“Too many people spend money they haven’t earned, to buy things they don’t want, to impress people they don’t like,” Will Rogers famously said. Indeed, in our relentless pursuit to acquire and accumulate, we have become the pack-horses of our possessions. Things are in the saddle and run our lives. Instead of bringing relief, every new purchase loads us with weariness, confines our will, and prevents us from living freely and nobly. How did it come to this and is there a way out? This is one of many questions that Joshua Becker explores in his book The More of Less: Finding the Life You Want Under Everything You Own.

Throughout the book, the point Joshua Becker keeps coming back to is that “once we let go of the things that don’t matter, we are free to pursue all the things that really do matter,” a vital message for a society where dependence upon material possessions inevitably results in the destruction of human character. Minimalism, Joshua Becker argues, can offer us a different, more joyful way of living:

1. More time and energy. Whether we are making the money to buy them, researching and purchasing them, cleaning and organizing them, repairing them, replacing them, or selling them, our possession consume our time and energy. So the fewer things we have, the more of our time and energy we’ll have left to devote to other pursuits that matter more to us.
2. Less stress. Every added possession increases the worry in our lives. In your mind, imagine two rooms: one that is cluttered and messy, and another that is tidy and sparse. Which one makes you feel anxious? Which one makes you feel calm? Mess + excess = stress.
3. More generosity. Living a less acquisitive, less costly lifestyle provides the opportunity to financially support causes we care about. Our money is only as valuable as what we choose to spend it on, and there are countless opportunities worth vastly more than material accumulation.
4. Less environmental impact. Overconsumption accelerates the destruction of natural resources. The less we consume, the less damage we do to our environment, and that benefits everyone, including our children’s and grandchildren’s generations.
5. More contentment. We tend to think that we can resolve our discontentment by getting the item whose lack is seemingly making us unhappy. Yet material possessions will never fully satisfy the desires of our hearts. (That’s why discontentment always returns after a purchase.) Only after we intentionally break the cycle of accumulating more, can we begin to discern the true causes of discontentment in our lives.

More time, less stress, more generosity, less environmental impact, more contentment — these are just a few examples of how The More of Less can change our lives for the better. It’s a book that inspires us to take actionable steps to declutter our homes of all the stuff we don’t need, stuff that keeps us from crafting the life we want, all the while contributing to the much-needed change in our consumer-based society.

“Learn about a pine tree from a pine tree, and about a bamboo stalk from a bamboo stalk,” wrote the seventeenth-century master of haiku Matsuo Basho. Similarly, we can extend Basho’s wisdom about nature to the nature of poetry and learn about poetry from the poem itself writes Edward Hirsch in his book How to Read a Poem: And Fall in Love with Poetry — a soulful guide to the spacious unfolding of verse, rhyme, and rhythm.

Poetry is an art form that deepens our capacity for experiencing ourselves as well as others, thereby deepening our capacity for personhood, our achievement of humanity. In this regard, Edward Hirsch’s book — a book about reading poetry and also a book of readings — serves as a means to restore the aura of sacred practice that accompanies this process, to honor both the rational and the irrational elements in poetry, to illuminate the experience that takes us to the very heart of being.

Edward Hirsch writes:

Read these poems to yourself in the middle of the night. … Read them when you’re wide awake in the early morning, fully alert. Say them over to yourself in a place where silence reigns and the din of the culture — the constant buzzing noise that surrounds us — has momentarily stopped. These poems have come from a great distance to find you. I think of Malebranche’s maxim, “Attentiveness is the natural prayer of the soul.” This maxim … can stand as a writer’s credo. It also serves for readers. Paul Celan said:

A poem, as a manifestation of language and thus essentially dialogue, can be a message in a bottle, sent out in the — not always greatly hopeful — belief that somewhere and sometime it could wash up on land, on heartland perhaps. Poems in this sense, too, are under way: they are making toward something.

Imagine you have gone down to the shore and there, amidst the other debris — the seaweed and rotten wood, the crushed cans and dead fish — you find an unlikely looking bottle from the past. You bring it home and discover a message inside. This letter, so strange and disturbing, seems to have been making its way toward someone for a long time, and now that someone turns out to be you.

Complement the lost art of How to Read a Poem with another equally lost art of How to Read a Book.

Renowned psychoanalyst and humanist philosopher Erich Fromm (March 23, 1900–March 18, 1980) was one of the most significant public intellectuals of the twentieth century. Living and working at the height of the Cold War and imminent threat of a nuclear annihilation, he put an enormous effort into bridging the gap between high government officials and human rights and peace activists as he became the founder and major funder of the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy and Amnesty International.

His emphasis on the importance of love, his unrelenting opposition to war, his stark criticism of consumerism, and his all-embracing humanism has made him one of the most read and admired figures whose legacy continues to inspire millions to build a better life for themselves and those around them.

In a rare 1958 The Mike Wallace Interview, Erich Fromm shares his deep insights about our relationship to work, the ability to be in a loving relationship, what Dale Carnegie has to do with the spiritual renaissance of the twentieth century, religion, happiness, and other eternal subjects of our existence. Interview highlights can be found below the video. Please enjoy.

THE MIKE WALLACE INTERVIEW
with Erich Fromm

WALLACE: What would you say is happening to man, American man, in relationship to his work?

FROMM: I think his work is to a large extent, meaningless, because he is not related to it. He is increasingly part of a big machinery, social machinery, governed by a big bureaucracy……and I think American man unconsciously hates his work very often, because he feels trapped by it…imprisoned by it… because he feels that he is spending most of his energy for something which has no meaning in itself.

