Simple and Free: Study Guide: Staging Your Own Experiment Against Excess

Packed with tools and practices, this study guide takes us deeper into Simple & Free: 7 Experiments Against Excess by New York Times bestselling author Jen Hatmaker, helping us combat the areas of overindulgence and excess in our lives, freeing us to feel less stressed and more fulfilled.

In Simple & Free, first published as 7, Jen Hatmaker gave readers the story of how her reckoning with excess and materialism turned into a social experiment—which soon propelled a spiritual movement. Now, in this study guide, Hatmaker invites us to delve deeper into solutions and practices for our own seven areas of excess—from stress to spending to social media. This nine-week study guide walks us through these excesses and equips us with practical tools for creating solutions—and making this idea a way of life, not just an experiment.

Taking the best from Simple & Free and packing these points with Scripture followed by prompting questions, this resource is broken down into focused, thematically organized weeks for readers to explore patterns and solutions around sustainability and gratitude in greater depth.

What’s the payoff from living a deeply reduced life? It’s the discovery of a greatly increased connection with God—a call toward simplicity and generosity that transcends social experiment to become a radically better life.

Jen Hatmaker is the author of the New York Times bestsellers For the Love and Fierce, Free, and Full of Fire. She hosts the award-winning For the Love podcast, is the delighted curator of the Jen Hatmaker Book Club, and leads a tightly knit online community, reaching millions of people each week. Hatmaker is a co-founder of Legacy Collective, a giving community that grants millions of dollars around the world. She is a mom to five kids and lives happily just outside Austin, Texas, in a 1908 farmhouse with questionable plumbing.