Yes, less is more. We hear this over and over again but like most of what enters our ears, it just falls out the other ear unnoticed and insignificant.

True, these three words scream simplicity and when we hear that oh-so-common proverb, we roll our eyes and think, “yeah, yeah, yeah. I know, I know.” But then why don’t we ever live by this saying? If we “know” it then why isn’t it being implemented in our lives.

But let’s break down this phrase, “less is more.” Less of what and more of what? Without meaning and understanding, it’s just another played out adage we’ve become familiar with.

This simple saying often conjures up the idea of a possession-free monk meditating in a temple in the foothills of Thailand. But this image isn’t really applicable to most of our lives, is it. We can’t just get up and leave for a life of austerity and quiet contemplation.

Or can we?

Like the monk who sold his Ferrari, the New Yorker in the article below left it all to live a tranquil life in suburban Kyoto, Japan. Is his life happier? Does less truly equate to more?

In my case, living with less really means not obsessing with the tangible world and chasing after material goods that don’t satisfy my true needs.

I’d like to know what your interpretation of this truism is. What does less = more mean to you? Do you live by it? Or is it just another useless cliche?

The Joy of Less

“The beat of my heart has grown deeper, more active, and yet more peaceful, and it is as if I were all the time storing up inner riches…My [life] is one long sequence of inner miracles.” The young Dutchwoman Etty Hillesum wrote that in a Nazi transit camp in 1943, on her way to her death at Auschwitz two months later. Towards the end of his life, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “All I have seen teaches me to trust the creator for all I have not seen,” though by then he had already lost his father when he was 7, his first wife when she was 20 and his first son, aged 5. In Japan, the late 18th-century poet Issa is celebrated for his delighted, almost child-like celebrations of the natural world. Issa saw four children die in infancy, his wife die in childbirth, and his own body partially paralyzed.

I’m not sure I knew the details of all these lives when I was 29, but I did begin to guess that happiness lies less in our circumstances than in what we make of them, in every sense. “There is nothing either good or bad,” I had heard in high school, from Hamlet, “but thinking makes it so.” I had been lucky enough at that point to stumble into the life I might have dreamed of as a boy: a great job writing on world affairs for Time magazine, an apartment (officially at least) on Park Avenue, enough time and money to take vacations in Burma, Morocco, El Salvador. But every time I went to one of those places, I noticed that the people I met there, mired in difficulty and often warfare, seemed to have more energy and even optimism than the friends I’d grown up with in privileged, peaceful Santa Barbara, Calif., many of whom were on their fourth marriages and seeing a therapist every day. Though I knew that poverty certainly didn’t buy happiness, I wasn’t convinced that money did either.

So — as post-1960s cliché decreed — I left my comfortable job and life to live for a year in a temple on the backstreets of Kyoto. My high-minded year lasted all of a week, by which time I’d noticed that the depthless contemplation of the moon and composition of haiku I’d imagined from afar was really more a matter of cleaning, sweeping and then cleaning some more. But today, more than 21 years later, I still live in the vicinity of Kyoto, in a two-room apartment that makes my old monastic cell look almost luxurious by comparison. I have no bicycle, no car, no television I can understand, no media — and the days seem to stretch into eternities, and I can’t think of a single thing I lack.

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