident happiness professor, Tal Ben-Shahar, agrees: "Happiness lies at the intersection between pleasure and meaning. Whether at work or at home, the goal is to engage in activities that are both personally significant and enjoyable."
5. Take Initiative at Work. How happy you are at work depends in part on how much initiative you take. Researcher Amy Wrzesniewski says that when we express creativity, help others, suggest improvements, or do additional tasks on the job, we make our work more rewarding and feel more in control.
6. Make Friends, Treasure Family. Happier people tend to have good families, friends, and supportive relationships, say Diener and Biswas-Diener. But it's not enough to be the life of the party if you're surrounded by shallow acquaintances. "We don't just need relationships, we need close ones" that involve understanding and caring.
7. Smile Even When You Don't Feel Like It. It sounds simple, but it works. "Happy people ... see possibilities, opportunities, and success. When they think of the future, they are optimistic, and when they review the past, they tend to savor the high points," say Diener and Biswas-Diener. Even if you weren't born looking at the glass as half-full, with practice, a positive outlook can become a habit.
8. Say Thank You Like You Mean It. People who keep gratitude journals on a weekly basis are healthier, more optimistic, and more likely to make progress toward achieving personal goals, according to author Robert Emmons. Research by Martin Seligman, founder of positive psychology, revealed that people who write "gratitude letters" to someone who made a difference in their lives score higher on happiness, and lower on depression—and the effect lasts for weeks.
9. Get Out and Exercise. A Duke University study shows that exercise may be just as effective as drugs in treating depression, without all the side effects and expense. Other research shows that in addition to health benefits, regular exercise offers a sense of accomplishment and opportunity for social interaction, releases feel-good endorphins, and boosts self-esteem.
10. Give It Away Now! Make altruism and giving part of your life, and be purposeful about it. Researcher Stephen Post says helping a neighbor, volunteering, or donating goods and services results in a "helper's high," and you get more health benefits than you would from exercise or quitting smoking. Listening to a friend, passing on your skills, celebrating others' successes, and forgiveness also contribute to happiness, he says. Researcher Elizabeth Dunn found that those who spend money on others reported much greater happiness than those who spend it on themselves.
CHAPTER 3Who Pays the Price for Cheap Stuff?
Annie Leonard
I'm a critic of consumerism, but I'm neither for nor against stuff.
I confess that my T-shirt drawer is so full it's hard to close. (That's partly because I'm often given a Tee as a souvenir when I speak at a conference or event.) But of all the T-shirts I have accumulated over the years, there are only a few that I honestly care about. My favorite (no eye-rolling, please) is a green number from the Grateful Dead's 1982 New Year's Eve concert. To me this shirt, worn for more than 30 years by multiple members of my extended family, is both useful and beautiful, not only because I attended the concert but because a dear friend gave it to me, knowing how much I would treasure it. The label even says "Made in the USA," which makes me smile because so few things are made in this country anymore, as brands increasingly opt for low-paid workers in poor countries.
Our stuff should not be artifacts of indulgence and disposability, like toys that are forgotten 15 minutes after the wrapping comes off, but things that are both practical and meaningful. British philosopher William Morris said it best: "Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful."
The life cycle of a simple cotton T-shirt—worldwide, 4 billion are made, sold, and discarded each year—knits together a chain of seemingly intractable problems, from the elusive definition of sustainable agriculture to the greed and classism of fashion marketing.
The story of a T-shirt gives us insight into the complexity of our relationship with even the simplest stuff. It also demonstrates why consumer activism—boycotting or avoiding products that don't meet our personal standards for sustainability and fairness—will never be enough to bring about real and lasting change. Like a vast Venn diagram covering the entire planet, the environmental and social impacts of cheap T-shirts overlap and intersect on many layers, making it impossible to fix one without addressing the others.
Who Sews Those Tees?
And that takes me back to a day in 1990, in the slums of Portau-Prince. I was in Haiti to meet with women who worked in sweatshops making T-shirts and other clothing for the Walt Disney Company. The women were nervous about speaking freely. We crowded into a tiny room inside a small cinderblock house. In sweltering heat, we had to keep the windows shuttered for fear that someone might see us talking. These women worked six days a week, eight hours a day, sewing clothes that they could never save enough to buy. Those lucky enough to be paid minimum wage earned about $15 a week. The women described the grueling pressure at work, routine sexual harassment, and other unsafe and demeaning conditions.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Sustainable Happiness by Sarah van Gelder. Copyright © 2014 YES! Magazine. Excerpted by permission of Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc..
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Table of Contents
Introduction: How We Lost Track of Real Happiness and Where to Find It Now, by Sarah van GelderPart 1: What We Know about Real Well-Being
1. The Movement to Live More Simply Is Older Than You Think, by Roman Krznaric
2. Ten Things Science Says Will Make You Happy, by Jen Angel
3. Who Pays the Price for Cheap Stuff?, by Annie Leonard
4. Why Everyone Is Happier in More Equitable Societies, by Brooke Jarvis with Richard Wilkinson
5. We Are Hardwired to Cooperate and Share, by Eric Michael Johnson
6. Why Saying Hello Matters, by Akaya Windwood
Part 2: The Practice of Happiness (or, How You Can Get Some)
7. This Is Your Life—Show Up for It Mindfully, by Matthieu Ricard
8. Give Yourself a Break: Take a Tech Sabbath, by Erika Kosina
9. Kick Your Addictions, Return to Intimacy, by Dan Mahle
10. Stop Worrying and Find Work You Love, by Roman Krznaric
11. Follow Your Calling (Even When It Scares You), by Shannon Hayes
12. Share Meals with Loved Ones, by Katherine Gustafson
13. Choose Gratitude, by Jeremy Adam Smith
Part 3: Sustainable Happiness and the Beloved Community
14. The Story of Your Gift, by Puanani Burgess
15. Heal, Don't Punish, by Fania Davis
16. The Hidden Treasures in Your Neighborhood, by John McKnight and Peter Block
17. How to Design Your Neighborhood for Happiness, by Jay Walljasper
18. Lessons in Gratitude from a Pay-It-Forward Restaurant, by Pavithra Mehta
19. Everything I Need to Know about Happiness, I Learned in the Forest, by Vandana Shiva
Conclusion: Ten Ways Sustainable Happiness Can Change the World