What if you designed a lighter life?
Ditching inner and outer clutter for a greater sense of meaning and aliveness
What might happen if you choose to design a lighter life?
Nearly 100 years ago, Richard Gregg, observing a consumeristic West littered with social anxiety, said:
"The greatest characters, those who have influenced the largest numbers of people for the longest time, have been people with extremely few possessions.
"Buddha, Jesus, Moses, Mohammed, Kagawa, Socrates, St. Francis, Confucius."
According to Gregg, they leaned into 'voluntary simplicity'.
"Voluntary simplicity involves both inner and outer condition. It means singleness of purpose, sincerity and honesty within, as well as avoidance of exterior clutter, of many possessions irrelevant to the chief purpose of life."
What if living heavy is an indication that one has a confused identity?
In our modern world, we tend to lead heavier lives than the aforementioned string of influencers.
If we were to imagine a successful person in the 21st century for a moment, we might picture them in a large house with seasonal properties elsewhere, driving a fancy car or two, wearing a shiny corporate title, having authored a few books, with a huge social media following, and sewn a healthy family lineage to ensure their prosperity lasts for generations.
Yet the ancient characters Gregg identified lived by an entirely different set of principles that informed their legacy.
As Western progress has accelerated, perhaps our understanding of who we are has deteriorated alongside it.
“When ordinary people do not know who they are, they get anxious,” Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan once said.
I believe we have ‘solved’ for that anxiety by purchasing from the capitalistic ‘heavy life’ proffered to us, with diminishing returns.
William James, the 19th century philosopher and first person to offer a psychology course in the United States, once coined the phrase ‘Americanitis’ to refer to a neurotic disease that resulted from the quantity and speed of change.
David Schuster, an associate professor of history at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne, argues that Westerners have accepted this widespread neurosis as a side effect of progress.
Julie Beck, senior editor at The Atlantic, outlined possible symptoms of Americanitis as “headaches, muscle pain, weight loss, irritability, anxiety, impotence, depression, a lack of ambition, and both insomnia and lethargy.”
In short, heaviness.
And yet the barrage of content and advertisements to purchase ‘that something new’ remain constant.
The promise that a heavy life can still save us could not be highlighted more than in Elon Musk’s rebranding of Twitter to X, with plans to make it “the everything app…the future state of unlimited interactivity…a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities.”
Westerners still cling to the promise of the heavy life in the naïve hope that “while the world may change, our ability to continue pursuing our personal desires, plans, and patterns will not be affected,” according to Mark Sayers, systems thinker and cultural writer.
We can maintain our affluent individualistic identity.
But what if designing a lighter life is the only way to recover who we really are?