Over the summer of 2014, I started readying a new blog: Mr. Money Mustache. His style is pretty fun--way more readable than most frugality and personal finance blogs. His tips are actionable and he's entertaining.

His post from yesterday, MMM Challenge: Can You go Car-Free This Weekend?, gave me new insight into what I mean by simplicity.

From my computer's desktop background: Simplicity.

Simplicity is one of my standards of integrity, a set of three words encompassing my values. I developed these as part of an exercise from Acton's life of meaning course. They sit on my desktop background, at the top of my annual journal's aspirations, and elsewhere in my life.

Mr. Money Mustache's idea of living a local life challenges and deepens what I mean by simplicity. In a post challenging readers to not use a car this weekend, he writes:

What I’m really hoping we can all learn about is living a local life. You can become friends with the people who live right around you. There are trees and hills and features of your environment that you miss completely if you never slow down to actually live where you live.

Choosing a calm lifestyle, my definition of simplicity, means picking where you live and then actually living there. It's being local.

* And no, I'm not becoming sucked into "organic-slowfood-wholefood-localfood pretentiousness", but thanks for asking.