Lutheran Peace Fellowship: July 2, 2010

Simplicity Day

“As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness.”
-- Henry David Thoreau

Simplicity Day on July 12th celebrates the birthday of Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) who encouraged us to simplify our lives.

Check out the following videos and resources about this remarkable movement:

AFFLUENZA - Soundtrack to VOLUNTARY SIMPLICITY The Poetic Alternative to Consumer Culture.

This video clip is a collage of scenes from the documentary posted next below

Watch the entire documentary:

VOLUNTARY SIMPLICITY: The Poetic Alternative to Consumer Culture documentary explores the philosophy behind Voluntary Simplicity, what potential or significance it has as a quietly emerging social movement and what its limitations might be.

Global Pandemy in its entirety - a 15-year-old documentary about what began as a trend in the US but now has spread all over the world. We are not considered to be citizens any more, we've been turned into simple consumers, with no other rights than the ones that corporations let us have, if so. There's no space for humanitarian behavior or for critical thinking. The greeding controlling minorities have deceived most of us to believe that we're free to choose a better life, and that the so called better life is measured in terms of properties, of things that we own. No matter if we don't have enough money, that's what Credit's been made for. If other people are suffering, we've been trained to ignore it because «That's not our business». Everything is business, and so, that way, we want to reach happiness. But the fact is that there's no happiness in material belongings. That's why we always are looking for more. And it's never enough. When we have reached to that point, then we are doomed, for we have been infected and controlled by this selfish way of surviving. We are not living anymore, we're just surviving, because we're sick. We suffer AFFLUENZA. And man... we DO SUFFER...

Adventures in Simplicity - A video montage created specifically to accompany an audio Plunderphonics track, created in 2008 on the topic of voluntary simplicity.