The One You Feed - Andy Couturier on Increasing your Happiness by Simplifying Your Life 

Episode Date: January 24, 2018

Andy Couturier lived in rural Japan many years ago and it changed his life. As he lived alongside people who were living profoundly satisfying lives, he learned what they were doing (or not doing!) to achieve this level of satisfaction and then he wrote about it in his book, The Abundance of Less: Lessons in Simple Living from Rural Japan. In this interview, Andy shares this wisdom and his experiences in such a way that you can apply the concepts in a practical manner in your life starting today.This episode is sponsored by Health IQ. Get lower rates on life insurance if you are health conscious. Get free quote hereand by Hello Fresh- Get $30 off your first order by going to hellofresh.com and using the promo code FEED30 at checkout In This Interview, Andy Couturier and I Discuss...The Wolf ParableHis book, The Abundance of Less: Lessons in Simple Living From Rural JapanHis time living in rural JapanThat the people in rural Japan do not use money to entertain themselvesTheir way of life is slow, humble, connected to their community and time for individual contemplationHow they don't suffer from "time poverty"That all life is connected in rural JapanBecause there is less to do, the garner more enjoyment from each taskThe consumerism and busy characteristics of the industrialized westHow "convenience speeds you up"Ways to make meaningful strides towards living a lifestyle inspired by the lifestyle in rural JapanSimplify simplify simplifyTravel less, know your home city betterMake meaningful connections with friends by spending more time togetherDiving deeper into things in your life in a methodical, thoughtful wayI love doing _____. Wouldn't it be wonderful to spend more time doing it?Ways to make time for what we care aboutHow they live profoundly satisfying lives in rural JapanThat you don't have to "go back in time" to live this kind of lifeBuilding his house entirely with hand tools   See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We can live much more deeply connected lives, but we have to figure out how to do it. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking.

Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction. How they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Andy Couturier, who spent four years studying sustainable living in rural Japan. There, he worked with local environments, wrote for the Japan Times, and studied how Japanese aesthetics can help us develop new forms of writing. Andy has also hitchhiked across the Sahara Desert, been a researcher for Greenpeace, built his own house with hand tools, and taught intuitive writing for more than two decades.

He's a student of many different Asian philosophical systems and is fluent in Japanese. His book is The Abundance of Less, Lessons in Simple Living from Rural Japan. This episode is brought to you by Health IQ. To see if you qualify and get your free health quote, go to healthiq.com slash wolf or mention the promo code wolf when you talk to a Health IQ agent. And here's the interview with Andy Couturier. Hi, Andy. Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Really glad to be here. I'm happy to have you on. Your book is called The Abundance of Less,

Lessons in Simple Living from Rural Japan. And it's a fascinating book about a group of people who have chosen a different way to live. And I think there's a lot of lessons for all of us in it. And we'll get to that in a minute. but let's start like we always do with the parable. There's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. Yeah. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second. He looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the

work that you do. Well, it's a very interesting parable, and I think it's very true in terms of our consciousness. But also, I'm interested in this idea of always at battle. And, you know, we can't fail to notice that there's a male, a young male and an older male. And I thought about the people that I wrote about in The Abundance of Less, and I thought, wow, they don't really seem to be in this state of struggle. It doesn't seem to be going on for them. And yet at the same time, they've made very conscious choices to move away from consumerism and greed is one of the key words you use there. And I thought, it's a powerful word, but it's also a tricky word. It's an obvious thing when you think about someone taking from a child or taking something from a poor person

or a landlord raising rent or someone maximizing their return on investment on their stock portfolio. But one of the people I wrote about said, he's a farmer, he said, don't be greedy with the soil. Realize what its actual fertility is, and then you'll have a stable harvest from year to year. And so for me, I realized that even as an organic gardener that grows some of my own food, that indeed I had had that greed with the soil. How can I maximize my production? So to me, on some level, the things we feed consciously are the sort of easy stuff. It's the things that we, the bad wolf in that language that you use, that we feed subliminally without even noticing it. That's what's sort of most important, I think,

because I think a lot of those things are the things that are driving us. And by meeting these people, at first I thought they were just vindicating my own pre-held beliefs. But in fact, they challenged me on many levels so that I actually had to see where I was being, just for example, greedy without even knowing it. That's a great start and a great way to kick things off. Why don't you tell listeners a little bit about the premise or the setup of the book, and then we can get more specific from there. Sure. Well, I was living in rural Japan. Well, I was living in rural Japan.

