The Joy of Less

By Pico Iyer
“The beat of my heart has grown deeper, more active, and yet more peaceful, and it is as if I were
all the time storing up inner riches…My [life] is one long sequence of inner miracles.” The
young Dutchwoman Etty Hillesum wrote that in a Nazi transit camp in 1943, on her way to her
death at Auschwitz two months later. Towards the end of his life, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote,
“All I have seen teaches me to trust the creator for all I have not seen,” though by then he had
already lost his father when he was 7, his first wife when she was 20 and his first son, aged 5. In
Japan, the late 18th-century poet Issa is celebrated for his delighted, almost child-like
celebrations of the natural world. Issa saw four children die in infancy, his wife die in childbirth,
and his own body partially paralyzed.

I’m not sure I knew the details of all these lives when I was 29, but I did begin to guess that
happiness lies less in our circumstances than in what we make of them, in every sense. “There is
nothing either good or bad,” I had heard in high school, from Hamlet, “but thinking makes it so.”
I had been lucky enough at that point to stumble into the life I might have dreamed of as a boy: a
great job writing on world affairs for Time magazine, an apartment (officially at least) on Park
In the corporate world, I always knew there was some higher position I could attain, which
meant that, like Zeno’s arrow, I was guaranteed never to arrive and always to remain dissatisfied.
Avenue, enough time and money to take vacations in Burma, Morocco, El Salvador. But every
time I went to one of those places, I noticed that the people I met there, mired in difficulty and
often warfare, seemed to have more energy and even optimism than the friends I’d grown up
with in privileged, peaceful Santa Barbara, Calif., many of whom were on their fourth marriages
and seeing a therapist every day. Though I knew that poverty certainly didn’t buy happiness, I
wasn’t convinced that money did either.
So — as post-1960s cliché decreed — I left my comfortable job and life to live for a year in a
temple on the backstreets of Kyoto. My high-minded year lasted all of a week, by which time I’d
noticed that the depthless contemplation of the moon and composition of haiku I’d imagined
from afar was really more a matter of cleaning, sweeping and then cleaning some more. But
today, more than 21 years later, I still live in the vicinity of Kyoto, in a two-room apartment that
makes my old monastic cell look almost luxurious by comparison. I have no bicycle, no car, no
television I can understand, no media — and the days seem to stretch into eternities, and I can’t
think of a single thing I lack.
I’m no Buddhist monk, and I can’t say I’m in love with renunciation in itself, or traveling an
hour or more to print out an article I’ve written, or missing out on the N.B.A. Finals. But at some
point, I decided that, for me at least, happiness arose out of all I didn’t want or need, not all I did.
And it seemed quite useful to take a clear, hard look at what really led to peace of mind or
absorption (the closest I’ve come to understanding happiness). Not having a car gives me
volumes not to think or worry about, and makes walks around the neighborhood a daily
adventure. Lacking a cell phone and high-speed Internet, I have time to play ping-pong every
evening, to write long letters to old friends and to go shopping for my sweetheart (or to track
down old baubles for two kids who are now out in the world).
When the phone does ring — once a week — I’m thrilled, as I never was when the phone rang in
my overcrowded office in Rockefeller Center. And when I return to the United States every three
months or so and pick up a newspaper, I find I haven’t missed much at all. While I’ve been
rereading P.G. Wodehouse, or “Walden,” the crazily accelerating roller-coaster of the 24/7 news
cycle has propelled people up and down and down and up and then left them pretty much where
they started. “I call that man rich,” Henry James’s Ralph Touchett observes in “Portrait of a
Lady,” “who can satisfy the requirements of his imagination.” Living in the future tense never
did that for me.
I certainly wouldn’t recommend my life to most people — and my heart goes out to those who
Perhaps happiness, like peace or passion, comes most when it isn’t pursued.
have recently been condemned to a simplicity they never needed or wanted. But I’m not sure
how much outward details or accomplishments ever really make us happy deep down. The
millionaires I know seem desperate to become multimillionaires, and spend more time with their
lawyers and their bankers than with their friends (whose motivations they are no longer sure of).
And I remember how, in the corporate world, I always knew there was some higher position I
could attain, which meant that, like Zeno’s arrow, I was guaranteed never to arrive and always to
remain dissatisfied.
Being self-employed will always make for a precarious life; these days, it is more uncertain than
ever, especially since my tools of choice, written words, are coming to seem like accessories to
images. Like almost everyone I know, I’ve lost much of my savings in the past few months. I
even went through a dress-rehearsal for our enforced austerity when my family home in Santa
Barbara burned to the ground some years ago, leaving me with nothing but the toothbrush I
bought from an all-night supermarket that night. And yet my two-room apartment in nowhere
Japan seems more abundant than the big house that burned down. I have time to read the new
John le Carre, while nibbling at sweet tangerines in the sun. When a Sigur Ros album comes out,
it fills my days and nights, resplendent. And then it seems that happiness, like peace or passion,
comes most freely when it isn’t pursued.
If you’re the kind of person who prefers freedom to security, who feels more comfortable in a
small room than a large one and who finds that happiness comes from matching your wants to
your needs, then running to stand still isn’t where your joy lies. In New York, a part of me was
always somewhere else, thinking of what a simple life in Japan might be like. Now I’m there, I
find that I almost never think of Rockefeller Center or Park Avenue at all.