By Ethan Maurice | November 20, 2019

The other day, I figured out how to put the way I go about life into a single sentence. It then occurred to me that life was far too expansive. One couldn’t possibly do such a thing! However, it felt like an important sentence, so I thought to share it with you:

I strive to be cheap, sensitive, and naked to the world.

As language is subjective, those words probably mean something different to you than me. Let’s break it into parts and elaborate on each.

I strive to be cheap.

I strive to be cheap not for the sake of money, but for the sake of time. When I work, I trade my time for money. I then trade that money for services and things. Simply put, the less money I spend, the less time I must spend earning money, and more time I have for other things.

This matters to me because I believe my time is super valuable. And I’m not that into the act of spending my time earning money. I enjoy traveling, reading books, writing, running, being among nature, hanging out with good friends, and at least a couple dozen other things much more than any job at which I’ve traded time for money, and I’ve found some pretty sweet places to trade my time for money too.

Essentially, I strive to be cheap so that I can spend my time doing the things I love to do.

Some ways I strive to be cheap include:

• Avoiding rent

• Buying less and buying used (Goodwill and OfferUp are great for this)

• Cooking my own food instead of eating out

• Walking or bicycling instead of paying for gas to get around

• Living in countries with lower costs of living than the United States

I strive to be sensitive.

Sensitive, not in the sense of easily having my feelings easily hurt, but senses that are strongly attuned. To be moved more by less.

Take the analogy of the volume of music through headphones. Regardless of the volume at which you’re listening (unless it’s so loud it hurts), turning down the volume is always a negative experience, dulling the intensity. Conversely, turning up the volume is always a positive experience, increasing the intensity and your connection to the music. The funny thing is, within a large range, it doesn’t really matter where the volume of the music began. If you increase the volume from there, great! If you decrease the volume from there, that sucks!

Like with headphones, our satisfaction with the volume setting of life is not based on some objective scale, but relative to what we’re used to. In certain ways, I try to keep the volume of daily life a tad lower, so that many interactions with the world are like that experience of turning the volume up.

Some ways I strive to be sensitive include:

• Literally keeping the volume of music through headphones lower and increasing it at the climax of a song or during my favorite ones

• Usually drinking water, black coffee, and unsweetened teas

• Meditating

• Walking, running, and bicycling without headphones

• Turning off notifications for most apps on my phone, and keeping Facebook only accessible by computer

Over time, these simple, bare acts heighten their own experience and the experience of all acts that are not simple and bare.

I strive to be naked to the world.

I strive to be naked to the world to be exposed to it. To be exposed to the world is to feel more — from happiness to sadness, from wonder to pain — and to feel more is to notice more, learn more, and have greater awareness.

To be naked to the world also means less between me and everything else. To shed barriers is to shed separateness. Such nakedness opens one up to the unexpected and unseekable. Raised in the hot, dry desert, I also enjoy being as close to physically naked as possible as well.

Some ways I strive to be naked to the world include:

• Striving to be real, open, and deep in conversation

• Traveling in the greatest degree of exposure I’m comfortable with

• Going barefoot as often as possible

• Saying “yes” more often

• Peeling clothes off whenever mildly acceptable

The Unsung Gifts of Less

I initially hesitated to write this article as being cheap, sensitive, and naked to the world are not exactly signs of status in our culture.

Think about it:

• Calling someone “cheap” is an insult.

• Far from sensitive, we saturate our lives with constant doing and watching and listening — often at the same time. We’re a people plagued by FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out).

• From clothes to cars to houses, we display our worth to others with very things that oppose our nakedness.

However, do notice that being cheap, sensitive, and naked to the world all take discipline and contain gifts. Holding onto money is harder than spending it, but spends time wisely. Being more sensitive requires the deliberate choice of less, but cultivates greater immersion and awareness. Getting naked to the world forgoes feelings of comfort and security, but brings us closer to it.

The gifts of less are often overlooked because we live in an economically informed society. Which I’ll try and illustrate to you with a Joseph Campbell quote from a PBS interview series entitled, The Power of Myth:

“You can tell what’s informing a society by what the tallest building is. When you approach a medieval town, the cathedral is the tallest thing in the place. When you approach an eighteenth-century town, it is the political palace that’s the tallest thing in the place. And when you approach a modern city, the tallest places are the office buildings, the centers of economic life.

If you go to Salt Lake City, you see the whole thing illustrated right in front of your face. First the temple was built, right in the center of the city. This is the proper organization because the temple is the spiritual center from which everything flows in all directions. Then the political building, the Capitol, was built beside it, and it’s taller than the temple. And now the tallest thing is the office building that takes care of the affairs of both the temple and the political building. That’s the history of Western civilization. From the Gothic through the princely periods of the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth centuries, to this economic world that we’re in now.”

In this economically informed society, “more” is the sound of the beating heart of our must-grow economy. The messaging of more is so woven into our days that we can almost forget it’s there. If you live in a city, you’re exposed to an estimated 5,000 advertisements per day. Advertising is on billboards, television, radio, Google, YouTube, social media, most websites, the news, every free app on your phone, and every single brand name you see — all of it is offering more to your life.

While being constantly bombarded by the idea of adding to our lives, it’s easy to forget that it can be just as worth it to subtract from them. And that’s a problem. Because the gifts of less — the gifts I’ve found in what may seem so odd a strife as being cheap, sensitive, and naked to the world — are buried by the constant messaging of more. 

And that’s why I feel that so important a sentence.