Essay Strategy – Simplicity is the ultimate Sophistication (Open to All)

Our species confronts a triple crisis: every biological system is deteriorating, we face growing social inequality, and the global economy has entered what could be a long depression.With our economy and climate in crisis, these times call for a change in how we live.

Happiness Index says we are not the happiest generation, although we have immense technological power with in our reach, we have access to best of the education, bet of the healthcare and all other aspects of good life, yet we are sad, depressed, isolated and disconnected from real world.

In our way through civilizational progress, it appears we have lost our true soul, lost our being. We have forgotten the ways we used to be happy with so little things, we have more now and we are less happy, less content, more fragile and more isolated than ever before. 

We are not happy with our jobs, our education,our society and our achievements and a void dwindles with in us all asking the pertinent question – What is the meaning of life ? and What went wrong ?

People are intuitively drawn to Simplicity, sensing its promise of the re-enchantment of life. But at the same time, they fear it, worrying that they will never enjoy themselves again. But they’re mistaken — if you’re not laughing and smiling more as you simplify, you’re not doing it right.

We’re happier and more fulfilled when we limit our outer riches and focus on inner riches. It’s not about impoverishment — where people do not have enough — particularly enough food, or shelter or safety. It’s about everyone having enough. Simplicity is about having enough, but not too much. Affluence, as the Dali Lama notes, brings inner, spiritual impoverishment.

Is Simplicity relevant to the poor? Yes, but in a different way. The Simplicity movement is a middle-class movement because it concerns making a choice about how to live, and the poor have few choices. Instead of cutting back their spending, the poor need more money to spend. The poor need new policies rather than Simplicity tips. They need policies that support higher minimum wages, good jobs, affordable housing and health care — policies that make it possible for the poor to live simply.

Simplicity is relevant to the poor in another way — it challenges our beliefs about money: As long as we allow unbridled profit to be our primary goal, people, and particularly corporations, will lie, cheat and treat workers unfairly. Ultimately, profit is the reason we go to war, and it’s the poor who fight these wars.

Simplicity, then, is about taking control over your life and resisting the forces of the dominant society that tell us to claw our way to the top, to be a winner, regardless of consequences. Being a winner does not necessarily make you happy! And in fact, it most likely won’t. Again, as Thoreau says, success is when you feel contented “with only a sense of existence”

More often than not, we have come across essays on this topic where students equate simplicity with – Poverty, Frugality, Choice of Apparel, Anti-Technology etc.

• Simplicity is not POVERTY (Don’t romanticize Poverty)
• Simplicity is not living in a HUT or leading an ASCETIC life(Instead it is a philosophy on how to lead life)
• Simplicity is not anti-technology (Technology as such is not good or bad, it is good/bad depends on the user)
• Simplicity is not banality or lack of lustre
• Simplicity is not Mundane
• Simplicity is not romanticization of our past.

Simplicity is finding balance in our lives and leading a life that is uncluttered yet sophistiated.

Many believe it’s because a lifestyle of overconsumption creates deficiencies in things that we really need, like health, social connections, security and discretionary time. These deficiencies leave us vulnerable to daily lives of dependency, passive consumption — working, watching and waiting. 

The typical urban resident waits in line five years of his or her life and spends six months sitting at red lights, eight months opening junk mail, one year searching for misplaced items and four years cleaning house. Every year, the typical high-school student spends 1,500 hours in front of the tube, compared with 900 hours spent at school. 

Yet, the game is changing. Just as we approach an all time peak in consumption, converging variables like shrinking resource supplies, necessitate changes in the way we live. Here’s the good news: reducing our levels of consumption will not be a sacrifice but a bonus if we simply redefine the meaning of the word “success.”

Instead of more stuff in our already-stuffed lives, we can choose fewer things but better things of higher quality, fewer visits to the doctor and more visits to museums and the houses of friends. Greater use of our hands and minds in creative activities like playing a flute or building a new kitchen table. If we are successful as a culture, we’ll get more value from each transaction, each relationship and each unit of energy; by reducing the waste and carelessness that now litter our economy — energy hogs like aluminum cans and plastic bottles, huge thirsty lawns, excessive airplane travel, feedlot meat and suburbs without stores — we can finance the coming transition to a lifestyle that feels more comfortable in the present and doesn’t clearcut the future.

