Simplicity and Luxury

If someone increasingly yearns for a simple life—growing flowers, birds, insects, and fish; strolling through lush, dense parks; buying natural, unpretentious objects; making two simple yet nutritious-looking dishes; arranging a tidy space; preferring a clean computer desktop; always discarding unnecessary, useless items; avoiding noisy environments; listening to quiet music—what kind of mindset is this? And if they also like using expensive brands, what kind of mindset is that?

All of the above are my current symptoms. I hate anything that looks complicated and disorganized, and try to maintain a simple living state. Although simplicity is often associated with plainness, everything I love isn’t plain—most of the time it actually seems quite luxurious.

Simple yet luxurious—the literal meaning is truly a contradictory state. Simplicity’s imagery includes white, elegance, and lightness; luxury’s imagery includes black, complexity, and heaviness. Now these two things are glued together like laminate flooring, appearing quite tangled. But some brands have achieved this—they sell raw wood furniture for more than others’ multi-layered lacquered furniture, and sell clothes with no patterns for more than others’ elaborately silver-embossed, flocked, or jacquard-woven clothes. Simplicity and luxury in these single products aren’t entirely expressed through external form: simplicity shows on the outside, luxury lies in the内涵 (inner quality).

Liking to grow flowers and raise dogs first requires sufficient living space; hobbies of play and entertainment require money first; buying simple furniture means higher design and material costs. The life I like is mostly like this—it looks simple, but is actually harder to achieve than many dreams.

I always have a sense of powerlessness. Those dreams would surely be easy to realize in ancient times. Modern people love new things too much and have almost lost their own pursuits, instead living increasingly complicated lives.

People and things—let’s keep them simple.