No One Will Cheerlead Your Simple Life - That's What Makes It so Hard
Until you find your tribe
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By all accounts, I’m a digital nomad. I’m not keen on the term and everyone’s (inaccurate) assumptions about what and who that makes me, but this the moniker I’m stuck with.
As such, I have many digital nomad friends. This weekend a few of us attended a food and wine festival on the Croatian island of Korčula. We were having a glorious time at an organic farm that was set up like a Fall-fantasy. A huge, heaving table filled with Fall-inspired salads and škopac (castrated goat, of all things) grilled on the BBQ. Course after course of food came out of the kitchen for close to four hours. Long tables in the courtyard were filled with people drinking wine from the vat and consuming vast quantities of this glorious food under the warm Croatian sun.
A few of us got chatting with an Australian lady - I would guess in her mid to late forties - who had quit her high-powered job to travel around Eastern Europe. She had been traveling alone and was due to be on Korčula (which is a tiny island that is about to shut for the season) for the next two weeks.
She asked us how we manage to spend so long on the road (2 years has just passed for me, 8 years for my friend), because she was starting to feel lonely.
My friend told her about his digital nomad community in his adopted home of Zagreb, and how much he values it. Not because he doesn’t have friends that are locals (he has plenty) but because Digital Nomads won’t spend an age telling you how dumb your life choices are.
Because as every digital nomad, long-term traveler or ex-pat knows, our life choices are not well supported at home. So we support each other instead.
Friends, family, people you barely know, all of them like to orate forth about unsustainable, reckless and temporary being a digital nomad is. If that’s your whole support network, it doesn’t bode well for the length of time you’ll make this lifestyle work. You need to find your tribe, your cheerleaders.
It got me thinking about how similar this reaction is to when you tell your support network you want to live a simple life or become a minimalist.
How many of us have been told we’re dumb for doing that? Whose parents, siblings or other family members can’t understand why you would reject a “normal” life for one of simplicity? Where’s your big house? Your ambitious career? Your debt?
Many people feel their life choices are ripped apart by those who claim to be closest to them, but when you choose a life beyond the norm, it’s amplified even more.
In other words, no one is going to cheerlead your simple life. That’s one of the reasons why you find it so hard.
***
Many years ago the original self-improvement bro Tim Urban wrote an excellent story called Taming the Mammoth: Why You Should Stop Caring What Other People Think. In it he brilliantly breaks down why so many of us are scared of deviating from the norm:
Humans evolved an over-the-top obsession with what others thought of them—a craving for social approval and admiration, and a paralyzing fear of being disliked. Let’s call that obsession a human’s Social Survival Mammoth. It looks something like this:
Your Greatx2000 Grandfather’s Social Survival Mammoth was central to his ability to endure and thrive. It was simple—keep the mammoth well-fed with social approval and pay close attention to its overwhelming fears of nonacceptance, and you’ll be fine.
Our bodies and minds are built to live in a tribe in 50,000BC, which leaves modern humans with a number of unfortunate traits, one of which is a fixation with tribal-style social survival in a world where social survival is no longer a real concept. We’re all here in 2014, accompanied by a large, hungry, and easily freaked-out woolly mammoth who still thinks it’s 50,000BC.
Your Social Survival Mammoth will hate on simple living because it goes against two of its core values. One, simple living means you won’t fit in with the rest of your societal tribe. Two, simple living looks like a rejection of comfort and convenience and that scares the hell out of your mammoth. For mammoths, a lack of comfort could mean, well, death.
Which means it’s hard for both you and for the people around you to accept your simple life.
That is until you find the right tribe - the ones who have tamed their own mammoths.
***
The internet has many flaws but one major advantage is how it’s opened up the world for people who don’t fit into the mainstream and thus, aren’t going to find their tribe in their hometowns, work, or schools.
It’s a win for the weirdos.
You might not find a simple living advocate sitting next to you at work, but you will find them in Subreddits, on Medium, Twitter, Facebook. At Simple and Straightfoward…
Even if you don’t converse with them, knowing there are people out there who have made a success of living slowly, simply, and sustainably can be all you need to realize you’re not alone. To make a start or to keep you going when IRL people tell you how much they don’t care for your lifestyle.
Which means reading books and newsletters like this one. Listening to podcasts or making comments on articles. Finding a different set of people to hang with.
The friendships you can make online can be strong. After two years of writing online about this subject, I’ve come to the realization that many of my regular readers probably know me better than my own IRL friends and family. The anonymity of the internet can make people (including me) open up in a way they never would in reality.
Yes, there’s a dark side to that - no one likes a troll. But the light side is that real, authentic connections can be made quickly and effectively. You can find a tribe of like-minded people who you may never meet but can have a profound effect on the way you live your life.
They can cheerlead for you.
***
So. Is today’s essay title true? Will no one cheerlead your simple life?
If you are one of the lucky ones with a supportive network then maybe. But for many of us, probably not. And yes, that makes living with simplicity really bloody hard.
But that doesn’t mean you won’t find support elsewhere. Reddit is a good place to start. Medium is another.
Read. Comment. Know that you’re not alone.
That tribe is out there. And it’s ready to help you kick your social survival mammoth’s ass back to 50,000BC.
Setting up your weekend
2 articles from my collection (paywall free)
Living in Continental Europe Is like Choosing Quality over Quantity
Perfection Is the Enemy of Living a Simple, Sustainable Life
The best pieces of content I’ve consumed this week
Article - The Two Keys You Need to Declutter Kid’s Stuff by Joshua Becker
Netflix - Sue Perkins’ “Perfectly Legal” - a brilliant dive into “finding yourself” in your fifties with one of my favorite British comedians.
Article - How to Transition from a Gift Giving Christmas to an Experience Christmas by Renee Benes
The lack of support goes back quite a ways. For instance, it's easy to find loan interest rates in advertising or news or official reports. It's almost impossible to find savings account interest rates. Nobody advertises them, and they aren't even in BLS reports or banking trade journals from the past. My best guess is from incidental mentions in old radio programs, implying that 4% was typical.
We’re a family of 5 living in a 2bed1bath house in the US. So many people ask us why we won’t move into a bigger house. We just remodeled in 2020 and made our house so sleek & put thought/love into every decision. This house is now exactly how we want it (no cabinets & easy to clean) and people can’t understand how we just decide to live here because it’s “small”. It bothered me for a while when people would make comments about it but now I follow up with, “well it’s a good thing we’re not inviting you to live here!” 🤣