Healthy, robust cultures mentor diets that are anthropologically correct, but sadly, in many market-bound economies, food has fallen from its lofty stature as a source of well-being, community and clarity to the simplistic category of fun. “Even wild monkeys have healthier diets than many humans,” says anthropologist Katharine Milton. Again, in our money-mad world, the focus is on snackability, convenience and shelf life rather than human life.

Alarmingly, the value of the food has radically declined in the last century. In 1900, wheat from conventional farms was 90 percent protein, compared to only 9 percent today, according to United Nations data. 

The economic crisis of the fall of 2008 was clearly based on greed — the pursuit of wealth regardless of the ethics. As Thomas Friedman says in his November 25, 2008 New York Times column: 

This financial meltdown involved a broad national breakdown in personal responsibility, government regulation and financial ethics. So many people were in on it: People who had no business buying a home, with nothing down and nothing to pay for two years; people who had no business pushing such mortgages, but made fortunes doing so; people who had no business bundling those loans into securities and selling them to third parties, as if they were AAA bonds, but made fortunes doing so; people who had no business rating those loans as AAA, but made fortunes doing so; and people who had no business buying those bonds and putting them on their balance sheets so they could earn a little better yield, but made fortunes doing so.

It is clear that the pursuit of wealth changes you. It makes people more greedy and selfish. So the research shows that the pursuit of wealth will not make you happy. However, there’s another, related piece of research that is more compelling than any other: The biggest predictor of the health of a nation, as measured in longevity, is the wealth gap. The bigger the gap, the lower everyone’s longevity. It’s not just that poor people’s health brings down the average. (Which is part of it, of course.) No, it hurts the wealthy as well.

The rich person in this country doesn’t have the longevity the middle-class person has in Norway, a country committed to a small wealth gap. Why is this? It seems that a wealth gap destroys social cohesion. It creates a society in which people do not feel connected with others, do not feel responsible for others, do not care about the common good. 

When a society allows a wealth gap, it’s telling people: It’s a jungle out there. It’s a cutthroat world. Do what you must in order to survive. Watch your back. Don’t trust anyone. Don’t expect any help. Don’t expect fairness. It’s every man for himself. You’re on your own.

In this kind of society, people feel like they have to hustle constantly if they are to survive. They lie and cheat to get ahead. Crime and violence grow. Of course citizens come to believe that no one cares, that you can’t trust anyone. Social cohesion is destroyed.

The resulting sense of isolation and lack of belonging takes its toll. But there’s something more: Part of this is the inequality of status. There is something very harmful about inequality. The poorer people are forced to feel shame and envy. The rich people feel arrogance, contempt and disdain, as well as guilt and fear of reprisal. These are not healthy emotions! 

Yes, it’s more pleasant to have higher status, but the high-status person never really feels good because there’s always someone higher! And when you’re at the top, you know everyone is trying to dethrone you. And who likes those people at the top? Do they even like each other? No, they never know who will be the one to stick the knife in.

Ultimately, the greatest harm comes because no one feels part of something greater than themselves. You feel isolated, disconnected, ignored, abandoned and alone.

All the research shows that feelings of caring and connection lead to health, happiness and longevity. Anger, fear, resentment and loneliness are devastating to people. These emotions will only disappear as the wealth gap disappears. 

A country with a large and strong middle class is one in which government has stepped in to say that the important thing is the common good, not extreme profits for a few. People have long argued the “trickle-down” theory of economics. We have seen that it doesn’t work.

What works is equality and connection — people understanding that our fate is tied to others’ fate.

You only become more caring by being cared for. We do not feel cared for in this cutthroat culture. You learn to compete, to achieve, to prove you’re better than others; you judge others, compare yourself to others; you learn to ignore the homeless, to hide your real feelings with a false image; you learn to cheat, to fool people, to trick them, to manipulate them. Who doesn’t worry they will end up alone, abandoned and neglected — sitting drugged in a wheelchair, warehoused with other old people.

