Andy Couturier on Increasing your Happiness by Simplifying Your Life

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 Wolfe 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 and Simple Living from Rural Japan. This episode is brought to you by health i Q. To see if you qualify and get your free health quote, go to health i q dot com. Slash wolf or mentioned the promo code wolf and you talk to a health hike you 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 and 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. 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. 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 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, um. But also I'm interested in this idea of always at battle um. And you know, we can't fail to notice that there's a male, young male and an older male. And I thought about the people that I wrote about in the Abundance of Lesson. I thought, Wow, they don't really seem to be in this state of struggle. Um.

It doesn't seem to be going on for them. And yet the same time, they've made very conscious choices to move away from consumerism. And greed is one of the keywords you use there, and I thought it's a powerful word, but it's also a tricky word. And it's an obvious thing when you say, think about someone taking from a child, or taking something from a poor person, or a landlord raising rent, or someone maximizing the return on investment on

their stock portfolio. But one of the people I wrote about said is he said the farmer, he said, don't be greedy with the soil. Realize what it's 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, what how can I maximize my productions? So to me, on some level, there's 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 are driving us and um and by meeting these people, at first I thought they were just vindicating my own pre held beliefs,

but in fact, um they were. 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, Um, I was living in world Japan, Um, I've always loved the countryside in the early nineties, and just by chance

doing some environmental activism, I met some people. Originally one woman who is a anti nuclear activist UM back in twenty 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 is to earn enough money to buy some land in uh northern California when we came back to the States and grow our own food and build our own house. We had already had that idea, and but we had no idea

that anyone was doing that in Japan. And when we went up there, not only was just physically so beautiful, these terraced rice paddies where people have planted vegetables and flowers and fruit trees uh and the old farmhouses dotting the hillside and the cedar forests and many of the um otsuko. As a woman, her 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 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, they're living overseas in India and Nepal and sometimes to meet in China, connecting in with those well springs of Buddhist and Hindu thought and bringing them to actuality in their

day to day lives. And so I thought my Japanese got better and better at speaking to them in Japanese. I realized these are very profound thinkers, and that they figured out some things that I think will 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 speech Japanese could meet

them and learn there. I don't want to call them secrets, learn learning these in some ways obvious pieces of wisdom that we've gotten so alienated from, just from the way we live every day. Yeah. Right in the title, you you can 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 the 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 the internet, you can stream Netflix. And it's not

that nobody does that. And you know, I don't do that or that that's necessarily a bad thing. But in many ways, UM, whether it's the drama of growing your own food and or um just the connection with the natural world or um. In many cases you're 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 and having um know and industrialized culture deliver you something that makes you laugh or

cry or um distract you that actually, UM. A lot of the ways of thinking that we have that are unsustainable are based in industrialized production methods that we buy into because of just the way we thought, we think, and 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 style sounds a little bit more like a fashion. But

either where do you use uh. Their way of life is slow, it's humble, UH, it's peaceful, it's connected to their community, it's um connected to their own time for contemplation. I would say that's the key word is 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. 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 dad's may only see their kids on Sundays or Sunday afternoons, or they may be living in a different city, and and the chance to really connect with their children is it's not really entertainment either. It's 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? 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 is so hectic, you know, 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. And I don't think I could even improve on that at all. I guess I would just go from there. Is so, well, if that sounds great, how do we get there? And um, I think we particularly now with the internet culture, we're used to these five quick hacks to a more sustainable life for you know, better inner peace, and well, those

things are valuable on another level. Really, it's not just about you know, making a little tweak here and they're putting solar panels on the house or driving a more efficient car, changing lightbulbs out. Um that it's about really re orienting 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 this crazy, or my schedule is crazy, as if someone did that to them.

And certainly there are people all of 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 shimera of like all my life needs to be enjoyed noble 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 out 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 asked me, how do you do this, is did really take some time out of your um 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. Are 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, and and then trying to fill that with convenient devices that will give you back your time, when in fact is as Usha Amimia, one of the people in the

book said, she said, convenience just speeds you up. And that was one of those moments for you when I realized that it was actually my subliminal belief that all I needed to do was get something, you know, designed the system then here, and then I would be happier, We'll have more time. And in fact it's the opposite that I'm using on these devices just to cram more into my day. And here's the rest of the interview with Andy 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, 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 it gets at the heart of what you were just saying a minute ago about well, is this just a

small tweak here there? What is this? You were doing an interview with somebody else and they refer 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 book was written twenty seven years ago, UM moved more and more in that direction, you know, less media consumption or more time rereading a particular book or listening to the recording of a poem again 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 um for a couple of years or more in their youth in these um 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 UM, 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 wanted to start before I do that, saying that this is the modern conundrum of credible resource use. UM, the suffering that that causes to the planet. People, UM say in a sweatshop in China. You know, 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 and maybe maybe there is a larger change, um that people will feel motivated to make. And um, certainly a number of people who've read my book have written to me and I 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 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. Um. I would say, just to think about in what ways you are creating, as I said in the book, misery for yourself, by 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 wrong person? If

I'm not dressed in the finest studs? 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 brush with death, they wake up to that, and um, 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 forty five 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 both

