less stuff more soul
"‘I walked thirty miles to school every morning, so you kids should too.’ That’s a statement born of envy and resentment. What I’m saying is something quite different. What I’m saying is that by having very little, I had it good. Children need a sense of pulling their own weight, of contributing to the family in some way, and some sense of the family’s interdependence. They take pride in knowing that they’re contributing. They learn responsibility and discipline through meaningful work. The values developed within a family that operates on those principles then extend to the society at large. By not being quite so indulged and ‘protected’ from reality by overflowing abundance, children see the bonds that connect them to others...Poverty didn’t kill my soul. Poverty can destroy a person, yes, but I’ve seen prosperity kill many a soul as well. After much ease and comfort and mindless consumption of commodities, how do we even know that anything resembling a soul is there anymore?...
My fear is this: I fear that as we cover more of our planet with concrete and steel, as we wire our homes with more and more fiber-optic cables that take the place of more intimate interactions, as we give our children more and more stuff and less and less time, as we go further and further away from the kind of simplicity I knew as a child on Cat Island, our Earth - or Gaia or not - will become for us the Wire Mother, and our souls will wither and die as a result.”
-The Measure of a Man by Sidney Poitier
My fear is this: I fear that as we cover more of our planet with concrete and steel, as we wire our homes with more and more fiber-optic cables that take the place of more intimate interactions, as we give our children more and more stuff and less and less time, as we go further and further away from the kind of simplicity I knew as a child on Cat Island, our Earth - or Gaia or not - will become for us the Wire Mother, and our souls will wither and die as a result.”
-The Measure of a Man by Sidney Poitier