The Elitism of Simplicity

By Sadhika on

 It is a very commonly heard utterance - “I just want a simple life.” But “simple” is, in fact, rather complex. What is the bare minimum that is needed for one’s life to be classified as a “simple” one? Are we not perhaps taking a myriad of things for granted when we utter this sentence? What would this simple life entail? 

To begin with, one would need somewhere to live. Since my main argument is not even about money, let us assume that one has the requisite amount of money to build or buy one. Of course, going deeper into the issue, one would have to examine whose money it is. Is it one’s own? How long and hard did one have to work to be able to afford a house that one can call one’s own? In other words, for how many years did one have to live a complex life, so that they could afford to buy just one of the most expensive items on the list of prerequisites of a “simple life”? Was the house or the money to buy/ build one given to one by one’s family members? In that case, someone somewhere along one’s genealogical line lived a complex life so that his son, or perhaps, his grandson is able to live more simply than he could have hoped for.


What about the structural integrity of the building in which one lives? Can one truly sleep peacefully at night knowing that the walls might come crashing down on him any minute? And if one cannot, then is that a simple life? The integrity of material objects is determined by the integrity of our psyche, although it is more often believed to be the other way round. 


We depend upon the integrity of the hands that laid the bricks supporting the roof above our heads. We depend on the integrity of the plumber and electrician who make sure that not a single bolt is out of place so that we might get our running water and uninterrupted electrical power. We depend on the integrity of the carpenter who fashions the chairs we sit on, the beds we sleep on and the tables we eat on. This is not just confined to the houses we live; it extends to our office buildings in which we spend most of our day, the schools we send our children to, the parks we walk our dogs in. The finished product seems so simple that it becomes easy to overlook the thousand fingers that worked to the bone so that we might recline in our armchairs and contemplate the simplicities and complexities of life. We depend upon the integrity of our neighbours who do not come pounding on our gates to steal our bread and wives. We depend upon the integrity of our laws that protect us from being slaughtered in our sleep. We depend on the integrity of our currency which does not turn worthless overnight, so we may procrastinate our chores by one more day. We depend upon the integrity of the doctor that treats us when we are ailing, the milkman without whom we would be unable to enjoy our morning coffee and the countless truck drivers who ply up and down the highways all night to transport the goods we consume to our next-door grocery store.


The simplicity of our lives depends on the industriousness of countless hands. It is nothing short of a miracle that everything works perfectly almost all the time so that we may forget the labour that goes into it. We pay to live in a society where the contributors do their bit (for the most part) with integrity. In other words, we pay for the narrowing of our perspectives.

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