I simplify, simplify. I now live in a studio apartment with my partner and the dog, and I have my closeye office for writing and teaching writing here, and we used to live it in one bedroom and before that a two bedroom, and each step has actually made me much happier. It's less to deal with. Um. 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, um, 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 of 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 part way 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 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 turned out that the focus was on circus arts and it was like little workshops on juggling and um clowning

and things like that. And the person there was talking about the difference between they did some research on people who were circuits arts performers or people who are 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 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 do gaming. But just if you think about, say, juggling, and they talked about you know, 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 is it turns out to be a lot more sadist body. But the point I want to make is this, like say you decided, wow, I really have always been so fascinated by juggling, I'll learn how to

do it. And you spend a lot of time doing that. Again, you're not besides buying your juggling balls, you know, spending a lot of money on it um, And you're interacting with your own body and your own self, and you're in many ways, uh deepening into that practice, and you're not rushing somewhere else to at the next thing to a 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 could be knitting, a crocheting, it could be drawing, it could be UM, interviewing people as you do, UM writing many of my writing students, you know,

they get such satisfaction. And then the answer might come, well, I need to make a lot of money for my rent, or you know, I have these obligations and certain obligations. You know, one's chosen to have children, and UM, that can't be just easily changed, nor would one want them to be. But at the same time, UM, and I should bring up children later. But let's I want to finish this point. Um, there's a way that we can

can deepen into fewer things. And maybe 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 um, car payments are too high, you know, 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. Yeah, at the same time those kids and I saw them grow up, and I interviewed some of the kids in the book. Why were they well rounded and why were they smart and connected in ways that a lot of the kids I was teaching who were on CRAM school, you know, famous university track that you hear about so much in Japan, just we're not And in many ways they ended up more satisfied as young adults in their lives, and you know they were they were still able to do what they wanted to do.

So even with kids, I think that there's no requirement that you have to generate a huge amount of money. If you're enjoying this conversation, I hate to be the bearer of bad news. We are nearing the end of it. I wish you could keep listening once the episode ends. Well, I've got some good news too. You can. The interview continues over at one you feed dot net slash support there.

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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 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 you know, really more from if we're if we're looking at our lives today and go, well, this 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 consumers economy is definitely part of that. Absolutely, and they have I'm not you know, sometimes you might write something you think back later, I'll maybe I overstated that, or I'm not sure that was true, or when I came back and met that person, they wasn't so much

the case. Well, that has not been the case some of these people, as I said, I've known over a quarter of a century, and um, as they've grown older, as their kids have grown up, as changes that have happened, and even the heartbreak of the Fukushima nuclear accident or I don't even know if we can call it an accident, but um all of those things, they're still living profoundly satisfied live. 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, um, But maybe maybe you know, 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, may it may

indeed be a huge change. Um, 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 a coach. Um. I say, no one needs to 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. 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 know, when you're touching the soil

and digging in it. It's just a great thing to do. Um. You know, you are actually living that satisfaction in that moment, and you'll probably want to do it more and more. Um. 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 problems with the rich in the elites, um, but there's only so many Maserati's they can drive. There's not that many of them. It's really, in some sense, uh, 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 of elephants and rhinos and 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 is. Um. It's 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 is like I can't handle that, I need another drink or I need to you know, 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. Yeah, exactly. The other thing that several of the people in the book mentioned, 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 would stove, when they're living in an old house, and um, they're growing your

own food. And you think, oh, yes, this is pre industrial civilization and here they are living in it and it's not even a re enactment 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 Otsuko um watched not be 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 and to um, I'm not necessarily seeking after the biggest amount of pleasure,

the biggest amount of comfort. So for example, in her case, she lives in the village that has a lot of forests and there's lumber mills and they just throw away all of this scrap lumber and otsico and her husband GOOFU. I just didn't want to see it go to waste, so they said, well we'll take it. And so um they use that to cook their food, and they find it fascinating to cook was fired. It's more difficult than just turning on a gas stove. Um, and yet there's

a pleasure in it. And it seems it's fascinating to look at the fire and to understand fire. And so on many many levels, people are choosing what they want to do. Another example is Mr Knackamoda, who you also mentioned. He's a woodblock harbor and um, his feeling is that he wants to build. His sensitivity is aware is of all the things in the life world, is sensitivity to his own life. Um, not just because it's pleasurable, but

also because he feels. He calls it his greatest safety net is you know, whenever you get into a deep trouble, whether that's your 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 purchased products out of his problems is a way to build that sensitivity and that that pleasure in his life. So you know, that's why you

see travel posters always have nature. There's this connection with nature that we want to have. UM. And even when there's pictures of cities, it's often you know, say a beautiful old building, something that's made by hand. I think there's something that gives us a lot of pleasure and enjoyment looking at it, just touching it. Just 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. UM, 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 um. Everything was hand tools, And I'm not saying that to brag, but just to point out that it was a lot slower um, but that the

connection I had to the wood into learning. How you know, I made a lot of mistakes and bent nails, and there was frustration. But now when I'm in that cabin and I hear the rain on the roof and I feel protected and warm and the fire going in the fireplace, that kind of satisfaction is just so different than turning on a thermosta at or sending in a check to

a landlord. Um. So back to your question of the 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 uh for himself like me, I mean, I just generally tend to take things that are more manual and outsource those. Um 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 that is in that so and 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 and Simple Living from Rural Japan. I recommend that 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 our fine interviewer, and I really love what you're doing. Well. Thank you so much. We'll talk again by now bye.

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