asceticism

The opposite of exploitative game design isn't a life of asceticism; it's value for money. I'm not a big gamer, but on the first page of my phone's springboard I count $300+ of apps, some of which have ongoing subscription costs.

If it's only about getting rid of as much stuff as possible and spending as little as possible on everything, than it's more like asceticism than minimalism to me. Damn, let's just go back to caves, hunt for food and make own clothes!

> Over time, children’s books and magazines began to promote this type of Edisonian asceticism. I remember reading a children's book on goblins.

From reading the article, I think that you've went beyond minimalism and into straight-forward asceticism. Any opinion about that?

It was for this reason that he was able to be born with very little karma left, making him able to get enlightenment through his individual practice of asceticism. So he's the one who became a Buddha for the very first time from being a Bodhisattva.

I appreciate the bracing asceticism of Scheme, but I love the impossibly complicated English language.

I don't see the anti-car position as asceticism. Rather, I see it as a recognition of the basic fact that peoples' expressed preferences are hard to separate from government policy in this particular domain.

I pity the vegans because they voluntarily choose a form of asceticism, and are not likely to get any compensatory benefit for doing so. They choose to make their own lives more difficult, just like people who play games with unofficial voluntary conduct challenges.

Historic Christianity was accused, not entirely without reason, of carrying martyrdom and asceticism to a point, desolate and pessimistic. The early Christian martyrs talked of death with a horrible happiness.

The religion is notably fascinated with martyrdom, asceticism and persecution complexes. But that suffering has no purpose in overcoming tribulation when you're a near-lifeless bag of meat.

IMO the wants budget is one of the best parts of the Balanced Money Formula -- Warren and Tyagi assert that financial asceticism is counterproductive and that everyone deserves to have a wants budget, no matter their income. There are a handful of books I've read that I consider to have changed my life, this one is ranked #2 or #3 in that list.

Note that this is a separate issue from asceticism; market economies aren't incompatible with owning stuff, rather than stuff owning you, and bartering doesn't enforce asceticism.

In college, I found myself practicing a sort of configuration asceticism where all I needed to be productive was standard bash and vim. However, now that I'm a full-time software engineer I've found that by investing some time into configuration, I've optimized my common-case workflows tremendously and am much more productive as a result of it.

At the other extreme is asceticism, which supposedly can lead to a life of satisfaction and contentment, if not happiness, but it generally seems to be a case of extreme long-term optimization, with little if anything in the way of short-term rewards. In any case, it's not a realistic life choice for me, since I have a family and no desire to leave them behind to live in a desert monastery.

So I am not sure if that can be taken as promoting asceticism. Leaving mythology aside, different spiritual traditions strive towards different goals. Sikhism rejects outward asceticism... \n"Asceticism doesn't lie in the earring, nor in the shaven head, nor blowing a conch. Asceticism lies in remaining pure amidst impurities." Buddhism advocates a middle way, and is against too much asceticism as well as too much hedonism and in mahayana a vow working to benefit others...