Simple living, high thinking in practical life

Most of us have quite challenging lives in terms of the demands of work, family, and so on. Prabhupāda masterfully identified this propensity more than 50 years ago and offered some solutions.

Most of us have quite challenging lives in terms of the demands of work, family, and so on. In the past, middle-class people used to be able to sustain their families with just an 8/5 job. They would go out in the morning, return in the afternoon, and be free on weekends. The wives would generally not have to work and thus would have time to care for the children and the house. One could maintain a family and still have time to collect his thoughts.

Nowadays, however, things are much harder. Most well-paid jobs are quite demanding, and often both the husband and wife must work to maintain a family. This leads to a very chaotic situation, where they have to run around continuously trying to somehow balance the demands of work, caring for the children, maintaining their relationship, practicing spiritual life, maintaining their health, and so on. Due to pressure, usually one or more of these factors end up being neglected, often with disastrous results.

This is a cycle that is very difficult to avoid since modern life creates insurmountable demands, which force us to work like hamsters on the wheel just to maintain the status quo. Modern life makes us unhappy due to an artificial lifestyle, and then offers the solution in the form of more products and services. To obtain these things, however, we need more money, which in turn forces us to work more, making us even more miserable, which in turn forces us to find quick fixes in the form of more products and services.

Śrīla Prabhupāda was able to masterfully identify this propensity more than 50 years ago when society was still much earlier in this cycle. He also proposed a solution, which, although radical at first glance, is still the only one that solves the underlying problem: Simple Living, High Thinking.

When we hear this sentence, we immediately think that we need to leave civilization and start doing some subsistence farming, but this is actually a broader idea that can be applied on many levels. It’s a general idea that we can all apply to our lives in different forms and to different degrees.

The general concept is that by reducing our material needs, we can simplify our lives and thus have more time for what is really important. Using fewer products and services means having to work less, which equals more time that can be used to solve our real problems in life.

When we buy ready-to-eat food instead of raw ingredients like grains and vegetables, for example, we think we are saving time, but we forget that time equals money since working essentially means trading time for money. When we understand that, we may make the decision to start cooking at home, which takes time, but in return reduces our expenditures, which saves time. We may think that it’s a zero-sum game, in which we just save on one side and expend on the other, but it actually brings some important benefits. First of all, cooking at home is an activity that can be easily connected with Kṛṣṇa, different from most of what we do at work. It’s also time we can spend with our families, instead of doing extra hours in the office, and finally, it is better for both our physical and spiritual health, bringing additional benefits.

Organizing our homes in a way that the space is better utilized may take a lot of time and effort, but if we do that, we may be able to comfortably live in a smaller house or apartment, which will result in huge savings. Again, we can see that the time spent helps us to save time on the other end, reducing the time we have to spend at the office and increasing the time we spend with our families and with other devotees.

Breaking bad habits can also save a lot of money. Someone who has the habit of drinking a few bottles of Sprite or eating chocolate every day, for example, may end up spending a considerable amount of money on a habit that doesn’t improve anything in his or her life. If we can work less and have more balanced lives, maybe we will be able to stop with these pick-me-ups, which will, in turn, not only save money but also improve our health.

Similarly, learning to be more minimalist, buying less, and reusing may take time to learn, but again, it results in less expenditure, which in turn results in more time and a better quality of living.

Each of these steps helps us to gradually break the chains and regain control of our lives. Consumerist society is a prison without walls, where people remain bound by choices that are imposed on them by marketing and other forces. When we start simplifying our lives, we gradually break these chains and gradually free ourselves from this vicious cycle.

As we can see, simple living is a little more than just going to live on the farm.

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