Simple Living and the Art of Saying Nahi Chahiye

We at the Kahu Advocacy Foundation have a slightly unfashionable obsession.

Reducing suffering for all sentient life as much as possible.

Over the past month, we’ve been flirting seriously with one tool for liberation: Minimalism.

What you’re reading here is our attempt to combine what we’ve learned over this past month.

What follows are three long essays, released on the last week of the year.

Yes, they are long. Long enough to make your thumb nervous and your algorithm confused. We know most people won’t have the patience, thanks to reels training us to abandon anything that doesn’t sparkle immediately. But if you do read on, congratulations you’ve already practised minimalism by resisting distraction.

This maybe one of the most offensive questions you can pose in modern India:

“What if… we just stopped wanting so much?”

While the world screamed “Big Billion Days!”, “0% EMI!”, “Last chance offer!”, we quietly sat down and thought about minimalism. Not the Instagram-bred aesthetic of beige sofas, one monstera plant and a sadly empty bookshelf. We mean minimalism as a tool for liberation, a form of civil disobedience.

Let’s start with our spiritual elder, Taro.

Once upon a time in a quiet mountain village (no malls, no Zomato, true horror), lived a humble stonecutter named Taro. Every day he shaped rocks into bricks and tiles, went home, ate his simple food, slept like a baby, and minding his own business. Basically, he lived the life motivational speakers now charge ₹10,000 a ticket to help you “reclaim”.

Then one day, a group of wealthy merchants passed by dressed like the offline version of “influencers”. Taro looked at their silk clothes, jewellery, servants and did what every normal human does in such moments: he forgot his contentment.

“Wah, what a life. Why not me?”

In a magical twist, his wish was granted. Suddenly, he was a rich merchant, exactly like the ones he envied. New clothes, big house, lots of stuff. Within a short time, he discovered a brutal truth everyone on EMI eventually learns: material upgrade ≠ mental upgrade. The restlessness stayed.

He decided the real deal must be power, not money. So he wished to become a prince. Granted. He now had palaces, servants, guards and also anxiety, politics, and the constant fear of being replaced or attacked. Still no peace.

Then he thought:
“Forget humans. I’ll be the sun. Nobody messes with the sun.” He became the sun, burning brilliantly in the sky… until one day a cloud covered him. So much for being untouchable.

Clearly, the cloud was more powerful. So he became the cloud, floating around, pouring rain wherever he pleased. Until he hit something that didn’t care about his power at all i.e the mountain. Stable, unmoved, ancient. Obviously, that was the final upgrade. Taro became the mountain.

One day, a small, insignificant-looking human appeared with a hammer and chisel and started chipping away at the mountain.

A stonecutter.

In that instant, Taro realised he had gone in a full circle. He had been the stonecutter, then chased merchant, prince, sun, cloud, mountain and only to discover that even a mountain can be reduced to dust. No position, no form, no amount of power makes you untouchable. His long, exhausting journey of upgrades had brought him right back to the life he started with.

He wished to become a simple stonecutter again. This time, though, he understood what he had.

Taro is basically the mythological version of what many of us are doing in real time. We are changing cities, jobs, phones, partners, hairstyles, therapy apps , everything but the one thing that actually matters: our relationship with “more”.

Transcendentalist philosopher Henry David Thoreau, who did his own version of “I’m logging off, bye” by moving to a cabin near Walden Pond, argued that simplicity is the law of nature for humans. When lives are simple, we function like a neat maths solution after all the JEE-level nonsense has been cancelled out. Thoreau compared it to solving an equation by reducing it to its simplest terms. Only then do we see clearly where we stand, where we come from, and where we’re going.

Painter Hans Hofmann summarised it as: “The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.” Most of us, frankly, are living with so much noise that the necessary is hoarse from shouting.

Modern research seems to agree with these beardy philosophers. A paper from the University of Bath on voluntary simplicity found that people who intentionally simplify their lives report greater security, autonomy, competence, and a strong feeling of “doing the right thing”, especially in terms of ecological and social impact. In other words, they sleep better at night not just because their houses are less cluttered, but because their consciences are too.

Speaking of clutter, here’s a story that we read during this month with two guinea pigs and a very human lesson.

Their owner used to clean their cage regularly. But once, out of forgetfulness (or Netflix), the cleaning got delayed. The cage became a mess it was dirty, smelly, chaotic. The guinea pigs, usually active, turned quiet and withdrawn. When the owner finally cleaned the cage and added fresh bedding and hay, the change was dramatic. The guinea pigs ran, jumped, and played.

Turns out, even guinea pigs can’t stand living in filth and clutter.

Humans like to think we are more advanced. Then you see a typical urban room: one bed, two humans, five cupboards, 37 “just in case” items, and a guilt pile of clothes on a chair that has not known what it means to be sat on in years.

Science has something to say here. Researchers at Princeton showed that visual clutter directly interferes with our ability to focus. The UCLA Centre on Everyday Lives and Families found that more household objects correlated with higher cortisol levels(the stress hormone) and lower mood and self-esteem. Carl Jung suggested that our living spaces are extensions of our psyche. Translation: if your room looks like an “after” photo from an earthquake documentary, your mind is probably not the calm Himalayan lake you think it is.

