Shanghai ranks 21st among 140 cities worldwide in living cost on The Economist's Worldwide Cost of Living Index 2014 report. But according to a frugal Shanghai couple who claim to have only spent about 20,000 yuan ($3,221) for the entire year of 2014, there's hope for those of us who do not live to consume.

As reported by the couple in a now-viral post they wrote on tianya.cn, a leading Chinese online forum, the 43-year-old man and his 39-year-old wife are retired with pensions and do not have children. They own an apartment in Shanghai, but needn't pay mortgage. They only eat at home and they buy all their food in local wet markets at a cost of 1,000 yuan per month, along with a 50 yuan tea allowance and 300 yuan for watermelons in the summer. Four thousand yuan is spent on basic monthly utilities (water, gas, electricity, phone, Internet, television and property management). The couple does not socialize. Usually they ride bikes, but the occasional public transportation expense comes to 50 yuan.

Igniting a heated discussion online, many netizens criticized the couple for neither working nor having a social life, and others encouraged them to leave Shanghai and move to a second- or third-tier city to enjoy the lower price and slower life.

However, I believe that this couple has demonstrated how simple, and cheap, life could be in a megalopolis like Shanghai if we as a society were willing to just let go of our materialistic demands.

An extreme lifestyle such as theirs would of course be tough for many of us whom have grown accustomed to the "work hard, play hard" mentality of China's middle classes. But as the couple said in their post, simply by not having jobs they are free of the stress that tends to weigh heavily on professionals. Instead, they spend their days out in the sunshine.

They also boasted that by cooking at home with all-natural foods, they avoid the additives and unsafe ingredients often put into meals by restaurants and factories, thereby leading all-around healthier lives.

An argument can be made that this penny-pinching couple are failing to contribute to our domestic and local economies by neither paying taxes nor consuming, which benefits society through a trickle-down process, and that by not having children they are indirectly causing a shrinking workforce, which imperils future growth. The aging, depopulating society and economic stagnation of Japan, for example, are an unfortunate result of similar collective selfishness.

While these are all valid points that affect us and future generations of citizens, ultimately the lesson we can take away from this couple's example is not how to live cheaply or evade our social responsibilities, but that by ridding ourselves of at least some of the luxurious comforts we kill ourselves, metaphorically and literally, to attain, life could be so much easier.

In a time when so many people in our glittery, glamorous city are desperately seeking wealth and possessions, it takes real courage to go against the norm and try to live humbly. Shanghai residents tend to feel that only by buying and consuming will they attain a good life.

But this brave couple has single-handedly proven that not only can we survive without material possessions, but we can be happy without them too.