Turtles-Paradise

In recent months I have stumbled upon a growing blogosphere about simplicity, minimalism, and living ‘tiny’. Up until then, I had been feeling somewhat distracted and overwhelmed. A lot had happened in a short period of time – all good things – and I had to re-adjust a lot to a new lifestyle. Along the way, I got a hacked off with the generally accepted life-plan that looks like this:

• Go to school
• Go to university
• Go to work
• Take out a loan to buy a house
• Continue going to work for a long time in order to pay off above loan
• Pay off the loan, but almost immediately move to the following step
• Go to a retirement home
• Die

Luckily, because such a life-plan is so utterly soul destroying and stupid – at least now that house-prices are astronomical, traditional jobs have deteriorated in almost every way (think: less money, more hours, less benefits, less security), and the internet has changed the very fabric of society – there are lots of people who have come up with better ideas. Ideas that include travelling the world or not going to work. Observing that – beyond a certain baseline – bigger hours, faster cars, and more stuff is not going to lead to happiness and a life well lived.

This is backed up somewhat by the fact that we have effectively destroyed our planet in the process of digging up and consuming our way through every resource it has to offer. It’s about time that we started investing something back into the planet, because the bank of Mother Earth is going to run dry very soon.

Which is why living small makes a lot more sense than living large.