Aristotle, in his Nicomachean Ethics, denigrates ‘paid employment’ as an unacceptable lifestyle, that, he says, absorbs and degrades the mind. He means, I guess, that a regular job with regular hours occupies so much of one’s being there’s little time for what is truly important: contemplation.

Jumping ahead a couple of millennia, Henry David Thoreau arrived at a similar conclusion. H. D. determined, living as he did in a small cabin in the woods, that to live one’s life fully, within the natural world one must resist the draw of materialistic society.

And certainly, many more individuals throughout time have opted for a life on the fringes of society to pursue an existence of deeper personal meaning. What they have provided us, through their disciplined, frugal lives, is a vision of beauty and meaning that benefits us all.