If you didn’t live through the mid-90s, early aughts you have no idea the ABSOLUTE chokehold the “Idiot’s” and “Dummies” guides had on the culture
I gave up most social media with never ending scroll news feeds and instead I focus on a few YouTube channels and Reddit feeds. It’s about an hour a day of entertainment for me and I ruthlessly remove any subs/channels that get too bogged down or repetitive. Recently, that was r/simpleliving.
Truthfully, it is because there were too many posts asking for advice. I realized that “simple living” content was trending a bit on tiktok, thus driving people to Reddit for advice on how to slow down. Cue myriad posts along the themes of: how do I get off of social media apps? How do I live a minimalist lifestyle? How do I stop shopping so much? I want to slow down but I have debt, help! How do I move to the country and start a homestead?
To summarize: these folks think simple living is moving to the country and having an *~aesthetic~* beige farmhouse where they own very few things, choose analog vs. Digital (except for, you know, their instagram reels), and instead of a job, they garden and feed their chickens in perfect makeup and unsoiled linen dresses. It’s basically what is being sold on carefully curated social media accounts (“Use my coupon code for 20% off a linen dress for the farmyard!”) and while it looks great, it’s completely unrealistic and most of these videos are unrelated to actually living a simpler life.
Can these things be part of a simple life? Yes, of course. Is it the only path to a simple life? Absolutely not.
I was writing about simplicity on livejournal in the late 90s/early 00s and I completely get the dream that lines up with the *~aesthetic~*. From my urban 500sq ft box in the sky, I dreamed of buying a farm that had a heritage farmhouse, sprawling gardens and farm animals. Centred around my bucoloic dreams was quiet – so much quiet! When we visited The Pharm[1] a few times a year I would soak in every moment in nature surrounded by rolling fields and a chorus of birdsong. The beauty! The nature! The quiet! Oh my!
As it turns out though, I never did move to the country. I ended up staying in the city, living in mid-century, quasi-urban suburbs. I was much happier being able to use public transportation and to live somewhere where I could walk or bike to the things I needed. When The Eldest was born, we didn’t even have a car. I walked to the grocery store, the library, the YMCA and playgroups. My kids grew up surrounded by friends and neighbours who would meet every day at the park for a few hours. In retrospect, that was a much more simple life for me than driving a half an hour to go anywhere. We now live even further from downtown than our old house was and I have what I really wanted all along: quiet & access to nature. We can walk to the river, the MUP/Trans-Canada trail and everything I need is within a 5 minute drive[2]. Both of the kids take public transportation to school and most of their friends live nearby. As it turns out, while the *~aesthetic~* of country living was appealing, I really do enjoy the amenities that come with living in a city. Of course, there is also the elephant in the room: being self-sufficient in the country is basically impossible if you are disabled. Had we even gone that route we would have absolutely have had to come back to the city in under less-than-ideal circumstances. But still, our life is generally pretty simple: we keep our formal activities to a minimum and focus on seeing our friends often but not in situations where we have to spend a ton of money. We may do takeout and a games night on the pricier end but we are also big fans of themed potluck get-togethers and homemade pizza and a movie.
Edward Carpenter popularized the term Simple Living in this essay
For most people, the turn to simple living is not actually about the bucolic ideal or minimalism but instead the dissatisfaction with their own lives. Simple living can be all or a few of these things:
1 – Minimalism – including digital minimalism.
2 – Frugality & watching your conspicuous consumption.
3 – Meditation/being present.
4 – Prioritizing relationships over things.
5 – Living your values, faith or spirituality.
6 – Homesteading/self-sufficiency.
7 – Environmentalism/social justice.
8 – Working less/reaching Financial Independence.
…and so on.
At its core though, Simple Living is a philosophy. It’s a way to structure your life so that you aren’t getting swayed by shiny things that sap your time, money and energy that don’t really add value to the quality of your life. It’s about drilling down to figure out what truly makes you happy and then aligning your life to focus on those things and letting the rest go. If you say you really want to spend more time with your best friend, why do you never make the plans? If you want to take a sabbatical from work and travel for 6 months, why are you spending so much money on Uber Eats? The point here is not to shame or judge people – we all have different wants, needs, and resources. It’s perfectly ok to move to a cabin in the woods but still own a fleet of classic cars that you work on and that bring you joy. The modern world is designed to separate you from your resources to line the pockets of others and simplicity is a process of unpacking where you want to spend your finite resources of time (including attention), energy and money. You are making a conscious effort to step off of the treadmill and figure out what really does serve you and focus on realigning yourself so that you are prioritizing those things.
But like everything else, there is only so many short form videos you can watch or influencers you can follow before the realization hits you: you need to do the work. That’s where the problem lies. Consuming content often feels like praxis but don’t let that confuse you; consuming content is just another way for tech companies to seize your most precious resource: your finite hours on this earth. The irony of consuming short form videos on how to lead a simple life via digital minimalism is not lost on any of us, for sure. But ya gotta start somewhere and if some random tiktok video encourages you to get your eyeballs off of social media, well great. There is a kind of justice in the universe if these social media companies lead you down the Simple Living path though, and I am here for it.
