Simple Living

Note: I am not the original author of this text. It was originally posted to Reddit by /u/dime-a-dozen-00, who has given me permission to post it here.

This post doesn’t apply to everyone, specifically those experiencing loss or bereavement, but maybe it will in the future.

I have a habit of looking backwards in time and wishing I was in the good old days. When I was 20, I wished I could go back to my teens. When I was 30, I wished I could go back to when I was 20. I’m 35 now and I have a feeling when I am 40, I will wish for the life I have now.

So in short, there’s no time like the present. We don’t know how much time we have left so enjoy “the good old days” right now and make some memories.

Note: I am not the original author of this text. This post originally appeared on Reddit, posted by /u/Father_Idol, who has given me permission to repost it here. I have edited the title to be less accusatory, since this post is not appearing in its original context. References in the text to other posts are referring to posts on /r/simpleliving.

Hint: There is no such thing as an inherently simple job.

These posts pop up quite frequently but I feel like the amount we have had just in the past 48 hours is incredibly high. "I am quitting my job for the simple life"; "Can you live simple on a high salary"; "Am I doomed for a complicated life if I work 9-5".

You people are losing the forest through the trees. The path to simple living is through contentment and the path through contentment is by finding comfort in where you are. So if you are working a 9-5 job, ask yourself how YOU feel about that. If you aren't comfortable with that, ask yourself WHY. Explore YOUR motivations and thoughts. It is irrelevant what people on this board think about YOUR life (in general that is, of course targeted advice can be productive).

For example, some people find simple living through teaching English in Africa. I could never do that, it would be incredibly challenging, taxing, and not simple at all for me. But if someone chooses that path as a way towards simplicity, more power to them.

The point is, there is more than one path. Focus on self-reflection and find what works for YOU, not what other people want you to do.

To me it all started with bumping into r/minimalism years ago (shoutout to [email protected], the migrated r/minimalism) and reading books about it.

I noticed that with minimalism came simple living, enjoying the small things in life. I often feel like they are interconnected due to this, but this could just be my experience.

How many others had a similar experiences, or did something else bring you here? Also welcome experiences about directly searching for simple living topics and bumping into this community (originally on reddit).

Excuse the off-topic nature of this post but I am keen to see non-Reddit online communities succeed and wondered if others feel similarly.

Lemmy.ml was unfortunately a widely shared instance for Reddit migrants and became massively oversubscribed by users and new communities. I for one joined up here before I fully understood the nature of the Fediverse.

What I have noticed (and is widely reported elsewhere) is that lemmy.ml isn't federating properly with other instances, likely due to overload. The result is that users from other instances are missing huge chunks of comments or even entire posts from lemmy.ml based communities such as this one. Subscribe requests sit at pending perpetually. The result is a big barrier of entry to the community. The issue appears two way which communities form other instances not federating properly to lemmy.ml and lemmy.ml communities not federating properly to other instances.

Seeing this I recently created a new account on a different, quieter instance. On there my subscribes to non-lemmy.ml communities has been near instant. My subscription to this community and another on lemmy.ml is stalled.

Due to the nature of Lemmy, being on a popular instance provides clear visibility benefits to those who are users on that instance but at this time appears detrimental to those on others.

Is it worth considering moving this community to a less populated instance while it is still small so as to provide a more reliable experience for new users who otherwise may just quit due to tech frustrations and an apparent lack of content?

My wife and I lead a pretty simple life. I work from home at a low-stress job. She is a stay-at-home mom. We have a small house, a garden, and some chickens. But we have a 3-month-old and a two-year-old. Nothing about our life feels slow or simple. On top of watching the kids there's always tons cleaning to do and house repairs and upkeep. How do you balance things that aren't optional like vehicle/house maintenance, upkeep, and raising kids? Is simple living just a luxury of those who don't have kids?

Or are we already living simply and it just doesn't FEEL simple?

Note: I am not the original author of this text. This was originally posted by /u/GodoftheStorms on Reddit, who has given me permission to repost it here.

Hello everyone! I was asked by u/inasaba to post this here. This post was originally written for a subreddit for people with Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (a condition resulting from long-term trauma). However, most people, whether they have trauma or not, may benefit from the information in it.

We live in a world where time spent in solitary reflection and decompression is becoming increasingly scarce. With constant access to digital distraction at our fingertips, most of us have lost the "margins" that used to serve a useful reparative, restorative, and incubatory purpose in human life. Scheduling some periods of "intentional boredom" can help create such margins of time where we don't have to do anything and are freed to let life sink in, process and digest it, contemplate, plan, and regenerate motivation and rediscover a sense of who we are. The original post follows.

