Did you ever wonder why it’s so hard for people to live happier with less? Last week we were at the 18th European Trend Day of the Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute. The theme of all the lectures and presentations was about “frugal innovation”.
First, what Jason Hickel’s presented about degrowth was not new, but still the numbers are quite blunt when you see them, and gives us additional motivation to what we are doing. It’s really up to us – the rich countries – to change the way we live and work together.
What fascinated me enormously was the talk by Leidy Klotz and the presentation of his research. He found out that it’s really hard for people to subtract things. That people tend to add things .. to their life, to their outfit, to their house, well to just about anything … in order to make things better. Hence the message that less is more, is not an easy one to convey, and not just because it has to do with “renouncing”, but apparently because it has been engraved in our DNA that more is better. Which makes our mission even more important, as well as working (with others) on solutions towards it.
So what are solutions? Well, we still much believe that people are learning by doing, and therefore we want to create opportunities for people to obtain positive experiences in living a simpler life.
In a weeks time our “GoSimple Challenge” Pilot will kick off in Basel, whereby households of all sorts will follow a 6-month programme. The challenge includes hand-on workshops and participants can support each other in taking on the various challenges to simplify their lives.
However there is of course much more that we can do and we are excited to collaborate with many other partners on achieving that. Stay tuned for our next blog post and some more inspiration when it comes to creative solutions!
To be continued …
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