I've always loved the countryside in the early 90s. And just by chance, doing some environmental activism, I met some people. Originally, one woman who was an anti-nuclear activist back in 1990, so 20 or more years before Fukushima. And she was very forthright and she was not afraid of challenging me. And we became great friends. And she invited us, my partner Cynthia and I, up to her homestead in the mountains. And the funny thing is, is we were in Japan earning money because what we wanted to do is to earn enough money to buy some land in Northern California when we came back to the States and grow our own food and build our own house. We'd already had that idea, but we had no idea that anyone was doing that in Japan. And when we went up there,

not only was it just physically so beautiful, these terraced rice paddies where people have planted vegetables and flowers and fruit trees, and the old farmhouses dotting the hillside and the cedar forest, and many of the Atsuko, as the woman, and her friends were living in these old farmhouses, many hundreds of years old, and for almost no rent. I realized that these people were not just my cliche idea of back to the landers, but they were living this profoundly connected life. And it wasn't just sort of that hippie ideal of grow your own food, but that it was connected in so many different ways to traditional Japan, but also very intriguingly to their living overseas in India and Nepal and sometimes Tibet and China,

connecting in with those wellsprings of Buddhist and Hindu thought and bringing them to actuality in their day-to-day lives. And so I thought, as my Japanese got better and better, I was speaking to them in Japanese, I realized these were very profound thinkers and that they'd figured out some things that I think could help a lot of people in the West who are suffering and can't figure their way out. And so that started me feeling

that it was important to write a book about them so that other people who don't have the luxury or privilege to live overseas or speak Japanese could meet them and learn there. I don't want to call them secrets, learn these, in some ways, obvious pieces of wisdom that we've gotten so alienated from just from the way we live every day. Yep. Right in the title, you kind of refer to them as lessons. And I think that's an interesting way to look at them. So one of the things that you mentioned about these people is that as one of the defining characteristics is that they do not use money to entertain themselves. Talk to me a little bit about their lifestyles and what does entertainment

mean to them? It's very different in a lot of ways than what we would think of as entertainment. That's a great question. And I think that's a key point is that they are not necessarily going, you know, obviously if you live in New York, you can go to the Kennedy Center and see opera. Or even if you're connected to the Internet, you can stream Netflix. And it's not that nobody does that and I don't do that or that that's necessarily a bad thing. But in many ways, whether it's the drama of growing your own food or just the connection with the natural world, or in many cases, it's simply getting books out of the library and reading them. It's not so much about pushing play, whatever that is, pushing the button on the remote and having an industrialized culture deliver you something that makes you laugh or cry or distract you. industrialized production methods that we buy into because of just the way we thought, we think, and that we all have grown up in such a world of mechanical reproduction of objects that we just

purchased. So in terms of their way of life, I do actually prefer the word way of life to lifestyle because lifestyle sounds a little bit more like a fashion, but either word you use. Their way of life is slow. It's humble. It's peaceful. It's connected to their community. It's connected to their own time for contemplation. I would say that's the key word is that they're not suffering time poverty, which is a term I read somewhere. Time poverty is when you just have no time for anything anymore because you're so rushed. not suffering time poverty, which is a term I read somewhere.

Time poverty is when you just have no time for anything anymore because you're so rushed. These are people who have this rich amount of time for contemplation or for making their own art or for spending time with their kids, and that's true even of the dads, which if you know anything about Japan, many times dads may only see their kids on Sundays or Sunday afternoons, or they may be living in a different city. And the chance to really connect with their children is not really entertainment either. It's just all life is connected. It's not separated into work and play. I mean, there's more to say about their way of life, but I don't want to make the answer too long. There's a quote that you give from Nakamura. Did I say his name right?

