Voluntary Simplicity: Richard Gregg, Thoreau's Pies and Small Is Beautiful

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The episode opens with the irony of decluttering by buying matching plastic bins, then traces simple living from spiritual practice to economic argument. Epicurus taught in the fourth century BCE that the stress of maintaining luxury outweighs its pleasure, and that food, shelter and friendship should be secured at the lowest cost. Jesus sent his disciples out without bread, bag or money, and Paul called the desire to be rich a root of evil. As Sufism spread among Turkic peoples between the 10th and 19th centuries, the patched garments of fakirs and dervishes echoed the austerity of Tengrist shamans on the Central Asian steppe and helped build trust. After industrialization, Jean-Jacques Rousseau praised the simple life in the 1750s, William Morris and Edward Carpenter pushed back against factory society, and Carpenter popularized the phrase simple life in an 1887 essay.

Henry David Thoreau spent two years in a cabin at Walden Pond in the 1850s, though on land owned by Ralph Waldo Emerson and with his mother doing his laundry and bringing pies. The distinction that answers this critique came in 1936, in the middle of the Great Depression, when Richard Gregg coined voluntary simplicity: a chosen rejection of consumption by people who could consume, unlike poverty imposed on them. Thorstein Veblen's 1899 idea of conspicuous consumption explained the treadmill they were stepping off. Modern practice runs from the 100 Thing Challenge and mortgage-free tiny houses to Mark Boyle and Daniel Suelo living without money. The episode closes with E.F. Schumacher's 1973 Small Is Beautiful and James Robertson's case for an economy that lowers the cost of living instead of raising incomes.

• City dwellers grow sprouts in wide-mouthed mason jars, rinsing them through nylon window screen fixed in the lid.
• The Movement for Compassionate Living, formed in the UK in 1984, pairs veganism with self-reliance.
• Robert Hart showed in Shropshire that a 0.12-acre forest garden can feed one person.
• The books Green Illusions and Techno-Fix argue renewable technology shifts environmental damage to mining countries.
• The new economics movement gathered momentum after the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment.