The wealth of voluntary poverty

Voluntary poverty and sobriety are among the purest sources of happiness. Voluntary poverty is releasing yourself from your addiction to “worldly” things, usually things that were scarce in the old days, and abundant now. Christians are invited yearly to enjoy this happiness in lent (this word means “spring” in Dutch). Usually we associate this time with imposed rules concerning food and drinks, but this is not the essence. Lent is not an obligatory diet. Nowadays, the worldly things are “opportunities”, “activities”, sport performances, Facebook jokes, likes, tweets and other instant successes.

Perhaps we should consider the following sources of happiness:

• Wouldn’t it be lovely if we could have breakfast all together in family next Sunday?
• Wouldn’t it be a relief if we could switch off our iPhone then and watch the first signs of spring in the garden?
• Wouldn’t it be more relaxing if we decided NOT to participate in the next jogging , racing, sailing event organised by our dearest colleagues? 
• Wouldn’t it be better to refuse participation in the next project, which will cost the company a lot of money and which will turn us into a nervous wreck, and if we would just go home earlier?
• Wouldn’t it be great to know more about the new colleague and the work he is doing?
• Wouldn’t it be fine to stop tweeting and blogging at 22h and talk to the people who happen to be living in my house?
• Wouldn’t it be a great year if we didn’t go skiing? No broken legs, no traffic jams, no queuing, no costs, no worries.

You may have noticed that voluntary poverty today is something else than what it used to be. We have become so hyper-active that voluntary poverty today is choosing NOT to accept the thousand opportunities that come up every day and which cause choice-stress because we can’t reasonably accept them all. 

We have become frightened to death to miss opportunities. This one lack-of-interest, this one non-participation will give our competitor an eternal advance in the rat race. We totally neglect the huge costs that are inevitably associated with these participations: financial costs, traffic jams, lost friends, divorces and burn-outs. Could our hyper-activity be the real cause of the unresolvable economic crisis we have since 2008? 

Man knows mankind better than he thinks. If things evolve too much in a certain direction, if too much excesses occur, man will automatically look for something else. He will take a distance from the worldly things that turned him into a slave. Lent is opting for poverty; contemporary lent is opting for contemporary poverty.

I refer to my own blogs: “Poverty, source of all trouble” (about “real” involuntary poverty), “social web addiction” and “Defeat the seven-headed beast”.

This has been a very inspiring blog: In Praise of the Quiet Life  from the Book of Life (highly recommended).

Picture: Saint George's Monastery in judean desert, shutterstock.com