That's correct, yes. He says, if you have time, many things are enjoyable, which is just a fascinating idea. And you talk about how in your own life, when you're rushing around and everything is so hectic, you sort of see the true source of your misery. And it's this idea of that a lot of things are unpleasant for us because we view them as we've got to get them out of the way to get to the next thing and the next thing. And what it looks like a lot of the people that you were talking with are doing is they don't have so many things to do. so they are able to spend more time on the basic things that we do to stay alive and they garner a great deal of enjoyment and

satisfaction out of doing those things that is in a way not entertainment but it's a it's a deeply satisfying part of their life and what they consider to be important fantastic way of saying i don't think i could even improve on that at all. I guess I would just go from there. It's so, well, if that sounds great, how do we get there? And I think we, particularly now with the internet culture, we're used to these five quick hacks to a more sustainable life or, you know, better inner peace. to a more sustainable life or better inner peace.

While those things are valuable, on another level, really, it's not just about making a little tweak here and there, putting solar panels on the house or driving a more efficient car, changing light bulbs out. It's about really reorienting ourselves towards consumerism. And if we're rushed, it's very difficult to do. If we're constantly busy, everyone says, oh, the holidays are crazy, or this is crazy, or my schedule is crazy, as if someone did that to them. And certainly, there are people all over the world who don't have the options that many people in the industrialized West have. But I think a lot of it is we have all these options, yet we still don't realize that

we're chasing after that shimmer of like, all my life needs to be enjoyable and I need to have it comfortable at all times. And in fact, we can live much more deeply connected lives, but we have to figure out how to do it. And I use the word figure, the term figure out, because sometimes it's really just about thinking our way out. And to do that, we need to make time. So I always recommend to people when they ask me, how do you do this?

It really takes some time out of your life, even if you can do a whole day or three-day retreat where you really think about how you let your life get set up or the choices you've made and how that rush has brought you to a place of constant sense of lack of time and I really need, I really need, I really need, of constant sense of lack of time and I really need, I really need, I really need, and then trying to fill that with convenient devices that will give you back your time. When in fact, as Asha Amemiya, one of the people in the book said, she said, convenience just speeds you up. And that was one of those moments for me when I realized that it was actually my subliminal

belief that all I needed to do was get something, you know, design the system better, and then I would be happier or have more time. And in fact, it's the opposite that I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal?

The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too?

Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really No Really. Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500,

a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called really no, really. And you can find it on the I heart radio app on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. And here's the rest of the interview with Andy C couturier there's a lot of circling around that theme of time in the book i'd say it's one of the big ones of of not trading things for time that's one that atsuko yeah she says most people have directed their attention towards having things more than time and that's why they are always running. So one of the things that you mentioned in the book, and I think it gets at the heart of what you were just saying a minute ago about, well, is this just a small tweak here or there? What is this? You were doing

an interview with somebody else and they referred to the people in your book as the Olympic athletes of simplicity. And when you read your book, what those people are doing is very, I don't know if I want to use the word extreme, but it is a far cry from the way most of us in the West live our lives. It's a pretty big distance between our life today and their life. And I'm interested in your ideas on maybe it's not a small tweak, but what are the ways that we make meaningful strides in that direction, knowing that most of us aren't going to necessarily go from the current life we live today towards living in the country, growing our own food and making our own furniture or whatever, whatever it might be. So I'm always interested in, you know, I talk a lot on the show about the middle way, about, you know, one extreme versus the other extreme. And I'm just curious

about how do we take meaningful steps in that direction? So one of them is time. Are there other things that you recommend or think of? I'm just, I'm sort of wondering about this whole level because the distance seems so great. Yeah. And I want to say that I don't live the way that they do, but I have over the time that I've met them in the first sentences, the book was written 27 years ago, moved more and more in that direction, less media consumption or more time rereading a particular book or listening to the recording of a poem again and again and getting deeper into the experience of what that is.

And yet at the same time, you know, if they were to look at, say, the Nepali villagers that they lived with in the Himalayas, some of them lived for a couple of years or more in their youth in these rural places, they might feel like, well, there's a really huge distance between that way of life and the way I'm living now with a car, for example, or buying some of my food at the grocery store. So I think the real answer is, it's not for me to say, okay, this is the way to do it. I think, and I can give some pointers, but I want to start before I do that, saying that this is a modern conundrum of credible resource use, the suffering that that causes to the planet, to people, say, in a sweatshop in China.

