You say “I don’t pretend to understand it, but it has happened and I am living it.”

It’s hard for me to remember that this is a new idea to some people. I have felt — for so long! — two things:
1) the more things we own, the more things own us!
2) the only thing worth buying, once you have the essentials, is your time.

It follows, therefore, that reducing our desires, our wants, reduces the amount of our time — our life — that we have to spend acquiring the money to have those essentials. And, with fewer things owning us, we feel more alive, more in touch with REAL life.

One tragedy of the stupid materialism that defiles our civilization is that industrial development could have been used to get us our essentials in less time, thus freeing us to live more human lives. Instead, it has been used to increase the number, complexity and cost of the things we are taught we “must have,” thus leaving us poorer in the real things of life. (This also encourages greed, theft, poverty and a form of insanity in which people learn to prefer the image they are sold to the reality they really would prefer.)

Henry Thoreau knew it almost before it happened. Anyone who reads even the first chapter of Walden is entirely prepared for the whirlwind we are living through.