Chasing Utopia...

[mia]

How many here feel a whole lot better just by getting rid of things?
I'm still a slave to my possessions - constantly rearranging things so that they'll fit in my small home. It feels great when I can just eliminate items once and for all.


Chasing Utopia, Family Imagines No Possessions

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/17/us/17texas.html

...Though it may not be the stuff of the typical American dream, the voluntary simplicity movement, which traces its inception to 1980s Seattle, is drawing a great deal of renewed interest, some experts say.

“If you think about some of the shifts we’re having economically — shifts in oil and energy — it may be the right time,” said Mary E. Grigsby, associate professor of rural sociology at the University of Missouri and the author of “Buying Time and Getting By: The Voluntary Simplicity Movement.”

“The idea in the movement was ‘everything you own owns you,’ ” said Dr. Grigsby, who sees roots of the philosophy in the lives of the Puritans. “You have to care for it, store it. It becomes an appendage, I think. If it enhances your life and helps you do the things you want to do, great. If you are burdened by these things and they become the center of what you have to do to live, is that really positive?”

Juliet B. Schor, a sociology professor at Boston College and author of “The Overspent American,” said the modern “downshifters,” as she called them, owed debts to the hippies and the travel romance of Jack Kerouac....

[The River]

1. I've Been Living Very "Lightly"

for the past 20+ years.
Just the basics and they are mostly
used, recycled or shared.