It's very real. We have to, I feel, we really have to think our way out of it, both as a culture and in terms of our laws, but also just individually, how do we stop participating in things that we don't believe in? And maybe there is a larger change that people will feel motivated to make. And certainly a number of people who've read my book have written to me and said, you know, it really changed my life. I decided to leave the corporate grind and live a lot simpler and live in a smaller house. And I'm so much happier. And thank you for writing the book. So I do want to say that it is possible to make large changes,

but sometimes it's easier just to get started. I would say just to think about in what ways you are creating, as I said in the book, misery for yourself or the way I'm creating misery for myself, rushing through things and think, is there another way to do this? Do I need to be in touch with everybody who writes me by email within an hour, within a day? Am I a wrong person if I'm not dressed in the finest duds? I mean, there's a lot of ways in which we've been conned into consuming a lot, rushing a lot, and missing a lot of what's happening in our lives. And I think a lot of times when people have, for example, a health crisis or a brush with death, they wake up to that. And maybe we don't need to have a brush with death to wake up to like, how are we living? Do we want to spend more time with ourselves? Do we want to spend more time with our family? You know, do we have lunch with a friend

for 45 minutes in the middle of a hectic work week? And how did that happen? You know, do we have lunch with a friend for 45 minutes in the middle of a hectic work week? And how did that happen? You know, when we really want to spend three or four hours with a friend and really hear about their heartaches and their joys and what they've learned and where their growth points are. So simplify, simplify, simplify. I now live in a studio apartment with my partner and the dog, and I have my quasi-office for writing and teaching writing here. And we used to live in a one-bedroom and before that, a two-bedroom. And each step has actually made me much happier, less to deal with. When I stopped traveling so much, I got to know my own town better. When I decided that really one of my priorities is having long

conversations with friends, I found the friends who also wanted that. And because I was doing that, I wasn't out there, you know, filling my shopping basket in order to staunch this horrible sense of alienation that I think we all sometimes feel. That's a great answer. There's a couple themes, I think, also that we can pull out from the book that are in the vein of what we're talking about. And one of them is what you mentioned partway through the last answer, which was rereading certain things, focusing on a poem. You talk in the book about a musician who has played the same seven songs on his, I'm going to call it a flute. That's not the right thing, but you can give us...

Flute is right. It's a large bamboo flute. Okay. You know, continued to play those same seven songs. So there's a idea of going deeper into things in this way of life. And you could talk about that from the perspective of a book, a poem, a piece of music, or a lot of the people are using their hands to make something. And they're doing that in a very methodical and thoughtful way. It's another way of going deeper into something than what a lot of us do. And so that points me as another direction that we could all look at to simplify our lives and to deepen our lives is to do, you know, those kind of things that you just mentioned. I was visiting my mother in Washington, D.C. this past summer, and I went

to the Folk Arts Festival, and I thought I would see, you know, wood carving and fiddle playing, but it turned out that the focus was on circus arts, and there was little workshops on juggling and clowning and things like that. And the person there was talking about the difference between, they did some research on people who were circus arts performers or people who were just studying it and spent you know many many hours of their days doing that versus um what's known as gamers people who spend a lot of time in front of a computer screen and and i there's nothing in the book that judges people for their choices so i don't want this um answer to your question to be uh judgmental of

people who uh do gaming but just if you think about, say, juggling, and they talk about kids who do each of those and what their lives are like, what their brains are like, and what their satisfaction is like, and as you might expect, doing things with your own hands. And juggling turns out to be a lot more satisfying.

But the point I want to make is, say you decided, wow, I've really always been so fascinated by juggling. I want to learn how to do it. And you spend a lot of time doing that. Again, besides buying your juggling balls, you're not spending a lot of money on it. And you're interacting with your own body and your own self. And you're, in many ways, deepening into that practice.

And you're not rushing somewhere else to get the next thing to stop you from looking at the things that you don't want to look at. So I would say that whatever it is that whoever's listening to this thinks about, like, you know, I really love doing this or that. Think about, like, wouldn't it be wonderful if you could spend a lot more time doing that? It could be knitting or crocheting. It could be drawing. It could be interviewing people as you do writing.

Many of my writing students, they get such satisfaction. And then the answer might come, well, I need to make a lot of money for my rent. Or I have these obligations. And certain obligations you know one's chosen to have children and that can't be just easily changed nor would one want them to be but at the same time and I should bring up children later but let's I want to finish this point there's a way that we can can deepen into fewer things and it may be that we need to live in a cheaper place in order to do that.

