Simple Living is a Ton Better Than Complex Living

Simple living is about focusing on the things that matter and getting rid of things that don’t. Too many people live with a complexity bias. Many believe that the more complex and busy their life is, the better they must be. In the end, they just end up making things more complicated that they are. That is not the goal.

The complexity bias is real. For some reason, people favor solutions and things that are more complex than simple. It gives them much more comfort. It makes them feel smart. If I told people to come up with a problem that makes the answer 4, very rarely will they say 2+2 = 4.

Instead, they’ll come up with 2 + 5/5 – 3 + 2 + 2 = 4. Or things along those lines. It makes them feel smart and it makes them look smart to the outside world as well. Rather, the smartest answer should be the 2 + 2 = 4. It requires the most minimal effort to get to the result. Working harder does not mean better. It means more effort.

Therefore, simplicity is better than complexity. It’s better to focus on one thing at a time and do it very well than to focus on a lot of things and do them in a mediocre way. Simple living encourages people to live with what provides them with the most value and to cut out what provides low value.

Don’t be that person who has 100 friends with weak relationships with all of them. Be the friend who has 10 friends who are loyal to you and you are loyal to them. Quality matters more than quantity. It’s going to be much more difficult to keep up with the lives of a 100 people, anyway.

Simplify your life and make it better.

What is Simple Living?

Simple living is when you find inner peace and being content with what you have. It is different for everybody and there is no quantitative and standardized definition for it. However, a good definition of living simply is when you are content with what you have and aren’t chasing for more.

It’s about living with less than what is needed. Not more.

Please do not mistake content with boredom. By definition, boredom should not mean that you are content with life. It means you want more things, which is not being content. However, content means that you are not bored with life.

Many things don’t matter in simple living. Things such as status, popularity, and material possessions are big things that don’t matter. It’s actually a close relative to the minimalist lifestyle. Possessions or material things are useful tools in your life.

However, they are not the things that bring you the big things in life that matters.

If material things matter to you, it creates obligations. Doesn’t that word just gives you the creeps? It forces you to have to do something. You don’t want to have to do something, you should want to do something. Complexity creates obligations while simplicity doesn’t.

Simple Living is Better Than Complex Living

Simple living lets you make better decisions and have increased productivity. It also lowers any amount of dependency you have. If you don’t want anything from anyone, then you are self-reliant.

That’s why wanting less is better than wanting more. Once you want something from somebody, you are at their mercy. You are at a weaker position than if they came to you wanting something. People rarely give something for nothing. In the times that they do, there are hidden strings that you have to watch out for.

Additionally, you don’t have to make as many decisions when you live simply. A simple diet means that you may eat the same thing every few days. Therefore, you don’t need to plan anything and go through the motions of thinking about what you need to eat or cook.

For me, I eat a Chipotle burrito bowl for five days out of the week. It’s healthy, it’s delicious, and it gives me all of the calories that I need in order to function throughout the day. I don’t need to go through the motions of planning my meals because it’s already done for me.

That leaves room and time to focus on other things that add more value to my life. There are no “what should I eat today” questions that I asked in the past year. That’s entirely by design and that’s how exactly I want to keep it. Figuring out the answers to that question takes a lot of mental energy for me.

That’s how I compete against others. By freeing my time up for the big picture decisions that I have to make in a day.

Tangible Steps to Simple Living

One way to practice simple living is for you to SMASH that social share button and post to your favorite social media! Your friends could live simpler as well and this article can better their life.

In seriousness, there are tangible steps that you can take to live simply. You’ll notice a significant decline in your stress levels once you simplify and stop worrying about things that will not matter in a day, week, or year. You will live in bliss.

1) Declutter Your Email

Anytime you get an email that you don’t really want, unsubscribe to it. Immediately. These days, people read and receive emails through their phone. It’s much easier than ever to navigate through the bottom of the email and click “unsubscribe”.

If an email requires you to go through additional steps such as providing a reason why you are unsubscribing or asking to confirm the email address, then promptly move that email to the Spam folder. It gives you peace of mind to clean up your emails.

It’s much better to have a “0” next to the email app icon than “5,000”.

Most people who have 5000+ unread emails generally means they have spam email in their unread folder. It doesn’t take a long amount of time to decide whether an email should be counted as junk or unsubscribed to. As soon as you read the subject line, that should be the first decision you make.

You’ve saved minutes from your future self receiving the same unwanted email. The power of simple living.

2) Evaluate Monthly Expenses

Do you really use your Netflix subscription? If so, how often do you use it? If the answer is once a month or hardly ever, it’s time to get rid of it. There’s no reason to continue paying money for service that you don’t use. You might as well be giving money away to someone else.

This goes for gym memberships, as well. Most people get gym memberships around New Year’s to take care of their New Year’s resolution. By March, they won’t have used their membership. A subscription’s based service can provide valuable benefits, ONLY if you actually take advantage of the benefits.

I realized that I rarely used Amazon anymore to make a purchase. I have most of the things that I want and if I don’t, I can bundle $25 worth of goods so that I qualify for free shipping anyway. Therefore, I cut out my Amazon Prime membership for the first time in 8 years.

That’s $120 a year that I save, which is a good chunk of money for me.