Aldous Huxley called it “organized lovelessness.” We choose technology over people and interact more and more with machines — voice mail, e-mail, cash machines. We even check our own library books outs. You don’t need anyone and no one needs you.

Juliete Schor has noted that, over the past 30 years, real consumption expenditures per person have doubled. Her analysis reveals a double-edged sword that has emerged particularly in the 1980s and 90s: [The] booming economy reinforced a powerful cycle of “work and spend” in which consumer norms accelerated dramatically. People needed to work more to purchase all the new products being churned out by a globalizing consumer economy. And they responded to their stressful lives by participating in an orgy of consumer upscaling.

A study by the psychologist Tim Kasser, The High Price of Materialism, has shown that the ecological footprint of an individual (measured as the number of acres necessary to support one’s chosen lifestyle) increases steadily in proportion to number of hours worked per week, and rises dramatically for those working more than 35 hours per week. Kasser showed that, at the same time that ecological footprints go up, genuine life satisfaction goes down.

Repetitive stress injuries, sleep deprivation, psychological stress, obesity, lack of exercise, anxiety and depression are all quite dangerous individually, but they may also conspire to cause diabetes, heart disease or cancer. All of these illnesses are linked in some way to the culture of overwork. 

Dr. Suzanne Schweikert has noted, however, that there is a deep irony here that brings us back to some social and political questions that are broader than those of work hours alone. “Our desire to keep our health insurance benefits,” she pointed out, “ties us to jobs that are bad for our health.

Imagine a way of life that’s culturally richer but materially leaner. In this emerging lifestyle, there is less stress, insecurity, pollution, doubt and debt but more vacation time, more solid connections with nature and more participation in the arts, amateur sports and politics. Greater reliance on human energy — fueled by complex carbohydrates — and less reliance on ancient sunlight stored as pollution-filled fossil fuel. Fewer fluorescent hours in the supermarket, more sunny afternoons out in the vegetable garden. Instead of being passive consumers, doggedly treadmilling to keep up with overproduction, we’ll choose healthy, renewable forms of wealth such as social capital (networks and bonds of trust), whose value increases the more we spend it, stimulating work that’s more like a puzzle than a prison sentence, and acquired skills and interests that enhance our free time, making money less of a stressful imperative.

A culture shift like this — from an emphasis on material wealth to an abundance of time, relationships and experiences — has already occurred in many societies such as 18th-century Japan. 

Land was in short supply, forest resources were being depleted, and minerals such as gold and copper were suddenly scarce as well. Japan’s culture adapted by developing a national ethic that centered on moderation and efficiency. 

An attachment to the material things in life was seen as demeaning, while the advancement of crafts and human knowledge were lofty goals. Quality became ingrained in a culture that eventually produced world-class solar cells and Toyota Priuses. Training and education in aesthetics and ritualistic arts fluorished, resulting in disciplines like fencing, martial arts, the tea ceremony, flower arranging, literature, art and mastery of the abacus. The three largest cities in Japan had 1,500 bookstores among them, and most people had access to basic education, health care and the necessities of life, further enriching a culture that spent less money but paid more attention.

Places such as Canada and the European Union (EU) have already started down this enviable path, making political and cultural space for values that lie beneath the bottom line of monetary wealth. For example, most EU countries give legal standing to mandatory family leave from work, part-time jobs with pro-rated benefits, higher taxes on energy use and pollution in exchange for lower income taxes and take-back laws requiring manufacturers to recycle products at the end of their use. 

An everyday ethic is emerging in Europe that encourages sustainable behavior by popular demand. Says John de Graaf, co-author of Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic, “Western European countries have invested in their social contracts. Strategic investments in health care, education, transportation, and public space reduced the need (and desire) of individuals to maximize their own incomes.”

The wake-up alarm is buzzing with news ranging from climate disruption to the end of cheap energy and food riots around the world. The time for changes in how we live is now. Only if we act swiftly and voluntarily, can we transform catastrophe into opportunity. Small steps are not sufficient. We require large-scale changes in our energy systems, the radical redesign of our urban environments, a conscious democracy with the strength to make great changes, and much more. 