Or we may need to have less gadgets and appliances. Or car payments are too high. Drive a used car or use a bicycle. All these different ways that we can make time for what we really care about. And in the case of people who have kids, you know, yeah, some of the people in the book, they couldn't send their kids to the most expensive universities in Japan. Yet at the same time, those kids, and I saw them grow up and I interviewed some of the kids in the book, boy, were they well-rounded and boy, were they smart and connected

in ways that a lot of the kids I was teaching who were on the cram school, you know, famous university track that you hear about so much in Japan, just were not. And in many ways, they ended up more satisfied as young adults in their lives. And, you know, they were still able to do what they wanted to do. So even with kids, I think that there's no requirement that you hate to be the bearer of bad news. We are nearing the end of it. Wish you could keep listening once the episode ends? Well, I've got some good news too. You can.

The interview continues over at oneufeed.net slash support. There, if you pledge at the $10 level, you'll get access to this additional exclusive content as well as many other bonus conversations that have been recorded with our guests. We really need and appreciate your support, so we hope you'll head over to OneUFeed.net slash support and pledge to access this additional weekly content. And now, back to the interview. You mentioned before this is not a moralizing or a judgmental thing. You mentioned before, this is not a moralizing or a judgmental thing. And when I talk about ways that we can embody some of what these people in Japan are doing, it's not from a sense of guilt or that we're living the wrong way. Although looking at the environment can be a big piece of it. But one of the things you said early on in the book that really struck me was that they were living profoundly satisfied lives. And I think that's the piece that I circle back to when I look at these things and I look at what those lessons are. It's that, you know, if you look at Western culture, more and more people

would say it's not a profoundly satisfying way of life. And yet these folks who have, by the standards we would consider, almost nothing, now they've made that choice, are living, and I think the way you say it, profoundly satisfied lives is so important. And so I wanted to echo what you were saying about a moralism or a judgmentalism or you should do this. And it's really more from if we're looking at our lives today and go, well, it's not as satisfying as I want. These are some approaches that can help. And to your point also that you made earlier, we are facing an ecological crisis, and our consumerist economy is definitely part of that. Absolutely. And they have.

You know, sometimes you might write something, and you think back later, oh, maybe I overstated that, or I'm not sure that was true, or when I came back and met that person, it wasn't so much the case. Well, that has not been the case. Some of these people, as I said, have known over a quarter of a century, and as they've grown older,

as their kids have grown up, as changes have happened, and even the heartbreak of the Fukushima nuclear accident, or I don't even know if we the Fukushima nuclear accident, or I don't even know if we can call it an accident, but all of those things, they're still living profoundly satisfied lives. So back to the question of like, well, we're not really going to make huge changes in our lives.

It's like, well, someone said you could live a profoundly satisfied life. Many of us might be really willing to make huge changes. And I don't think it's necessary, depending upon where you're at. But maybe if your life is totally crammed full of things that you hate doing and you're doing it in order to make money, in order to buy something, it may indeed be a huge change. But that doesn't mean that, you know, if you make small changes along the way, wherever you're at, that you can't actually

get more and more of your life to be satisfying. And it's, you know, my writing students sometimes say to me, oh, I need to get disciplined to write my book. And that's never my approach because it's sort of a punishing approach. I say no one needs to know. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden.

And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you

and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir.

Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really, No Really. Yeah, really. No Really.

Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason Bobblehead. It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Discipline themselves to eat chocolate, by which I mean it's like if you find a way of living, if you're enjoying your writing, if you're really enjoying the process, you just want to do it more.

enjoying your writing, if you're really enjoying the process, you just want to do it more. And in the same way, if you really are watching the way a broccoli plant grows and kind of trying to figure out how to keep it nourished and free of bugs and you're touching the soil and digging in it, it's just a great thing to do. You are actually living that satisfaction in that moment, and you'll probably want to do it more and more. But I do think, at the same time, it's a tricky thing about the moralizing thing. If the world middle class, whether that's in India or China or Europe or the United States or Australia, is destroying the earth,

and I think an argument can be made that it's not actually in terms of consumption. I mean, there's a lot of problem with the very rich and the elites, but there's only so many Maseratis they can drive. There's not that many of them. It's really in some sense, it's us and the way we live.