The more stuff we own, the more we have to manage, fix, store, insure, and worry about. Ownership quietly turns into a full-time job.

Diogenes, the ancient Greek philosopher who took the minimalism trend way too seriously, lived in a barrel with a few rags and a cup. One day he saw a child drinking water by scooping it with his hands. Diogenes threw away his cup, muttering that a child had beaten him at simplicity. The Dalai Lama, in a more balanced tone, said: “If one’s life is simple, contentment has to come… Having few desires, feeling satisfied with what you have is very vital.”

None of them had to deal with modern Indian real estate, of course, where two people insist they “need” a 4BHK because “guests might come,” and then proceed to live 360 days a year in one bedroom and the dining table.
But the point stands: beyond a certain level, more space and more stuff add more stress than joy.

Epicurus, the ancient philosopher of simple pleasures, drew a sharp line. The wealth required by nature i.e basic food, shelter, clothing, is limited and relatively easy to satisfy. The wealth required by vain ideals like status, luxury, the latest phone or car is infinite. There is always a bigger model, a fancier area, a cooler gadget. Pliny the Younger chimed in: “An object in possession seldom retains the same charm that it had in pursuit.”

We’ve all lived that: the buildup to buying something is far more exciting than actually owning it. After the purchase, we feel a burst of happiness that fades astonishingly fast. What remains are EMIs, dusting, and the terror of scratching it.

Thoreau went to the woods partly as an act of “civil disobedience”, his term for non-violent rebellion against a system he felt did more harm than good. He wanted to prove that one could live well, even “richly”, on very little. “A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone,” he wrote. Lao Tzu gave the same idea in a different package: “Those who know they have enough are truly wealthy.”

Compare that to how our lives are structured. We work long hours in jobs we often dislike, for bosses we privately roast in group chats, to buy things we don’t really need, to impress people we barely know, and to avoid being judged by people whose opinions should not matter in the first place. Alain de Botton calls this “status anxiety”, the constant fear of being seen as unsuccessful in material terms.

In India, status anxiety wears many costumes. It is the voice that says, “Sharma ji ka beta is already a VP, what are you doing with your life?” It is the compulsion to upgrade your phone every two years “because everyone else has.” It is rishta aunties calculating your worth in CTC and square footage. It is the strange panic members of the family feel if you arrive at a wedding in an auto.

Seneca, from a completely different era, looked at this madness and said that people carefully count the cost of the cheapest, most useless things, but never count the cost when they spend their most precious commodity, which is "time". Time, he pointed out, is the one loan we can never repay. Tyler Durden years later summarized the same idea with more attitude: “The things you own end up owning you.”

And then there’s the paradox of choice. Imagine a lady going to buy toothpaste. In her grandparents’ time, there would have been one or two options. Today she walks into a supermarket and is attacked by an army of tubes: whitening, herbal, salt, clove, charcoal, sensitive, ayurvedic, fluoride-free, gel, paste, kids’ edition, black, blue, bubblegum-flavoured unicorn sparkle, and ten brands for each category. She comes out with SpongeBob toothpaste and decision fatigue.

This tiny drama plays out with phones, fridges, career paths, and, of course, dating. Once upon a time, if you were 17 and wanted to meet someone attractive, you went where people your age gathered: college fest, local disco, that one café everyone used. Whoever was there, in that place, at that time, were your options. You flirted, failed, learned, moved on.

Now, dating apps present you with millions of people. It feels like freedom and ends up feeling like browsing Swiggy: infinite options, lots of swiping, very little actual satisfaction. You can spend months scrolling, always convinced that the next swipe might produce a slightly better human being. The more choices we have, the more we second-guess ourselves and the less content we become. Psychologists call this the paradox of choice. We call it “Friday night alone with three apps and no plan”.

Simplicity offers another way: limit your options on purpose. Accept “good enough” instead of chasing “the best” in every product, person, or life path. Buy something that works instead of something that wins comparison videos. Commit to a “normal” partner who is kind and compatible, instead of endlessly auditioning people for the role of “perfect.”

Consumerism today operates like a full-fledged religion. Shopping malls are our new temples. Sales are our new festivals. We don’t go there to seek God; we go to seek “the bigger, better thing”. Owning fewer things, wanting fewer things, and buying more mindfully is a quiet act of blasphemy in this religion.

And it’s not just stuff. Our social and work lives have also become overstuffed. There’s a whole world of “achievement culture” breathing down our necks. Philosopher Byung-Chul Han says we’ve moved from a disciplinary society, where people were controlled by prohibitions and authority, to an achievement society, where we control ourselves in the name of ambition.

Earlier, control looked like factory whistles, army barracks, strict office hours. Today it wears the face of hustle quotes, LinkedIn flexes, co-working spaces, gyms, airports, and “crushing it” posts. Nobody has to whip us; we whip ourselves. We don’t just work; we “grind”, “optimize”, “build our brand”. If you’re not doing your full-time job plus a side hustle plus upskilling in AI plus reading five self-help books a month, are you even trying?

