I tried, but it didn't take

I thought I was making a move to a simple life. Going from living in a house to a trailer, purging our stuff and starting over, moving from a large-ish city (population 600,000) to a small one (population 30,000). But when I looked into it, I'm not doing "simple living" at all.

I found out it's actually pretty serious stuff. There's this Simple Living Manifesto I found from zenhabits.net. It lists 72 ways to simplify your life. You'd think they could simplify the process a bit, but no.

The way they put it, It means getting rid of the clutter so you are left with only that which gives you value. and you can do it in 2 steps:

1. Identify what’s most important to you.
2. Eliminate everything else.

or, since that is apparently too vague and difficult for most people (myself included), you can follow their instruction manual and achieve satisfaction after all 72 simplification tasks are complete. Reading that list wasn't so appealing to me either. But I'm also not interested in killing babies, which is apparently what I'm doing if I don't at least make an effort



So, assuming it's on the list somewhere referring to de-cluttering my life, I started by cleaning out my inbox, outbox, junkbox ... all the electronic mailboxes I had. It took an hour. I don't feel much better. And I'm pretty sure that if I had that hour back, I might be able to use it napping, or reading a book, or petting my puppy which, simply, makes me happy.

Instead, taking on simplicity, seriously, is completely time consuming. I feel like I have yet another goal on the horizon and 71 more tasks on my agenda (I did find "declutter your digital packrattery" on the list). I'm not sure I'm cut out for this, and I'm not sure I want to be either.

Not to mention, it's not a happy moment when I realized that I accidentally deleted a whole number of emails I was keeping for posterity's sake, including one from a personal hero I've never met but have corresponded with. I feel like I just gave my autographed baseball to the dog to be used as a chew toy.


ps - that image, it's for sale. I'm not telling you where. Because one of the 72 steps to simplicity is "limit your buying habits" - so why market a simple living product when buying unecessary material goods is completely antithetical to the goals of simplicity?

I smell a ruse. I'll try again tomorrow when I'm feeling less suspicious.