What we have found is that you really don't need that much to live a fairly comfortable life. In fact this is something we have noticed more since we downsized our lifestyle. Everywhere you look these days, advertisers and marketing people are trying to sell you new products and technology that they say you must have to supposedly make your life happier and easier. Although some of these products are obviously useful, we don't want our whole life taken up pursuing them. The funny thing is that many of these products actually make your life more complicated. Always having to worry about them, if something will go wrong, or if someone will try and steal them, or having to update them to get all the latest features to make them bigger, better and faster.
Believe it or not, we still don't own a mobile phone, an ipod, or a plasma TV - and we are still alive, connected, and well informed, so that proves you actually can live without all these things. We obviously do have a computer, but we only need a basic model, not the one that is five times better and 10 times faster than everyone else's.
We try hard not to buy anything we don't really need, I know it sounds very practical and boring, but it works for us. And it frees up more time to do the things we think are more important and fun in life.
Something we are also aware of is that every product uses up more of the world's resources in one form or another. Now that environmental payback time has arrived, in the form of global warming, we feel good doing our bit to minimise our impact on this planet, by keeping life simple, and only buying the things we really need......not the things the manufacturers, marketers and merchants say we need, so that they can make even bigger profits and use them to buy a whole lot of things that they also don't really need.
