Note: I am not the author of this text. This post was originally submitted to /r/simpleliving on Reddit by /u/penartist, who has given me permission to repost it here.
Someone asked me the other day what simple living meant to me. The title was my response. Simple living is “crafting a life I don’t need a vacation from, that allows me to live in alignment with my values.”
I find a lot of people have this notion that you need to minimize how much you work in order to live a simple life. My personal experience has been that crafting a life you don’t need a vacation from can happen even when you work 40 hours a week. It is a mater of prioritizing how you spend your time outside of work.
Exercising and getting enough sleep are important as these two things can set your mood for everything else. Not overscheduling yourself and leaving lots of room for downtime. It is ok to have nothing to do. I also found that removing things that were time sinks was most helpful. It’s easy to spend a few hours in front of a tv screen, scrolling the internet, watching YouTube videos etc., and feel like you didn’t do anything.
My husband and I have always found a way to live a simple life right where we are. We were careful to not over extend our obligations outside of work so that we have lots of down time and don’t feel like we need a vacation or too escape our day to day lives. We “right sized” our home to a small apartment to remove the need for yard work, home maintenance and upkeep. This freed up a huge amount of our time and our energy for things that we want to do. We removed tv from our home as well as it was a time sink and limit screen time.
We go to the farmers market on Saturday mornings and purchase produce for the week. We shop small and local and we cook from scratch. We spent time biking the rail trail and hiking in the state park or the forest near our apartment on the weekends when the weather is good. We read or play cards in the evenings, and we enjoy attending art openings and exhibitions, and live theater performances done by our local theater company on occasion. We listen to LPs and podcasts while creating art and I also enjoy knitting.
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Grear share, and I think over scheduling and overcommittingis my biggest struggle. Makes me think that a good ways understanding the simple living philosophy is that it’s the opposite of complex/complicated living, doing what you can to remove complexity and increasing time and headspace.
I tend to be one of those people who wants to say yes to everything. That’s partially because I’m a people pleaser and don’t want to disappoint. But I’m trying to be better about protecting my time. If something doesn’t get a “hell yeah” gut reaction from me, it’s probably best that I decline. “Present me” tends to overestimate how excited “future me” will be about some commitment.
Having said that though, it should be a healthy balance I think. Some of the better experiences I’ve had have been ones where I was initially reluctant about them but ended up being glad I did them.
So… Balance. Protect your time. But it’s also okay to occasionally step out of the comfort zone.
I have definitely struggled with this over the years as well. I used to agree to every single volunteer event I was approached about, and at its peak that meant two events a week. I got very socially exhausted from it, and had to learn how to set healthy boundaries.
There’s a lot of truth to this. My life is currently not “simple” as such but it’s also not something I feel the need to run away from, and as the OP said it’s all a matter of prioritising.
I’m a big fan of knowing your core values, precisely because it helps to you make these decisions and prioritise what’s actually important to you versus what you wish was important to you.
My most important value, for example is freedom. I sometimes wish it was something that would lead me to a stable well-paid career, but it’s not. So I’m self-employed and definitely not rich, but much much happier.
Next up is creativity, so as well as going down a creative path for self-employment I also make sure to schedule in plenty of time to just…creatively play. Crafts, drawing, generally making a mess, etc etc.
TLDR work out your core values and everything follows from that.
I think knowing your core values is so important. Over the years on /r/simpleliving, I have seen hundreds of people asking the same questions:
- where should I move to to live simply?
- what kind of job should I take to live simply?
- should I have kids or not?
As I wrote in my introduction post, nobody can answer these questions for us. A place or a job that I find simple may not resonate the same way with someone else. I feel like these kinds of questions are typically posed by anchorless people, who don’t know their own core values. They know they are unhappy with their status quo, but can’t identify what they truly desire. All they know is that they want to get away, to try something different.
Which is why I advocate that people do introspection before they start making big changes to their lives. Only once we know what truly matters to us can we begin to build a life around those things!
Thanks for sharing. I think it’s an interesting way to approach life. I’ve found myself trying to get the most out of life by scheduling my free time so I can make sure I’m not wasting time. It broke down for me when I’d find myself not wanting to do that thing and then feeling guilty about wasting my time instead of acknowledging it’s ok to take time to make sure I’m in a good space.
I’m not at the “don’t need a vacation” phase but it’s a great idea to consider so thank you!
This post resonated with me because I always personally found the concept of taking a one-week vacation in another country, only to return to your high-stress job and immediately hate your life again completely absurd. It really makes me wonder if that week off is really worth how much we spend on it — and the irony is, a lot of us work so hard so that we even can take that one-week vacation in another country.
I would rather work less and not need to detox from my life. I’m certainly not there yet, but I like to think that I’m doing better than I was at points in the past. I think my goal is to not have to “look forward” to stat holidays, and to just be pleasantly surprised when I have an extra day to myself.