A while back, I watched this podcast with neuroscientist Dr. Andrew Huberman about dopamine. Dopamine is often misunderstood as the "reward" hormone. In reality, it's more of our motivation hormone: our brains produce dopamine when we are presented with the opportunity to get something we want. Dopamine is involved in motor activity (people with Parkinson's suffer from low dopamine levels, which causes motor dysfunction symptoms), and it primes us to get moving in the direction of things we might enjoy.

I think dopamine is a big key in why many of us with C-PTSD suffer from executive dysfunction and related issues like learned helplessness, avoidance/procrastination, and difficulty completing activities or projects. When our early environment is characterized by aversive stimuli -- sources of pain, punishment, shame, humiliation, abandonment, etc. -- rather than attractive stimuli (sources of happiness, excitement, satisfaction, fulfillment, etc.), our main goal in life becomes to avoid pain rather than to pursue pleasure. Everyone has some degree of things they want to avoid, but when that becomes our primary focus, we lose out on opportunities to develop the other motivation system: expansion, exploration, experimentation, curiosity, goal pursuit, etc. For most people, life feels as if it's filled with opportunities to pursue pleasurable goals. For those of us with trauma, however, life is an endless succession of hurt we must avoid.

I believe this screws up our dopamine systems. Every goal takes on a threatening aspect. Every action is fraught with danger. Every path is dangerous. Every pursuit risky. No wonder we don't want to go anywhere or do anything out of a very narrow comfort zone! Our naturally-inborn pleasure-seeking instincts get clouded up with anxiety. Life is like navigating a minefield of potential pain, hurt, disappointment, shame, humiliation, etc. What should be stirring up our dopamine and motivating us to take action actually leaves us feeling conflicted, afraid, confused, and overwhelmed.

What's more, life can often become a series of obligations: "I should go there" or "I must do that" or "I have to be this sort of person." This leaves no room for finding and pursuing what we want, need, value, etc. Life becomes either an escape from pain or the joyless fulfillment of obligations that don't belong to us. This naturally induces anger, resentment, and resistance. No wonder we find ourselves unable to act! No one wants to be made to pursue goals that don't belong to them, especially when the rest of their life is characterized by a lack of joy, pleasure, or satisfaction. How can we recover our natural motivation system in this landscape of fearful stimuli and "the tyranny of shoulds" (to quote psychoanalyst Karen Horney)? Life is hardly a captivating experience when these are our only options...

One starting place, for me, has been "scheduled boredom." Those of us with C-PTSD spend so much of our lives in this driven, relentless, breathless flight from pain or pursuit of externally-imposed goals. Scheduled boredom is similar to the pop-psychology trend of dopamine fasting, but simpler. Essentially, every day, I schedule a block or two of time in which I do nothing. I literally just sit and do nothing. I put my phone away, turn my laptop off, put away books, music, TV, etc. And I just allow myself to sit and get bored on purpose.

This seems to have two main benefits:

1. It gives me a break from constant stimuli, which can cause overwhelm, stress, and exhaustion. It allows me to "de-compress", slow down, and get reacquainted with what life actually is. You get back in touch with the slow pace of life, its quietness, its strange wonder. It gives me time to think and contemplate without distraction (a rare practice nowadays, but probably something most people did each evening or morning 100 or more years ago). Sometimes I do Focusing or some other form of self-inquiry, but mostly I just sit and wait. Sometimes an emotion will come up, and I will compassionately attend to it. Sitting and spending time with your emotions can be very healing in itself.
2. It actually stirs up motivation to do things.

One important point that Huberman makes is that dopamine is essentially a resource of which we have a finite store at any given time. If you expose yourself to stimuli that spikes your dopamine by a lot, you have less of it in the immediate aftermath. This is why we often feel "strung out" or possibly even depressed, apathetic, or anhedonic after experiencing a high. Even smaller stimuli compounded over time can reduce our dopamine levels in the long-term: compulsively checking the news or social media (including Reddit or Youtube) presents us with an endless stream of potentially intriguing content, and spikes our dopamine levels with each new thumbnail or heading. Somehow, sitting and not moving or doing anything gets me in the mood to do stuff.

At first, when you first start intentionally allowing boredom into your life, you will probably find the simple stuff calls out to you to be done: cleaning up, watering your houseplants, reorganizing the bookshelf, etc. Then, you will probably find more substantial stuff you will want to do. When you feel the impulse to do something (that isn't just surfing the internet or social media), get up and do it. That's a healthy impulse and deserves to be nourished. I've been practicing "scheduled boredom" several times a week in the evenings (and during the day, I try not to use social media or surf the internet until after lunch). During this time, I've found the motivation to do things and even taken up new pursuits that I would have just distracted myself or exhausted myself before discovering: reading poetry, learning to code in Python, reading books about the most random topics, learning to write comedy/stand-up, etc.

