According to David Gessner, Henry David Thoreau offers a lesson in doing more with less:
Everywhere you look these days people are singing the praises of restraint and bemoaning the failings of sheer excess. Frugality, that unfashionable virtue, is suddenly back in fashion. How do we make our own home economics, our personal ledger sheet, balance with what is happening in the larger world? Although Thoreau did his share of finger-wagging, it isn’t his moralizing that interests me. What is truly exciting is what you might call his celebration of the joys of restraint, his thrill in self-abnegation, as long as it is self-abnegation for a purpose. Perhaps most vital for our moment is his deep-seated and deeply-lived belief, that one can live a good life, and an interesting and compelling life, by consciously doing with less instead of striving, incessantly, for more.
(Image: One of several drawings inspired by OWS by Guy Denning)
The Dish 