You need some ideas on how to live the simple life? Let me fast-forward you to the simple life.

I lost my job some time ago (God bless America) and decided to start my own business. For the first year we lived mostly without income, surviving off of quickly evaporating savings. THAT kind of experience will turn you to the so-called "simple life". You don't have to ponder how to accomplish the simple life. Economics gets you there faster than anything else.

Suddenly, you start to actually enjoy the experience of shopping at a grocery store. Suddenly, meat is a treat! You know you have hit simple life Nirvana when the family finally stops biitching about eating beans again because they are glad to have them and start to appreciate your creative ways to modify recipes.

The wife's "Ungodly busy" days get more simple when you drop the piano lessons and swimming lessons and hockey lessons, and all the other money sucking crap that the kids hated doing anyway. We had time to eat dinners together and talk together. We went to the library together to get books rather than going to Barns and Noble for coffee and a $100 pile of bookshelf weights. We went to church together and prayed together for our health, and for the ones we loved, and for people we didn't know and for improved income.

I used the fireplace as the main heat source for the house - "oh how charming" - ya, right. We rode bicycles because it made sense to do so rather than scooting off by car. One measure of how our life was being simplified was that our weekly garbage production went from four garbage cans on trash day to one garbage can.

Ah yes, the "simple life"; you can buy it cheap, my friends. Most of us are just one bad day at work away from the simple life.