Short Ones are opinion pieces, this one mostly pulling from my personal experiences. Don't expect an academic paper.
Before we talk about simple living, we should have a widely accepted definition for it. Wikipedia says,
Simple living refers to practices that promote simplicity in one's lifestyle. Common practices of simple living include reducing the number of possessions one owns, depending less on technology and services, and spending less money. In addition to such external changes, simple living also reflects a person's mindset and values. Simple living practices can be seen in history, religion, art, and economics.
The sources for this are self-help books, but I guess if a bunch of people on wikipedia decided this was okay, then I guess it’s good enough. But I also wanted to include some input from AI. Why? Because AI, I believe, is trained to give the most widely accepted “approved” answer, and ChatGPT has input from countless people. I think it’s a good measuring stick for taking the temperature of what the general population believes.
The picture above is ChatGPT's depiction of simple living.
Here’s the problem though, of what I have with this rustic, natural, minimalist abode: it simply isn’t minimalist, at all. Not in modern America. A small house like this on a beautiful plot of land is only feasible if you’re well off.
I argue this from the perspective of what I know in the tax world and businesses. First of all, counties that rely heavily on property taxes for their income–and these are usually in the rural areas of the country–they hate approving plans to build small houses. This is because the estimated price of the house, an estimate they use to calculate property taxes, will be lower than a giant McMansion with more rooms. The counties can’t make as much money on small houses. That’s why we don’t see them built, despite a desperate need for affordable starter homes for the Millenial/Zillenial/Gen Z generations I hail from.
Implementing a state/local income tax and discarding property taxes would solve this issue, because the government’s revenue won’t be tied anymore to property values, aka how large and fancy the house is. But god forbid we have an income tax.
And I don’t know much about the real estate industry, but there must be some incentive for them to build larger houses. Maybe they’ve been in the business of building McMansions for so long, and have been so successful from that, that it would be an unnecessary risk to change the formula. Even though it takes more building materials, resulting in higher costs, to build these houses.
I also know that it’s in the best interest of housing developers to cram as many homes into one plot of land. You can have one house on an acre of land sell for $300,000, or four houses on the same amount of land–a quarter acre going to each–and sell them all for $1.2 million. And people will just buy it, despite the loss in land. So why change the formula, and try to give people an acre of land, when you can maximize the amount of space on that land to build more houses and make more money?
Lets now talk about the people who can actually afford a small house on an acre of land, despite all the market and government forces driving the price upwards.
ChatGPT didn’t include this in the picture, but there’s usually a small farm involved, and a chicken coop. I used to be subscribed to a subreddit about living a minimalist lifestyle, and there were a lot of pictures of chicken coops. And no, I’m not talking about CAFOs; I’m talking about what you’d see in a children’s picture book, which is definitely not a CAFO. (The world is a real disappointment to our children.)
These instagram-worthy photos of farms and cute animals and tomatoes: they do not make money. I’ve seen more than enough of them on rich people’s tax returns to tell you they make losses every year. Everybody in the tax industry knows it. So why do these rich people have them, if they don’t make money?
Because the rich make so much money, that making thousands of dollars in losses, hundred of thousands sometimes; it’s just a bug bite to their wealth. A little inconvenience. They make all their money elsewhere. The farm is just a hobby, or a vacation home, something pretty to show off. They’re not actually living off of their own work on a farm. You might not believe me, but I guarantee you, a lot of the people posting about their small farms are probably extremely rich. I’ve even seen comments before about people with these farms, to paraphrase, “Man, I should do more with my farm, but I’ve gotten kind of tired of it.”
The farm is a fucking toy to them. And I bet, as the years wear on, as I collect more face to face time with clients, I will have many more stories about their cute hobbies. Maybe I’ll add them here.
I would like to end this on a picture, of an American living close to the poverty line. The man without a lot of wealth, making the most of what he has. Giving up frivolities to make ends meet:
These guys are living on disability checks, and so by definition, don’t have many possessions. I pulled image from a really interesting site that photographs the housing of people around the world by income: https://www.gapminder.org/dollar-street
If you want a humble, meager life in America, this is what it looks like. This is living without much. Rolling plains and weathered barn doors are a dated and romantic assessment of simple living, passed down by generations of Americans from when Lincoln and his log cabin used to be the image of the common man.
But I guess the nice thing is, for the majority of us, we already have all that we need to live a simple life. We’re closer to this type of humble, mindful living than the rich man with a small farm ever will be. Because we have to be mindful with our money, to survive.