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.
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.