A Case for Doing Less and Living More

Embracing simplicity at home and abroad.

Of late I have spent altogether too much time working and thinking about work. How did this happen? Who did this to me? Where along the way did I join the assembly line in search of crumbs?

Yesterday, I read that the good people of Ikaria—a Greek island—work an average of at most five hours a day, while Americans spend upwards of eleven hours on work-related activities. This is another way of saying that when we are not working, we are preparing to go back to work. Half of Americans eat their breakfasts during the morning commute, a troubling factoid considering the banality of choking in a few dozen lanes of insufferable traffic. Are these mugs getting stuffed during the rearward commute home? Presumably, but I’m too pensive to go that far into the research.

My agitation today is highly specific, but in all likelihood not unique. After some brow-twisting philosophizing, I’ve managed to isolate it. I miss the days of wearing diapers. Back then, people let me roam around, fling dirt at things, throw tantrums, lie down on the ground and soil myself. Nobody expected me to pay for lunch. I sang to the birds; I hugged trees without being called a bliss ninny. I could set fire to a car and someone would give me a kiss and allow me to snooze in their lap after the emergency vehicles departed. What’s not to miss?

It doesn’t help that December is a nasty month here in the Far North. The weather takes a toll. Consecutive days of rain, and suddenly everyone appears a decade older. When I cross paths with myself in the mirror, I’m always startled to see a clam staring back. We are many months removed from the hope of spring and the abundance of summer, so it is no wonder I begin to dream of the un-lived life elsewhere, a place where the sun shines reliably enough to coax life from the soil all year, not for just a few crescendoing months.

But this is the life I’ve chosen, mainly because I’m temperamentally unsuited to crowds, who tend to avoid cold regions where bingo goers reign supreme. Last week, returning home from the gym where the same heavy metal songs have been playing on repeat since the Jurassic, I stood still in the pitch black of night listening to a pack of coyotes yip. I’ve lived in wolf country out West and can do a fairly good impression of their deep melancholy howls, so I sucked in some air and gave those coyotes a warm welcome. They did not respond. Wolves are the mortal enemies of coyotes, so this made sense. I vowed next time to yip because I need friends, not enemies. At this latitude, the nights can get downright lonely.

As a disagreeable writer born under a wandering star, I’ve been looking for a way off the deadening hamster wheel my whole life. It’s been disastrous, mostly. There was even a stretch during my college art war years when I ate nothing all day but half a bagel in the morning and the other half for dinner, inspired by the vagrants of literature to avoid getting a job for the sake of squalor and starvation. Unless you are an extremist like me cursed with a love of storytelling, I recommend majoring in finance. There you will learn how money works for you rather than how you work for money. I promise.

Not that I loathe work. My bohemian days sucked enough to convince me that work is actually desirable to keeping company with artsy types struggling to pan up enough pocket change to buy a few gallons of the cheapest available wine. An American poet told recently that I must avoid money so as not become one of them. In his fist there was a tall can of beer, not the first of the day. Copy, I told him, solemnly. Who them is remains unclear. I’ve got my people on it.

I happen to like work, but balance is difficult to achieve. The question remains whether or not it’s all worth it. I mean the life of the grind. I was raised to believe in the virtue of hard work, which with time smells less like a philosophical principle than it whiffs of the bleak Puritan imagination. The most successful friend I have has told me more than once to never create a job for myself. His millions speak to some wisdom my sweet, dumb brain is hungry to achieve. I’m getting there, albeit gradually. I’ve never claimed to be a quick study. Given our long evolutionary history of chasing down calories to stay alive, I guess it is no wonder the bulk of us work so much. We’ve got to eat and stay warm.

But what of the Ikarians? They not only underwork us and outlive us by an average of twenty years, they experience an additional twenty years of health. That’s two decades of robust living—a.k.a. copulating, dancing, swimming in the sea, puttering around the rocky hillsides collecting wild herbs, hanging with friends, falling in love, gardening, and making wine. Was that pot-bellied poet onto something? Maybe, though to be honest he wasn’t looking too good. Trusting a man in his thirties with dark bags under his eyes really narrows things down.

In light of how much longer the Ikarians live and how much healthier they are than us, is there anything we can learn from them that our ethnocentrism won’t occlude? Is it possible to take a page out of their book and slow things down a tad here in the wealthiest nation in the universe? Is the current zeitgeist of productivity and optimization and biohacking sane, or is it symptomatic of brains diseased with the fears of scarcity and abandonment?

Consider my social media algorithm. I can’t pick up my phone without feeling ashamed of myself because there is always some husky dude telling me to wipe my arse and get my shiznit together by stacking undeniable proof of my own personal brand of razzle-dazzle! Which is great advice if it weren’t such a tiresome cliché. They seem frail to me, mostly, entirely unoriginal and driven by the classic Freudian problems. Products of products, a perfect output of a system of markets that promises us relief from the human condition while only compounding the pain that obviously haunts us in this awesome country of opportunity.

Personally, I love America, warts and all, but the question what is enough remains. What is a good life? Is work the apotheosis of being alive, or have we drunk the Kool-Aid?

Wanting more than enough has never made me feel good about myself anymore than wanting less than enough has. But I’m a simple guy. I like to walk a lot, get naked as often as possible, and since I’m less evolved than the typical city dweller, I come by ample joys while hunting and fishing. It’s been well over a century since Walt Whitman and I knocked back a few pints together. Despite the fallibility of memory, I do recall him jabbering on about loafing and inviting the soul to admire a blade of summer grass.

That’s not a direct quote, but it is close. If you are curious, go ahead and look it up online. Your algorithm, like mine, may be in need in some tweaking. Keep in mind that old Walt and I were big drinkers then. All advice is good with a side of salt. Maybe being them is not so bad.

I mean the Ikarians, of course.