As individuals, we may protest that we are helpless in the face of such immense challenges and that there is little we can do. However, the reality is just the opposite — only changes in our individual lives can provide a trustworthy foundation for a human future where we can not only maintain ourselves, but also surpass ourselves.

Voluntary Simplicity is a cool lifestyle for a hot planet. Simplicity that is consciously chosen, deliberate and intentional supports a higher quality of life. Here are some of the important reasons to consciously choose Simplicity:

• Simplicity fosters a more harmonious relationship with the Earth — the land, air and water.

• Simplicity promotes fairness and equity among the people of the Earth.

• Simplicity cuts through needless clutter and complexity.

• Simplicity enhances living with balance — inner and outer, work and family, family and community.

• Simplicity reveals the beauty and intelligence of nature’s designs.

• Simplicity increases the resources available for future generations.

• Simplicity helps save animal and plant species from extinction.

• Simplicity responds to global shortages of oil, water and other vital resources.

• Simplicity keeps our eyes on the prize of what matters most in our lives — the quality of our relationships with family, friends, community, nature and cosmos.

• Simplicity yields lasting satisfactions that more than compensate for the fleeting pleasures of consumerism

• Simplicity fosters the sanity of self-discovery and an integrated approach to life.

• Simplicity blossoms in community and connects us to the world with a sense of belonging and common purpose.

• Simplicity is a lighter lifestyle that fits elegantly into the real world of the 21st century.

Voluntary Simplicity is not sacrifice.

• Sacrifice is a consumer lifestyle that is overstressed, overbusy and overworked.

• Sacrifice is investing long hours doing work that is neither meaningful nor satisfying.

• Sacrifice is being apart from family and community to earn a living.

• Sacrifice is the stress of commuting long distances and coping with traffic.

• Sacrifice is the white noise of civilization blotting out the subtle sounds of nature.

• Sacrifice is hiding nature’s beauty behind a jumble of billboard advertisements.

• Sacrifice is the smell of the city stronger than the scent of the Earth.

• Sacrifice is carrying more than 200 toxic chemicals in our bodies with consequences that will cascade for generations ahead.

• Sacrifice is the massive extinction of plants and animals and a dramatically impoverished biosphere. Sacrifice is being cut off from nature’s wildness and wisdom.

• Sacrifice is global climate disruption, crop failure, famine and forced migration.

• Sacrifice is the absence of feelings of neighborliness and community.

• Sacrifice is feeling divided among the different parts of our lives and unsure how they work together in a coherent whole.

• Sacrifice is the lost opportunity for soulful encounter with others.

Consumerism offers lives of sacrifice where Simplicity offers lives of opportunity. Simplicity creates the opportunity for greater fulfillment in work, compassion for others, feelings of kinship with all life and awe of living in a living universe.

Crude / Regressive Simplicity:-

The mainstream media often present Simplicity as a path of regress instead of progress. Simplicity is frequently viewed as anti-technology, anti-innovation and a backward-looking way of life that seeks a romantic return to a bygone era. A regressive Simplicity is often portrayed as a utopian, back-to-nature movement with families leaving the stresses of an urban life in favor of living on a farm or in a recreational vehicle or on a boat. This is a stereotypical view of a crudely simple lifestyle — a throwback to an earlier time and more primitive condition — with no indoor toilet, no phone, no computer, no television and no car. No thanks! Seen in this way, Simplicity is a cartoon lifestyle that seems naive, disconnected and irrelevant — an approach to living that can be easily dismissed as impractical and unworkable. Regarding Simplicity as regressive and primitive makes it easier to embrace a business-as-usual approach to living in the world.

Cosmetic/Superficial Simplicity:-

In recent years, a different view of Simplicity has begun to appear — a cosmetic Simplicity that attempts to cover over deep defects in our modern ways of living by giving the appearance of meaningful change. Shallow Simplicity assumes that green technologies — such as fuel-efficient cars, fluorescent light bulbs and recycling — will fix our problems, give us breathing room and allow us to continue pretty much as we have in the past without requiring that we make fundamental changes in how we live and work. 

