Think of the moments in your life when you really sat back and reflected on a successful experience, or a real meaningful moment. Not just the feeling one gets driving a new car off the dealers lot, or when you finish mowing the grass, or when you find a $20 bill in the empty dryer at the laundry mat, but rather when you felt genuinely appreciated for your contribution.
No one will ever question the value of history and the reflection on learned experience. Yet, perhaps it is time to consider new ways of being, behaving, and engaging our world to nurture this evolving mindset that puts people ahead of personal gain. It will never happen you say? You’re convinced that humans are self-pleasing first and only consider others out of guilt or personal agenda. Perhaps that is true.
However, when you reflect back earlier on the most meaningful moments of your existence, you will discover that they will fall in the giving category more so than the taking. So why is our society, and certainly our economy, so geared to the accumulated gains from the taking as a measure of success?
Those individuals who have gravitated toward a varying degree of voluntary simplicity are finding new ways of engaging in their lives, and discovering new ways of measuring individual accomplishment. Those that still choose to cling to the past benchmarks of success may eventually be squeezed, due to natural economic pressures, to engage in in-voluntary simplicity, leaving the experience to be one of necessity rather than free choice.
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