The World is Flat Broke and Happier For It, says Pico Iyer

http://happydays.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/the-joy-of-less/

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“I left my comfortable job and life to live for a year in a temple on the backstreets of Kyoto. My high-minded year lasted all of a week, by which time I’d noticed that the depthless contemplation of the moon and composition of haiku I’d imagined from afar was really more a matter of cleaning, sweeping and then cleaning some more.

“But today, more than 21 years later, I still live in the vicinity of Kyoto, in a two-room apartment t