Han points out that this excess of positivity like motivation, ambition, perpetual self-improvement etc actually harms us. To balance it, he argues we need more so-called negativity: boredom, hesitation, pausing, doing nothing, even just being mildly annoyed and refusing to perform. These are not moral failures; they are survival tools.

Minimalism fits here beautifully. Doing fewer things, more deeply. Accepting a less glamorous job that doesn’t eat your soul. Letting your child do just one activity after school instead of five. Leaving entire afternoons blank in your calendar without panicking that you’re “wasting time.”

Watch kids these days: school, tuition, coding class, piano, basketball, robotics, Bharatnatyam. Their schedules look like a CEO’s. Many adults continue that pattern: every evening booked, every weekend crammed. But as Swiss philosopher Henri-Frédéric Amiel wrote, at some point you have to “cut a knot” instead of trying to untie every tangle. You must learn to disengage what is essential from the details and simplify your duties, business, and life.

Some people seem to have figured this out already. In Indonesia, there are men whose job is simply to help people park their cars for a small fee. Their social status is low. Their work looks extremely “simple.” Yet if you watch them, you see a lot of laughing, chatting, hanging out, and a relaxed attitude toward time. Meanwhile, the people emerging from the cars often look tense, rushed, worried about the next meeting, the next bill, the next goal. Who is really living well?

It’s the same in India when you watch a chaiwala who jokes with customers all day, or the parking guys outside big offices who stand around chatting, humming songs, occasionally guiding a car into position, and then going right back to relaxing. Like Taro, some of them may have tried other things and discovered that simple work, done with enough, beats prestigious work done with constant stress.

Simplicity also applies to our social lives. Humans are social, certainly, but we underestimate how much social contact is just noise. Large friend circles, multiple groups, endless events , many of these are more obligation than joy. Interestingly, research by evolutionary psychologists suggests that while more social interaction usually increases happiness, this effect is reduced or even reversed for more intelligent or analytical people. For them, too much socializing can actually lower happiness.

Social minimalism doesn’t mean you cut off all your friends and move to a cave. It could mean fewer big parties and more long walks with one friend. It could mean saying no to that third cousin’s engagement you really don’t want to attend. It could mean escaping WhatsApp groups that only exist to send “Good morning” flowers and random forwarded videos.

And then there’s digital life. Our phones may be the single biggest source of modern clutter. Notifications, texts, memes, reels, breaking news, DMs from people you barely remember, emails from companies whose only dream is to “take two minutes of your time”… this is not normal input for a human nervous system.

Cal Newport calls digital minimalism a philosophy where you “focus your online time on a small number of carefully selected and optimized activities that strongly support things you value, and then happily miss out on everything else.” Happily miss out. Not grudgingly. Not while crying about FOMO. Happily.

In simple terms: check WhatsApp when you want to talk to someone, not every time your phone lights up. Use social media like a tool, not like oxygen. Mute 90% of your unnecessary notifications. Accept that you do not have to see every meme, respond to every reel, read every hot take, or keep up with every “trend”.

All of this physical decluttering, social pruning, digital boundaries, calmer ambitions,still won’t help much if our minds remain cluttered. Overthinking is perhaps the most underrated form of self-torture in our culture. We take simple situations and turn them into 18-part web series in our heads. We treat every decision like a UPSC attempt: months of preparation, zero certainty, crushing pressure.

Simplicity in thinking doesn’t mean being shallow or ignoring complex problems. It means not turning every small choice into a three-hour mental debate. It means accepting uncertainty as a permanent roommate. It means, sometimes, choosing based on reasonable thought plus intuition, then moving on instead of replaying the decision in our heads for the rest of the week.

Because in the end, problems originate in the mind’s relationship with circumstances, not in the circumstances alone. You can have a simple room but a stormy mind. You can have a light calendar but heavy thoughts. True simplicity includes the coolness of a tranquil mind.

At the Kahu Advocacy Foundation, we are interested in minimalism not as a lifestyle trend but as a way to reduce suffering. When we consume less, we reduce the demand that drives factories, pollution, animal suffering, and exploitative labour. When we need less, we are fewer steps away from contentment. When we declutter our schedules, we have more time for rest, care, activism, creativity, and genuine connection. When we lower the volume of noise like digital, social, material,we make space for clarity, compassion and presence.

By owning less, we become more. By needing less, we become dangerous to systems that run on our dissatisfaction. Being content with “enough” is modern civil disobedience. It weakens the grip of a consumerist culture that survives by constantly whispering, “You are incomplete without this.”

We now want to simplify not to live with less, but to love with more. More attention for the beings around us. More time for causes that matter. More energy to reduce suffering where we can. We want Minimalism, for us, not to be a trend but a quiet revolution. No hashtags, no branded mugs just humans choosing, one by one, to stop selling their lives for things that were never going to make them whole.

You’re welcome to join. No joining fee. Just bring your overstuffed life, your tired brain, and a small willingness to ask: “What if I actually have enough?

KAHU ADVOCACY FOUNDATION

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