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WDRL 264

Establish Principles, Long Work, Simple Living

Hi, I’m Anselm Hannemann, a freelance Frontend Developer and Engineering Manager. You can hire me. I wrote WDRL for 10 years and have a a Market Garden as a side-business.

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Hey,

This week, right before the long Easter weekend here, I stumbled upon “The beauty of being satisfied enough”. In times of advertising everywhere, discount days like ‘Black Friday’, and everyone telling you “you need this” or “save here” we’re constantly tempted to buy things we don’t necessarily need. We browse in online shops because we received a newsletter that told us products are cheaper now. But we end up spending a lot of time to find things we don’t really need. Once we move our household, we’re reminded how much clutter we own, how many things we have and don’t use. We don’t sell them because it’s too much effort and brings too little money, so we stick with them or put it into trash. In parallel, we try to earn more money to continue our livestyle. We try to get the most out of our money by investing into shady financial stock markets and bonds—no matter if these companies we invest into are acting ethically to our believes.

What if we simplify our lives by stop buying things we don’t need, by stop buying new stuff while the current items are still working, by stop caring about stock markets because you save more money by doing nothing and buying nothing. By reducing working hours because you suddenly need less stuff. By embracing what we have, by realising that more things in our lives doesn’t mean more satisfaction, more happiness. If you own less, you will have to worry about less, your trash cost will shrink, your happiness about the few items you have will grow. And it’ll be easier to maintain the household during a normal work week, it’ll be easier to go on vacation or come back. In the past three months, my partner and I tried hard to reduce our household to a minimum (and everyone needs to find out what minimum means for them). There’s still way to go for us, but it already feels much better and lighter.

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