Owning more and more things is no guarantee of personal happiness. In fact, encumbering ourselves with ever-greater numbers of material possessions may have an opposite effect -- generating new obligations, increasing stress, and inducing an unsettling sense of guilt. Living with less can mean living a more rewarding life.

Voluntary simplicity aims to disconnect consumerism from notions of human wellbeing. As Mark Burch of Winnipeg's Simplicity Practice and Resource Centre puts it, "Among the happy truths we discover along the way to greater simplicity is that reducing the quantity of our material consumption can actually increase wellbeing. We find that contributing to planetary sustainability is within reach of nearly everyone, simply by changing our minds about what we want."