Feeling overwhelmed with the daily rat race? Is career, gathering material goods, consuming more time than you want, taking time from your personal time, your family time, your life? Have you noticed that every time you reach a material or career goal, you find little sense of achievement, just an emptiness that can only be replaced with a new goal?

Then perhaps you need to rethink your values. More and more people are redefining the "American Dream". The traditional goals of money and consumption does not bring us happiness.

Anxiety, Addiction and Depression Treatments

According to economic and psychological experts across the board, more money almost always brings with it more stress and leads to decreases in the quality of an individual's physical and mental health. Popular philosophy reasons that money grants one greater opportunity to live the life he or she wants. But independent studies have ironically found that, the more money people earn, the more stress they incur while trying to find the time and opportunity to spend it. It makes sense that the CEO's of major corporations, for all the record-breaking financial packages they currently receive, hold positions of power and responsibility that add up to more tightly managed and anxious lifestyles. But studies find that the social group lodging the most complaints about the stresses of a perceived lack of free time is that of affluent housewives.

Perhaps it's time to rethink your values. Consider simplifying your life voluntarily. There is a whole network to give you ideas.

The Simple Living Network

Since 1996 The Simple Living Network has been providing resources, tools, examples and contacts for conscious, simple, healthy and restorative living.[...]

What Is Simple Living?

"Living in a way that is outwardly
simple and inwardly rich."
- Duane Elgin

Simple living -- aka voluntary simplicity -- has just about as many definitions as there are individuals who practice it. Simple living is not about living in poverty or self-inflicted deprivation. Rather, it is about living an examined life -- one in which you have determined what is important, or "enough," for you, discarding the rest.

There are many "flavors" of simplicity. We offer [these 1, 2, 3] articles by Duane Elgin, author of the classic book Voluntary Simplicity, to further illustrate what simplicity is -- and is not -- and how simplicity might be an appropriate lifestyle choice for you.

The people in our lives enrich us immeasurably. Spending time with the people we love requires only the means to survive from day to day. The rest of life is little more than window dressing. Why waste valuable time chasing things when what is really important lies easily within our reach every day?