Waking Life

Simple Living Manifesto: 72 Ideas to Simplify Your Life

 

from zenhabits 

A simple life has a different meaning and a different value for every person. For me, it means eliminating all but the essential, eschewing chaos for peace, and spending your time doing what’s important to you.

It means getting rid of many of the things you do so you can spend time with people you love and do the things you love. It means getting rid of the clutter so you are left with only that which gives you value.

However, getting to simplicity isn’t always a simple process. It’s a journey, not a destination, and it can often be a journey of two steps forward, and one backward.

If you’re interested in simplifying your life, this is a great starter’s guide (if you’re not interested, move on).

The Short List
For the cynics who say that the list below is too long, there are really only two steps to simplifying:

1. Identify what’s most important to you.
2. Eliminate everything else.

Of course, that’s not terribly useful unless you can see how to apply that to different areas of your life, so I present to you the Long List.

The Long List
There can be no step-by-step guide to simplifying your life, but I’ve compiled an incomplete list of ideas that should help anyone trying to find the simple life. Not every tip will work for you — choose the ones that appeal and apply to your life.

One important note: this list will be criticized for being too complicated, especially as it provides a bunch of links. Don’t stress out about all of that. Just choose one at a time, and focus on that. When you’re done with that, focus on the next thing.

1. Make a list of your top 4-5 important things. What’s most important to you? What do you value most? What 4-5 things do you most want to do in your life? Simplifying starts with these priorities, as you are trying to make room in your life so you have more time for these things.
2. Evaluate your commitments. Look at everything you’ve got going on in your life. Everything, from work to home to civic to kids’ activities to hobbies to side businesses to other projects. Think about which of these really gives you value, which ones you love doing. Which of these are in line with the 4-5 most important things you listed above? Drop those that aren’t in line with those things. Article here.
3. Evaluate your time. How do you spend your day? What things do you do, from the time you wake up to the time you go to sleep? Make a list, and evaluate whether they’re in line with your priorities. If not, eliminate the things that aren’t, and focus on what’s important. Redesign your day.
4. Simplify work tasks. Our work day is made up of an endless list of work tasks. If you simply try to knock off all the tasks on your to-do list, you’ll never get everything done, and worse yet, you’ll never get the important stuff done. Focus on the essential tasks and eliminate the rest. Read more.
5. Simplify home tasks. In that vein, think about all the stuff you do at home. Sometimes our home task list is just as long as our work list. And we’ll never get that done either. So focus on the most important, and try to find ways to eliminate the other tasks (automate, eliminate, delegate, or hire help).
6. Learn to say no. This is actually one of the key habits for those trying to simplify their lives. If you can’t say no, you will take on too much. Article here.  

Ephemeral Art: Memory and Loss

quotations from papers by Mary O’Neill

In order to understand ephemerality it is necessary to understand our attachment to the opposite – permanence – and its function not only in art, but in Western culture generally, which requires visual art to be both physically durable and collectible.   This requirement derives in part from the economic demands of the art market and the need of collectors and art museums to possess artworks   in order to valorize and legitimize their power and status    Given the pressure from the art institutions, who, in their governing rules are obliged to acquire works that are preservable and can be passed on to future generations, and given the common assumptions about the need for a body of work to build an artistic career and reputation, why would an artist make ephemeral work?   Part of the motivation may be a desire to dematerialize the art object in order to defeat the market, to democratize or to challenge art museums, but in many works something much more fundamental is involved. The ideal of the permanent work of art relates to our cultural need for at least an illusion of permanence which is a response to the difficulty posed by transience.  

Adam Philips describes boredom as ‘integral to the process of taking one’s time.’   Ephemeral art is work both of and in time.   It requires the time to view what might in fact be a very boring process; watching flowers decay, ice melting or a mound of sweets erode, but it also requires time to experience these works.

In no other area of human activity is the relationship between production and money as perverse as in the art world.   The peculiarity of this relationship may be responsible for the appreciative failure of much of contemporary art and in particular conceptual art. If value is attached to ‘intrinsic’ qualities of an object it would be hard to justify the high prices attached to contemporary artwork. This however raises interesting questions as to the extent to which it is possible to separate economic from other values in art.   There have been numerous attempts to break the link between art and money – Roger Fry’s Omega Workshop experiment, offered participants a guaranteed minimum income to free them from economic pressure. Commencing with Art and Commerce in 1926 Fry explored this relationship in a series of publication. In 1971, the Art Workers’ Coalition produced a statement of demands which asked for a small measure of what Fry had offered artist fifty years earlier. In the 1960s and 70s, there was a proliferation of highly politicized work challenging the art/commerce relationship, focusing on the dematerialisation of the artwork as a decommodification strategy. 

In ephemeral artworks there is a form of sacrifice; the artworld is deprived of the durability that enables art to fulfil its role in creating the myth of immortality. However there is the greater gain of an understanding of the role of permanence in art as contributing to our death denying cultural worldview and why transience challenges that function. Discussing these works risks losing the central experience, because they demand an engagement that does not sit comfortably with the aesthetic detachment and the wariness of deeply felt personal responses, which are not valued in the hierarchy of knowledge validated in academia.

Within an ephemeral artwork, there is an element of sacrifice.   If this is the case, what is being sacrificed?   Is it our attachment to, and requirement for, permanence, the art object,   or is it the artworld itself that is being sacrificed,? There is a bilateral quality to sacrifice – something given up for a greater gain.   If the greater gain in the ephemeral art sacrifice is a form of knowledge about mortality, death denial, and terror management, how can that knowledge be accessed when the work no longer exists? Or, as the result of intervention by conservators, exists only in a form that is no longer ephemeral.

Portrait of Artists as Young Men