When Simplicity Yields Satisfaction And Less Is More…

Dear Readers,

One of the many new habits that most of us were able to develop, over the past couple of years, thanks to the pandemic, when we were relegated to being indoors for long periods of time, was to ponder and reflect. Many of us would sit at home in our pajamas or ‘home-wear’ through the day, surfing news channels on television which only added to our horror of the death and destruction taking place, the world over. Quickly switching to Netflix or Amazon Prime, etc., didn’t do much to escape the deadly reality that had been forced upon us.

We found ourselves reminiscing and desperately missing those pre-COVID times, when words like ‘social distancing’, ‘masks’ and ‘sanitizers’ were simply words, not life-saving equipment. We learnt to redefine the concepts of ‘freedom’, ‘fear’, ‘mortality’, ‘gratitude’ and ‘life’ with a new-found sense of reverence. We missed those simple pleasures of life that we always took for granted.

Feeling isolated from the world and life as we had known it, as anxiety-ridden social animals in isolation, we turned to that one unrivalled ‘hero’ of the pandemic (no, I don’t mean our brave frontline warriors) – ‘Social Media’… which proved to be as much a boon-for-connectivity as it was a curse-for-misinformation.

It makes some of us think back even further – to a time when social media and cell phones were a thing of the future… when life was less-hectic, when the simple things in life brought us great contentment, when less was enough… when, in the words of Robert Louis Stevenson, “the breath in your nostrils, light in your eyes, flowers at your feet, duties at your hand, the path of God just before you…. (when) daily duties and daily bread were the sweetest things of life.”

This simplicity was unfortunately replaced by, ‘Too many people spending money they haven’t earned, to buy things they don’t want, to impress people they don’t like’. There’s this crazy need to portray a happy, plush and fun-filled life on social media, where not just one’s sense of self-worth but even one’s identity itself, has become the reserve of the number of ‘likes’ given by absolute strangers! There can be no greater self-sabotaging tragedy than relying on external validation – but that is the price we pay when we stray too far off from simplicity and consequently, from being true to ourselves.

As grateful witnesses of the hopeful end of the Covid era, may we live less selfishly and progress more conscientiously towards a life where simplicity yields satisfaction and where less is more.

Have a lovely weekend!

– Anahita