Ratings4
Average rating3.5
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In a way, the author is preaching to the choir here when it comes to me. I'm a lover and practitioner of the minimalist lifestyle, and while I'm not a crunchy granola greenie, I am also trying to have a more zero waste lifestyle. But it can be wearying to be pounded with facts and figures again and again about how acquiring too much stuff is bad. I can't imagine how it must feel to those who are not completely onboard with his ideas! Towards the end, he eases the rhetoric a bit with personal stories about people who downshifted their lives, but they were short, a few paragraphs long only. I felt that the tone of this book could've been lightened if he had added more anecdotes to make his point more relatable. Facts and figures can get pretty mind numbing after the fifth chapter.
Still, John's message is important and should be heeded; I just felt that the execution wasn't good, neither would it inspire people to change.
Well researched. Lots of scary statistics, like more people go to the mall than to church each Sunday, more people declare bankruptsy than graduate from college each year, average size of homes more than double the size of homes in the 50's. Scary. Not a lot of possible solutions.