The biggest waste is to do that thing you call work, but to interrupt it, compromise it, cheat it and still call it work.

When I was younger I thought busy people were more important than everyone else. Otherwise why would they be so busy? I had busy bosses, busy parents, and always I just thought they must have really important things to do. It seemed an easy way to see who mattered and who didn’t. The busy must matter more, and the lazy mattered less.

It is not possible, nor is it desirable, to own nothing. In fact, a point comes when not owning critical stuff (a bed, a toilet, a room) starts becoming stressful again, in a whole different way from "too much stuff" stress. "Simplicity" is a relative term, and perhaps inapt; try "convenience", which has more useful connotations. Fitting my life into a small number of boxes tucked under my bed makes me happy. Fretting over the precise enumeration of the items in those boxes would completely defeat the object of the exercise.

There are fundamental tenets to life I've landed on at this point in my life. When I feel stressed or off course, I come back to these truths. As I look in our world, it's clear that others have other principles they seem to have chosen.