I’m a couple months short of 3 years with Project Simplify. While my focus is to help people do what they want and love to do by making their office & life management easier, I am also a strong supporter of full-life simplification.

Years ago, while living in Santa Barbara I was car-free for 3 or 4 years, choosing instead to bicycle commute. I rarely ate out, preferring to make my food. The same clothes would appear on my back for years, finally getting the boot to the local thrift store once the style was just too dated.

So what’s the confession? I still haven’t read Duane Elgin’s (now classic) book, Voluntary Simplicity (oh me gads!!). It’s on order. =)

I probably thought that I was probably already doing the stuff that he’d probably have written about… so why use up more paper and have another book on the shelf? Well, I just finished reading the first half of his report, co-authored with Arnold Mitchell, titled “Voluntary Simplicity“. It was published in 1977. the downloadable pdf is under
REPORTS & ARTICLES
2. Sustainability & Simplicity

OR you can get the (revised 1998–correction 7/10/07 to 1993 per book’s author) book, which presumably would have suggestions, ideas, and even some inspiration here:
Voluntary Simplicity,
Revised Edition: Toward a Way of Life That Is Outwardly Simple, Inwardly Rich

What I found particularly interesting was that even 30 years ago, the authors understood that it would be the desire for inner growth that would provide the fuel to change people’s lifestyles, not the somewhat conceptual belief that we’d either be annihilated by resource depletion (or fighting over) IF pollution doesn’t finish us off first. And that “each person will consider whether his or her level and pattern of consumption fits, with grace and integrity, into the practical art of daily living” (from page 5 of the report).

This has translated to people with widely varying lifestyles and convictions:

• no car, 10 year old car, hybrid
• only grow my own veggies, buy them from the nearest market, only from a health food store
• no technology, phone and electricity, cell phone/laptop

Widely diverse, yet all chosen with personal consideration of “grace and integrity”. Each decision seeking to incorporate energy and material consumption, work, and personal growth “into the practical art of daily living”.

I look forward to reading the book!