Economics, Ecology, And Us

Robert Gilman - Economics, Ecology, And Us: "This kind of lifestyle is often referred to as 'voluntary simplicity.' We used to chuckle at that because, compared to the simplicity of having one job and handling everything else by paying someone else to do it for you, ours was definitely a life of voluntary complexity! It was both enormously stimulating and enormously challenging.

On the minus side, we naturally found that we could not replace all expenses with our own labor. More problematic, we found that the paid-labor world was often downright hostile to anyone who was not devoted to it full-time. It was hard to find a middle ground that combined sophisticated paid work with substantial personal time.

We were never truly poor, but we did get tight enough at times to appreciate the desperation that being without resources (not only financial but social and otherwise) can bring. Yet in our case, whenever we got to the 'end of our rope,' new rope always seemed to grow out of the old end. There were always new opportunities coming up over the horizon - often just in time.

Above that level there was, and is, a broad income territory where wealth and poverty are clearly states of mind and not measured by our bank account. In this territory, our sense of fulfillment depends almost entirely on the degree to which we are able to express our values and have reasonable control over how we spend our time. [...]"