Cosmetic Simplicity puts green lipstick on our unsustainable lives to give them the outward appearance of health and happiness. A superficial Simplicity gives a false sense of security by implying that small measures will solve great challenges. A cosmetic Simplicity perpetuates the status quo by assuming that, with the use of green technologies, we can moderate our impact and continue along our current path of growth for another half century or more.

Sophisticated / Conscious Simplicity:-

Seldom presented in the mass media and poorly understood is an elegant Simplicity that represents a deep, graceful and sophisticated transformation in our ways of living — the work that we do, the transportation that we use, the homes and neighborhoods in which we live, the food that we eat, the clothes that we wear and much more. 

A sophisticated and graceful Simplicity seeks to heal our relationship with the Earth, with one another and with the sacred universe. Conscious Simplicity is not simple. This is a life-way that is growing and flowering with a garden of expressions. Sophisticated Simplicity fits aesthetically and sustainably into the real world of the 21st century. Which of these expressions of Simplicity — crude, cosmetic or sophisticated — is most fitting in our dramatically changing world?

Simplicity is not an alternative lifestyle for a marginal few; it is a creative choice for the mainstream majority, particularly in developed nations. Simplicity is simultaneously a personal choice, a civilizational choice and a species choice. 

Even with major technological innovations in energy and transportation, it will require dramatic changes in our overall levels and patterns of living and consuming if we are to maintain the integrity of the Earth as a living system. Overall, a “deep Simplicity” that fosters an elegant transformation of our lives is vital if we are to build a workable and meaningful future.

1) Uncluttered Simplicity

Simplicity means taking charge of lives that are too busy, too stressed, and too fragmented. Simplicity means cutting back on clutter, complexity and trivial distractions, both material and non-material, and focusing on the essentials — whatever those may be for each of our unique lives. As Thoreau said, “Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.” Or, as Plato wrote, “In order to seek one’s own direction, one must simplify the mechanics of ordinary, everyday life.”

2) Ecological Simplicity

Simplicity means to choose ways of living that touch the Earth more lightly and that reduce our ecological impact on the web of life. This life-path remembers our deep roots with the Earth, air and water. It encourages us to connect with nature, the seasons and the cosmos. A natural Simplicity feels a deep reverence for the community of life on Earth and accepts that the non-human realms of plants and animals have their dignity and rights as well the human.

3) Compassionate Simplicity

Simplicity means to feel such a strong sense of kinship with others that we “choose to live simply so that others may simply live.” A compassionate Simplicity means feeling a bond with the community of life and being drawn toward a path of reconciliation — with other species and future generations as well as, for example, between those with great differences of wealth and opportunity. A compassionate Simplicity is a path of cooperation and fairness that seeks a future of mutually assured development for all.

4) Soulful Simplicity

Simplicity means to approach life as a meditation and to cultivate our experience of intimate connection with all that exists. By living simply, we can more directly awaken to the living universe that surrounds and sustains us, moment by moment. Soulful Simplicity is more concerned with consciously tasting life in its unadorned richness than with a particular standard or manner of material living. In cultivating a soulful connection with life, we tend to look beyond surface appearances and bring our interior aliveness into relationships of all kinds.

5) Business Simplicity

Simplicity means a new kind of economy is growing in the world with many expressions of “right livelihood” in the rapidly growing market for healthy and sustainable products and services of all kinds — from home building materials and energy systems to foods and transportation. When the need for a sustainable infrastructure in developing nations is combined with the need to retrofit and redesign the homes, cities, workplaces and transportation systems of developed nations, it is clear that an enormous wave of green economic activity will unfold. A new economics is integral to this new approach to business, for example, where “waste equals food” or the waste of one activity represents resources for another part of the production system.

6) Civic Simplicity

Simplicity means a new approach to governing ourselves, recognizing that to live more lightly and sustainably on the Earth will require changes in every area of public life — from transportation and education to the design of our cities, public buildings and workplaces. The politics of Simplicity is also a media politics as the mass media are the primary vehicle for reinforcing, or transforming, the mass consciousness of consumerism.