3) Live on Necessities

That doesn’t mean live with no electricity or furniture. Yes, you don’t need electricity to exist. Cavemen have done it for many years. However, you don’t want to be a caveman anymore. That species of people don’t exist these days. What the advice does mean is to live with less things in your possession.

Simple living allows you to live on just one car, one phone, one TV, and the like. There’s no need to have multiples of each, even if you can afford it. All you really need is one. You don’t need two houses to live in, you just need one. Excluding investment properties.

Fun money also counts as a part of necessities. You need to live life instead of trying to save every penny that you possibly can. There are many things that are accounted for in my fun budget, such as out of town trips, vacations, and city exploration.

As a result of fun money, I continue to enjoy life. You should incorporate it into your budget as well.

4) Practice Consistency

Variety may be the spice of life but it’s the enemy of progress and simple living. Progress in diet, schedules, and personal finance is easy with consistency. Routines are good. Most of your life should be fixed on a schedule and routine tasks. It should be 85% routine and 15% variety, not the other way around.

It’s tiring to eat chicken every single day for a year. Therefore, you should eat chicken on M/W/F and eat beef on T/TH, as an example. You shouldn’t sporadically invest $1,000 one day then decide to invest another $1,000 after an entire year passes. Rather, invest a set percentage of your income every time you get a paycheck.

Schedule your investments. Day in, day out, without fail. After 3 years, you will notice meaningful results. Much better results than if you sporadically decided to invest.

5) Adopt a Minimalist Lifestyle

Simple living and minimalist lifestyle are connected. Both want you to live with less, not more. When you were a kid, there wasn’t a whole lot of things that you needed. You didn’t need a phone nor did you need exorbitant decorations around the house.

As we grow older, we decide that we need all of those things and spend more money than we should. What happened?! I’m not saying go back to the times when you were ten years old. I’m saying learn from some aspects of your younger life. When things didn’t matter as much as you think they do now.

6) Focus on One Goal at a Time

You’ll be much more likely to finish your goals if you don’t multitask. Simple living is all about putting all the focus on things that matter the most and avoiding things that don’t. You don’t realize it but making a decision takes a lot more brainpower than you think.

You have to understand and identify the problem first. Then you have to figure out a good solution. That takes mental power to do so. If you want to practice simple living and declutter your thoughts, focus on one thing at a time.

Right now, my focus is on becoming a millionaire. I don’t add other big life goals to my list. One other goal I want to accomplish is to start a company. I haven’t started it nor do I have goals to do so right now because that would be casting too wide of a net.

Focus on one thing and how to do it really well before moving onto the next project.

7) Learn to Say No

If you’re not excited about something, say no. It’s better to have nothing than it is to have a bad thing. One of my friends asked to go to a concert. The concert wasn’t my thing so I politely declined. Most things should be declined because they are negatives.

People pleasing is a bad thing. While it used to be an evolutionary advantage to have people like you, it isn’t as much anymore. We don’t live in tribes anymore and we can survive on our own just fine. Don’t say yes to people for the sake of pleasing the other person.

If you do, you end up creating bad experiences for you and others as well.

My Story With Simple Living

In my approach to simple living, I lock out as much noise as I can. I focus on doing deep work rather than focusing on the quantity of work. Quantity of work isn’t in my list of priorities. Deep work is better for me than the alternative. I concentrate better.

I used to have a really complex life where I was putting my attention on numerous things. When my schedule was jam packed with things to accomplish, that made me feel better. It made me feel really productive, that I was actually going somewhere. It took me a while but I finally realized that that’s not really the right way to go.

I used to focus on filling out surveys to make extra money. Add gambling to make more money on the side. Researched part-time jobs that I could do to make money on the weekends. I cut all of it out because it wasn’t showing results. Instead, I now focus on the blog and my day job. That’s it.

The day job already keeps me very busy. Even though I could only focus on the day job to make money, I also added blogging as well to cut out any dependency on my job. However, even if I never make money from my blog, I’m at least having a lot of fun and learning countless things.

There’s only really one or two things that matter for you to get better. Once you identify the few things and learn to do them very well, there’s no telling what you can accomplish. It’s a lot more than what you think. Remember that consistency is the key to getting there. Keep putting in the time and the right effort and the results will show.

Practice Simple Living

Like with many things, simple living is a product of your habits. Continue to live a complex lifestyle and you will create a dependency cycle with a baseline level of complexity for you to feel safe. The key is to continue practicing it every day.

This is one of those things that can actually be added to your New Year’s Resolution goals. It’s a tangible goal that is easily achievable because it’s not one of those things that require a lot of effort. It just requires some effort. However, it runs like a well-oiled machine after some time.

Working out requires constant maintenance throughout the year to meet your health goals. However, simple living is a do it once and get used to it kind of goal. There’s no prep work that’s required. All you have to do is just remember to do it. It doesn’t take a lot of effort to click unsubscribe to that email.

Because you now know the how of simple living, all you have to do is remember to do it. That’s the hardest part of this resolution if you decide to forge ahead in that path. Otherwise, there are no heavy lifting involved. You don’t need to increase the metaphorical weights in order to grow stronger. That’s the beautiful part of it.

Don’t buy again, but rather maintain the things that you already have in your life. That’s much simpler than working so you have enough money to spend, research to find the right product, and make the trip to the store to buy it. It’s much more expensive and complex to buy things again rather than keep the things you already have.

Practice simple living and watch your wallet and yourself thank your past self.