Freedom For Ourselves
Living simply is a way to be free from those who would exploit us.
The mass media, our governments, economic forces, and corporate influences all work to shape us, and not always in our best interests. The modern individual in the first world is under very active pressure to
over-produce and over-consume. Our lives are made wasteful. We consume products we do not need, and even products that are harmful to us. False-needs and wants are fabricated for us by marketing powers.
We have to ask more questions, examine our assumptions, and be more aware. We have to be sure that we are driving our own lives, and not being driven by our media, our governments, or the will of the marketplace.
If we live simply, we are choosing not to participate. We become free from a well-formed trap.
Freedom For Others
When we choose to life simply, it is not just that we can be individually free. We are helping to give freedom to people we enslave without even knowing it.
In the first world we are used to affordable imported consumer products, cheap ‘necessities’ we take for granted. Yet we seldom know where our products come from, who made them, and who may have been
exploited during their manufacture. We are not taught to ask. We are taught to be happy for our good fortune, not to think of those who have laboured for us, or who missed out so that we could have.
Whether we choose to think of these problems as being the product of small groups of evil individuals, or simply as a basic tendency in human nature, the powers of industry can be immoral. They steal, harm,
exploit, and pillage.
People resist this hard truth in different ways. Some people get angry. Some choose to lead a simple life.