7) Frugal Simplicity

Simplicity means that, by cutting back on spending that is not truly serving our lives and by practicing skillful management of our personal finances, we can achieve greater financial independence. Frugality and careful financial management bring increased financial freedom and the opportunity to more consciously choose our path through life. Living with less also decreases the impact of our consumption upon the Earth and frees resources for others.

Yahoo search engine was dominant in  1990s when Google was barely starting out. But over the years, Yahoo Search engine became almost irrelevant where as Google took over. The reason was exceptionally simple. 

Yahoo Search engine page and Search engine page of other competitors were cluttered with advertisements and links. While Google, kept it exceptionally simple. That’s the prime reason how and why google search engine took over and became a favorite. 

Same can be said about the Bing search engine of Microsoft. Now, Yahoo is almost history and and tech journalists have written its obituary already. The reason was simple, it was Google’s simplicity and uncluttered environment that helped it to become what it is today. 

Imagine, if google agrees to put an advertisement on its search page, it will reach the global audience instantaneously and how much can google earn from this, yet despite the lucrative nature of this, google stays as it is, that’s because, it very well knows , the day it loses simplicity, it will loose its sophistication and that it will be a history like Yahoo.

That’s been one of my mantras – focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains. – Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs’ interest in design began with his love for his childhood home. It was in one of the many working-class subdivisions between San Francisco and San Jose that were developed by builders who churned out inexpensive modernist tract houses in the 1950s for the postwar suburban migration. Inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright’s vision of simple modern homes for the American “everyman,” developers such as Joseph Eichler and his imitators built houses that featured floor-to-ceiling glass walls, open floor plans, exposed post-and-beam construction, concrete slab floors and lots of sliding glass doors.

The marketplace abounds with promises of simplicity. Citibank has a “simplicity” credit card, Ford has “keep it simple pricing,” and Lexmark vows to “uncomplicate” the consumer experience. Widespread calls for simplicity formed a trend that was inevitable, given the structure of the technology business around selling the same thing “new and improved” where often “improved” simply means more. 

Imagine a world in which software companies simplified their programs every year by shipping with 10% fewer features at 10% higher cost due to the expense of simplification. For the consumer to get less and pay more seems to contradict sound economic principles. Offer to share a cookie with a child and which half will the child want?

Yet in spite of the logic of demand, “simplicity sells” as espoused by New York Times columnist David Pogue in a presentation at the 2006 annual TED Conference in Monterey. The undeniable commercial success of the Apple iPod—a device that does less but costs more than other digital music players— is a key supporting example of this trend. 

Another example is the deceivingly spare interface of the powerful Google search engine, which is so popular that “googling” has become shorthand for “searching the Web.” People not only buy, but more importantly love, designs that can make their lives simpler. For the foreseeable future, complicated technologies will continue to invade our homes and workplaces, thus simplicity is bound to be a growth industry. Simplicity is a quality that not only evokes passionate loyalty for a product design, but also has become a key strategic tool for businesses to confront their own intrinsic complexities. Dutch conglomerate Philips leads in this area with its utter devotion to realizing “sense and simplicity” and it has a “Simplicity Advisory Board (SAB) unlike any other company.

We live in ecosystem that is deteriorating rapidly, the generation is not the happiest one either and we are on the verge of collapse-ecologically, morally, socially, psychologically and otherwise. We need to separate between our Want and Need and then only we can approach simplicity, where life is full of joy and its richness is bountiful. Thus, simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

Indeed, Buddha, left home, travelled far and wide, meditated relentlessly and almost fasted to death, but in the end, gave a simpler yet practicable philosophy of life and to arrive at that, and to find the cause behind all our sorrows was not easy for him, but in doing so, he made lives simpler and elegant. HIs teaching were exceptionally simple yet sophisticated and finding a middle path is the true path to happiness and ultimate realization of pure bliss.

In the teachings of Gandhi too, we find utmost simplicity and thus he is widely read and regarded as Mahatma. 

You can explore Gandhi, Buddha and other very well known similar dimensions as well.