
	Americans have long been enamored with the image of the simple self-sufficient aesthete, whether it is Thoreau growing beans on the back forty in Concord or Jeremiah Johnson going into the Rocky Mountains to wrestle grizzly bears. In recent years, PBS has created several versions of a reality-style television miniseries, based on the fantasy of “escaping” into the perceived simplicity of the past. Three of these shows, Frontier House, Colonial House, and Texas Ranch House, garnered tens of thousands of applications from would-be participants (www.pbs.org/wnet/frontierhouse). The actual reality was that living in primitive 17th and 19th century conditions was no Thoreauvian tiptoe through the tulips. 21st century participants invariably found the experience grueling, dangerous, and dirty. 
There is a common saying in the Voluntary Simplicity movement: How much is enough?  People can theoretically follow their reduction-morality to the nth degree, and diminish consumption until they are living in naked in caves, eating roots and berries. Perhaps one should also ask, how far is too far? 
In 1996, Jon Krakauer wrote an account of Chris McCandless, a 24-year-old man, who, four years prior, walked into the Alaskan tundra with not much more than the clothes on his back. Wildly devoted to the concepts of self-sufficiency extreme simplicity, McCandless’s particular reduction-morality (heavily influenced by Thoreau, Tolstoy, and Jack London) ended with the tragic consequence that the young man starved to death. Again—and this is a terrible irony considering how he died—Chris McCandless was attempting to reduce his circumstances from a position of relatively comfortable upper-middle-class socio-economic means.
The desire to create meaning in the complex lives we build for ourselves is a uniquely human enterprise, and the concept of simplicity has come into and gone out of favor with Americans time and again over the course of centuries. The Puritans, Shakers, and Amish all set up religious precepts that shunned the complex trappings of secular life in order to embrace spiritual purity. Thomas Jefferson held forth the ideal of the gentleman farmer, an agrarian gentry that would be a perfect American type. The late 19th century brought a flourishing of American utopian experiments in which numbers of people endeavored to live together under a set of simple ideals (Nathaniel Hawthorne, in his The American Notebooks, describes in a particularly winsome fashion, working up the courage to milk a cow. During the 1960s, tens of thousands sought to simply life by getting “back to the land,” following eco-gurus like Scott and Helen Nearing, authors of the wildly popular Living the Good Life. 
Humans always appear to throw themselves toward extremes to try and achieve physical and psychic balance. It seems that when we travel too far from the truth of who we are—animals that have developed the capacity for abstract thought—we find it necessary to reduce our circumstances and slide back down Maslow’s ladder, just far enough so that it feels like we are once more in familiar territory. 