Hope this is helpful for others! Some further reading:

• Cal Newport: Have We Lost Our Tolerance for a Little Boredom?
• Veritassium: Why Boredom is Good for You
• Being bored can by good for brain health and boost creativity
• The Atlantic: The Surprising Benefits of Boredom

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.

Note: I am not the original author. This post originally appeared on Reddit, and the author has since deleted their account. I am archiving this post here so its advice isn't lost. I have made a quick pass in editing for typographical errors.

I'm a former art director in advertising, and thought I'd share a bit about ads

I had commented about advertising in a previous post, and got a bit of a reaction, so I wanted to share more in case anyone was interested in how advertising works.

First off, I'll say — I've been in advertising since I was 15, I'm 31 now. I quit the industry when I was 26 and am now doing UX design/branding for nonprofits, and super happy where I'm at now, still do a bit of advertising to promote the NPs.

Secondly — This isn't to say advertising is evil or bad or whatever, this is just what happens and how it works. I'm trying to stay very netural with the facts.

A few things about advertising

1. Modern advertising really only came to existence around ~1950s, you can research David Ogilvy. Basically he's the one who started really using storytelling in magazines to achieve a new imaginary lifestyle.
2. I'll highlight — Most consumer advertising is SUPPOSED to sell you on an imaginary lifestyle and teaches you that you lack something
3. Advertising targets your subconscious, You don't go around reading ads aloud all day, it's supposed to bypass your consciousness and target your fears/"desire center" in your brain. It triggers a tribalistic response from the fear of not fitting in ("Keeping up with the Joneses") or an "I'm lacking" response
4. There are teams of highly paid professional creatives and data scientists doing massive amounts of research to gain your attention for like 6 seconds, in order to subconsiously sell you a product or tell you you're missing something, fucking insane right?! But it's true!
5. It's all about winning your time and attention. At a certain point, it's not even about receiving your money, it's about planting the seed of "look at me, talk about me, remember me" because it will eventually turn into a profit somehow, whether it's you talking about it with your friends or actually purchasing the item.

Things we test in advertising

1. We hold focus groups to see which ads perform better. We pay "average consumers" for their time to interact with a product to make it more appealing to the general public (or maybe a target demographic)
2. They literally hold focus groups where they track pupil movement to see where people's eyes land on areas of an ad and for how long.
3. Lots of data is tracked, including heat maps on websites. Many websites will install heat maps to see where their users click the most, and then alter their websites as needed to gain more interest.

Here are ads that you may not know are ads

1. Every logo. Every logo is an advertisement. Nike has literally people PAY $$$$ to be a walking billboard for them... incredible!
2. "Native articles" — these are articles that are sponsored by, say, your local cable company. But it won't outright say that it's sponsored, it may have a tiny line on the very bottom of the article saying that it's sponsored by them. Many listicles are likely to be sponsored or paid for by whatever company is being promoted in the listicle.
3. Published studies. Now this fucking sucks and is why I very rarely read or believe anyone nowadays. Most published studies are funded by companies in their own self-interest. That article you read about wine being good for you? Probably funded by someone in the alcohol industry. Phillip Morris (cigarette company) both owns the cigarettes AND the nicotine patch brands. So this company is profiting off your addiction and your recovery and probably publishing studies with off-brand names quoting an "independent study" but it's really just them. The "doctors" they interview are likely to be paid sponsors. Many many many large companies have this going on, you, as an average consumer, probably just don't know about it.
4. Curated content — Social media influencers are the most obvious, they can make anywhere between $500–$100k on a post that has "product placement" in it, even if they aren't directly promoting it. Say you see a popular person wearing a Chanel bracelet in a post, you can guarantee Chanel sent them that for free (and maybe then some.) Influencers also include your million+ subscriber YouTube channels, even if it's some tech reviewer — he's likely being paid in products or whatever to say certain things, despite how much they claim they're not being paid for opinion. They're being paid to put a product in front of 1M subscribers, that's enough to sway public opinion.
5. Guerilla marketing. There are a lot of stunts being pulled in public that you may not know are marketing. Bartenders can be told which alcohols to promote. Grocery cashiers ask you if you want to donate to St Jude's Children's hospital. Someone on the street asks you to take a picture with their "Really cool Sony Camera". Etc. That's all advertising
6. Word of mouth advertising. This is the most effective form because it's person-to-person within your social group. How many times have you had a friend try something and then they're like "omg we have to go here!" that's word of mouth. Then they plan on taking you and 6 friends to this new nightclub. Now that night club has your business. And they didn't have to pay anything for you to say it.