WALLACE: Let’s talk about man in relation to his love, his marriage.

FROMM: Love today is a relatively rare phenomenon. We have a great deal of sentimentality, we have a great deal of illusion about love, namely as a…as something one falls in. But the question is that one cannot fall in love, really; one has to be in love. And that means that loving becomes, and the ability to love, becomes one of the most important things in life. … Love is not easy. All great religions postulate love as one of the greatest accomplishments. If it were that easy, or as easy as most people think, certainly, the great religious leaders would have been rather naive.

WALLACE: What about man in relationship to his religion?

FROMM: We have a religious renaissance today in America … What is attempted in this so-called religious “renaissance” is kind of a mixture – between Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Be Successful and the norms of the Bible, of the Old and the New Testament. And in a kind of a clever, and sometimes not so clever way, people try to combine the two. Well, that is actually very much the contrary of the spirit of our true religious tradition. … Man today being concerned with production and consumption as ends in themselves, has very little energy to devote himself to the true religious experience. … [By true religious experience,] I mean the capacity to feel deep love, deep oneness with a fellow man, with nature, and if I were religious in the conventional sense, I would say, with God. But it doesn’t matter whether one uses God or doesn’t. What matters is which experience a person has.

WALLACE: And happiness?

FROMM: Well, happiness is a very proud word of our whole cultural heritage. … I think if you would ask people what their concept of Heaven is, and if they were honest, they would say it’s a kind of big department store with new things every week, and enough money to buy everything new. … [But what] happiness should be [is] something which results from the creative, genuine, intense relatedness — awareness, responsiveness, to everything in life — to man, to nature. Happiness does not exclude sadness — if a person responds to life, he’s sometimes happy and sometimes sad. What matters is he responds.

For a deeper dive into Erich Fromm’s life and intellectual legacy you can’t go wrong with The Lives of Erich Fromm: The Love’s Prophet by Lawrence J. Friedman. Based on remarkably extensive research, it traces Fromm’s life from his childhood years in an observant Jewish household and illuminates how culture and environment shaped his thinking and personality. Friedman’s own acquaintance with Fromm started with The Mike Wallace Interview you’ve just watched as he writes, “The one television program my Eastern European émigré grandfather and I watched together was The Mike Wallace Show, a forerunner of Sixty Minutes. Wallace conducted an hour-long interview of Erich Fromm, introducing him as a man with essentially two “lives”—the most important psychoanalyst since Freud and a major champion of peaceful coexistence with the Russians. Over the course of the interview, Fromm tastefully expanded on Wallace’s descriptions of his two apparent lives, defining himself, first, as a psychoanalytically informed clinician; second, as a political activist; third, as a social critic; and, fourth, as a writer committed to instructing society.”

“Get into bed in a comfortable position, make sure the light is inadequate enough to cause a slight eyestrain, choose a book that is either terribly difficult or terribly boring … and you will be asleep in a few minutes,” writes Mortimer Adler in his famous manual How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading. Indeed, anyone who has ever read a book before bed knows this sleep recipe works, one hundred percent. But staying awake during reading is an entirely different matter, one that depends on our goal in reading. If we want to grow in mind or spirit we have to keep awake, and that means reading as actively as we can. But what does it mean to read actively? To answer this question, it’s first helpful to consider what constitutes passive consumption of information. Mortimer Adler writes:

The viewer of television, the listener to radio, the reader of magazines, is presented with a whole complex of elements — all the way from ingenious rhetoric to carefully selected data and statistics — to make it easy for him to “make up his own mind” with the minimum of difficulty and effort. But the packaging is often done so effectively that the viewer, listener, or reader does not make up his own mind at all. Instead, he inserts a packaged opinion into his mind, somewhat like inserting a cassette into a cassette player. He then pushes a button and “plays back” the opinion whenever it seems appropriate to do so. He has performed acceptably without having had to think.

Active reading, on the other hand, means making an effort, thinking, and asking questions — questions that we ourselves must try to answer in the course of reading. But not any questions. A wakeful, conscious way of reading and comprehending information consists in asking four key questions. Mortimer Adler writes:

The art of reading on any level above elementary consists in the habit of asking the right questions in the right order. There are four main questions you must about any book.
1. What is the book about as a whole? You must try to discover the leading theme of the book, and how the author develops this theme in an orderly way by subdividing it into its essential subordinate themes or topics.
2. What is being said in detail, and how? You must try to discover the main ideas, assertions, and arguments that constitute the author’s particular message.
3. Is the book true, in whole or part? You cannot answer this question until you have answered the first two. You have to know what is being said before you can decide whether it is true or not. When you understand a book, however, you are obligated, if you are reading seriously, to make up your own mind. Knowing the author’s mind is not enough.
4. What of it? If the book has given you information, you must ask about its significance. Why does the author think it is important to know these things? Is it important to you to know them? And if the book has not only informed you, but also enlightened you, it is necessary to seek further enlightenment by asking what else follows, what is further implied or suggested.

Mortimer Adler concludes by reminding us that people go to sleep over good books not because they are unwilling to make the effort, but because they don’t know how to make it. “Good books are over your head,” he writes again and again throughout the numerous chapters of his classic guide, “They would not be good for you if they were not.” Good books weary us unless we can reach up to them and pull ourselves to their level. How to Read a Book (paperback | audiobook) remains a timeless manual of the most important skill that supports us in all stages of our adult life.