The Joy of Less
I just went on a pretty awesome vacation- a sailing trip in the Caribbean with 9 other close family members and friends. 9 days on a 44 foot catamaran, so I guess you could think of it as 4.4 foot per person (tight quarters)! We planned this trip for months and it truly was a very special experience. We were the crew on the boat — including chefs, sailors and cleaning crew. For many I am sure that doesn’t sound like a vacation. To me it was heaven.
One of the big takeaways for me was how much stuff I have in my life- I mean actual physical stuff, like clothes, makeup, kitchen gadgetry and so on-that really isn’t adding much value. On a boat, our sleeping quarters were quite exactly the size of our bed, and the bathroom was just big enough for a small toilet, sink and shower. Storage space is at a premium so everything needed to be pared back to the minimum — and I never heard anyone express a wish that they had more space or more stuff with them.
I was reminded of something I recently read, which was that with the invention of the washing machine, the idea was that women would have a lot of free time, that had prior been spent on the laborious task of handwashing. What happened instead was that the standard of cleanliness shifted, so that now people expected that their clothes should be washed after only one wearing, which in the past would have been an unheard of waste. On the boat, we all wore clothes for multiple days, and when things got wet, we hung them in the sun to dry and wear again. No one was the worse for it.
It makes me wonder how much stress and work we create for ourselves pursuing goals that are unnecessary. Maybe daily clean clothes is a poor example, but I meet people every day who are scrambling and pushing themselves to make more and more money, when what they have in their lives is more than kings of yore could have dreamed of. It’s that creeping standard of living that many of us chase, and with any experience we see that it certainly doesn’t bring any happiness.
When I left banking to go into the risky (and relatively un-lucrative- on an expected value basis) world of startups, I was discussing the move with a friend who was also moving from banking to the relatively un-lucrative world of public service. What we agreed is that because we had been exceptionally thrifty throughout our careers, we had the ability to pick the “next career” not based on the potential income, but on the interest level and on what we would learn. She called it “the gift of thrift we have given ourselves” . I wonder if I (and most people) would do well to continually check in to see if further lowering our standard of living, aka downsizing or scaling back, is something we should pursue with more vigor. Less certainly seems to be more, and in this world where we are pushed by advertising to get the newest big and best, perhaps the right answer is to turn off the ads and go sit outside and look at the sunshine.