Some thought/experiments to really nail in what's going on:

1. For every billboard you see today, I want you to imagine that there's a group of 10 people shouting at you to buy the product, because that's essentially what the team of creatives is doing. It just so happens to be a silent image that's doing all the shouting, but rarely do people understand or notice it.
2. Take an hour out while walking around your town to count how many ads you see in that time. Logos count! Shop names count! Like, if you pass by 20 cars parked, how many logos do you see that you finally become aware of. This is what your brain is soaking up even though you're not conscious of it. Your brain filters out a bunch of the noise, but there's a term "reach and frequency" that is why Nike puts its logos on every single item of clothing. Because seeing a logo over and over and over again is basically teaching you to remember it.
3. Take some blue painters tape, and tape over every logo you see in your house. Food labels, router logo, tech logos. This is just in your house.

There is an article somewhere that says an average person sees about 6000 ads per day. While I can't say that I've researched past that article, as someone who has been in the "war rooms" of ad agencies, I can absolutely say that I'm not surprised it isn't more.

You subconsciously have to say "no" over and over and over again, and a lot of people just don't have the bandwidth to ignore 6000 ads every day for the rest of their life. Something, somewhere, is going to give. Once you become consciously aware of advertising, it's easier to channel that "desire trigger" into things like "I know I'm gonna want to spend money, but I'm going to spend it on educational courses or on music lessons for myself or personal training sessions or investing, instead of crap I don't need."

So to end this, don't be hard on yourself if you can't avoid the ads. On a single day you probably bypass "thousands" of people trying to sell you things in the form of advertisements. It's a lot.

My suggestions is to: Go into nature more, meditate more, figure out what you want to channel your spending into, find free activities, opt out of buying from big companies, opt out of mailing lists, opt out of shopping malls, opt out of Amazon.

EDIT: Wow guys thanks so much for the really great comments and conversation and awards!! I really enjoyed sharing this and really happy you guys found this so interesting (advertising is definitely an interesting field). I tried to respond to as many comments as I could, but it's definitely worth the read in the comment section if you have the time to. There's more info from people in the industry too who have more insights than I gave on the original post

More avoidance techniques: Get an adblocker, take side streets instead of main streets (if it's safe to — less advertising on neighborhood/side streets), focus on the nature when you're walking down the street, spend time in front of water (ocean/lake/rivers/lagoons), cover up the logos in your house, get into brandless packaging.

This appeared while cutting up some firewood on the homestead.

Despite most of my favorite subreddits reopening, I can't in good conscience continue to use Reddit. The whole community might not totally move, but I hope this can be our own little happy corner.

In the spirit of simplicity, I've actually been enjoying the slow roll of new posts on my subscribed feed. I know this might not be forever, but I'm enjoying it for now. I realized I've been following too many subs that I don't care about anymore. So it's been nice to have a fresh start too!

This is an incisive look at simple living beyond the self from a quaker point of view.

When we practice simple living, we collectively say a resounding no to the consumerism, materialism, and waste of modern industrial society.

But how often do we ask ourselves whether our simple living actually does enable other people to live?

I have two options now. Working in a simple not well paid job i am trained in or continue working in IT. I would leave coding and switching to Helpdesk in IT since I burned out as a programmer. I believe the tech industry propaganda brought me to programming so I left the simple job I'm thinking going back to again.

What are you currently reading? And bonus points if you can somehow find a connection to simple living, even if it is not about simple living.

I'll start: I'm currently reading The Arabian Nights by Sir Richard Burton and.. well it is grim but I love the simplicity of the short stories. I can pick the book, read a page or two inbetween chores while relaxing, and put the book back down.

(Sorry mod if this does not fit the community, I'll delete if it doesn't!)

Welcome, everyone! For anyone like myself who appreciates a nice, clean interface, I thought I'd write a quick guide on how to remove some of the extraneous stuff.

The first step is to open the settings page. This link will work if you're a lemmy.ml user, but for others you can click your username in the top-right corner and then click "Settings."

Type: switching from "Local" to "Subscribed" will show you only communities that you have subscribed to on your homepage by default.

Show Avatars: unchecking this will hide all user and community avatar images, making Lemmy more in-line with old Reddit.

Show Scores: unchecking this is certainly not necessary, but a bit of a more radical experiment I'm doing. I personally find that being able to see my vote scores can lead to me wanting to refresh my profile to see how things are doing. This setting removes that desire!

Hope this helps you transition to Lemmy. Have a great day!

The folks there were simply the best. But now we're here! What brings me joy today? The hummingbirds outside my window drinking the nectar I've provided.