It will always be quicker and easier and more convenient— as long as The Economy keeps on humming—to sustain our lives just by swiping credit cards and writing checks, paying people we don’t know for things we can’t do or make ourselves, and sustaining the illusion of our separateness from one another. It will also be lonelier, less satisfying, less free, and less resilient. Part of a simpler life entails seeing through that hollow kind of faux simplicity and, ironically, choosing to take on a deeper, richer kind of complexity as we reconnect more intentionally and competently with what it actually takes to sustain our lives. Simplicity isn’t self-sufficiency or the Daniel Boone ideal of rugged independence. It’s the beautiful, time-consuming privilege of rugged interdependence, when we roll up our sleeves with and for others in a great community of needful belonging.