We might, you know, really when we get a sobering look at, you know, the loss of elephants and rhinos and polar bears, like, wow, is it really that important to fly across the Atlantic five times or even more than once or twice in your life? I mean, is it really that important? So I think we can make changes. And maybe it's moving towards satisfaction without blaming yourself, because the more we strengthen that part of our brain back to the one you feed,

where we're doing self-blame, where does that leak out into? It's like, oh, I can't handle it. I need another drink, or I need to get away from it all and consume things in order to get away from it all and, you know, consume things in order to get away from our own negative self-talk or negative self-image. Yep, exactly. The other thing that several of the people in the book mention, they say that this is not a return to the past. Explain what they mean by that. Well, that was a moment for me. So, you know, you come up to someone's house and you see that they're cooking with wood, for example, on this old-style wood stove and they're living in an old house.

And they're growing their own food and you think, oh, yes, this is pre-industrial civilization and here they are living in it. It's not even a reenactment for a theme park. They're really living in it. It's not even a reenactment for a theme park. They're really living this way. I thought, wow, you know, you're living this way of life of the past. And they said, no, we're not. And I was confused at first, but Atsuko Watanabe, the woman who I first met,

who introduced me to many of the people, said, I'm just a woman living a simple life in the mountains and everything I do, I do it because it seems like that's the best way to do it, and that's the best way to use this life that I've been given and to honor it. I'm not necessarily seeking after the biggest amount of pleasure or biggest amount of comfort. So, for example, in her case, she lives in a village that has a lot of forest and there's lumber mills and they just throw away all of this scrap lumber. And Atsuko and her husband, Gufu, just didn't want to see it go to waste.

So they said, well, we'll take it. And so they use that to cook their food and they find it fascinating to cook with fire. It's more difficult than just turning on a gas stove. And yet there's a pleasure in it, and it seems it's fascinating to look at a fire and to understand fire. And so on many, many levels, people are choosing what they want to do. Another example is Mr. Nakamura, who you also mentioned. He's a woodblock carver. And his feeling is that he wants to build his sensitivity, his awareness of all the things in the life world,

his sensitivity to his own life, not just because it's pleasurable, but also because he feels, he calls it his greatest safety net, is whenever you get into a deep trouble, whether that's you're sick or maybe your end of your life, probably the best way out is having a heightened and well-developed sensitivity. And so for him making things with his own hands or trying to think his way out of problems instead of purchase products out of his problems is a way to build that sensitivity and that pleasure

in his life. That's why you see travel posters always have nature there. It's this connection with nature that we want to have. Even when there's pictures of cities, it's often a beautiful old building, something that's made by hand.

I think there's something that gives us a lot of pleasure and enjoyment just looking at it, just touching it. And if you learn how to make something yourself, there's a form of satisfaction that just can't be gotten any other way. I'm giving you a long answer here, but maybe one more example. My partner and I are not carpenters, but we really wanted to have the experience of building our own house. And when we did return to California, we bought a piece of land that didn't have anything else on it. And we took a few carpentry

classes and we did everything with hand tools. And I'm not saying that to brag, but just to point out that it was a lot slower. But the connection I had to the wood and to learning how I made a lot of mistakes and bent nails and there was frustration. and I feel protected and warm in the fire going in the fireplace, that kind of satisfaction is just so different than turning on a thermostat or sending in a check to a landlord. So back to your question of, is it a life of the past or is it a life of the future? And I think that it probably has to be a life of the future because we know if our current way of living is unsustainable that we have to find something that humans can do for hundreds of years and continue doing it. Yep. That's a great story. I love how you talk about the satisfaction you get from doing things yourself. And as someone who, by and large, tries to avoid doing anything for himself like me, I mean, I just generally tend to take things that are more manual and outsource those. It's a profound way of looking at things differently. And as I've done more of that, as I've gotten older, as I've tried to re-engage more, I've realized the satisfaction that is in that. satisfaction that is in that. And the way you write about that in the book is lovely. So we are at the end of our time. The book is called The Abundance of Less, Lessons in Simple Living from

Rural Japan. I recommend it. There's lots of fascinating people in it. It's a really eye opening look at a very different way of life. And so Andy, thank you for taking the time to come on. It's such a pleasure. You're a fine interviewer and I really love what you're doing. Well, thank you so much. We'll talk again. Bye-bye now. Bye. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a donation to the One You Feed podcast. Head over to oneyoufeed.net slash support.

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