Lived nuances and challenges of a voluntarily simple life
Oftentimes, when my fellow humans visit my home, which is one of the spaces where I practise an alternative mode of living (that combines different elements of voluntary simplicity/simple living, slow living, extreme minimalism, zero-waste), they say something like this: Your home looks/feels so peaceful! It must be so easy to clean this space! It's so idyllic! It looks like a yoga studio.
It feels so important to highlight all the wonderful, beautiful, nurturing, and otherwise wellbeing-promoting aspects of living this way. These aspects can be so easily lost in discourses advocating less (e.g., less production and consumption). Just as we need to produce and consume less, we also need more. More of entirely different things. This lifestyle gives me more free time, more peacefulness, more lightness and ease.
And yet, there is another side of this mode of living. I tried to capture many of the nuances and challenges I have experienced on my path in this article. It came out very recently. In this article, I discuss things such as instability/temporary employment, having one's time in a country/residence permit tied to one's work contract, health (mental and physical).
While in the past 15 years I've practised this lifestyle for good reasons, such as ecological, spiritual and aesthetic, I have also noticed that my practice, at least partly, is connected to (if not rooted in) fear. It is difficult to feel rooted and create a home, and feel at home, when one's contract is temporary (a standard postdoc contract is 2 years). At times, my fellow humans ask, why don't you live in an eco-community? Why don't you grow your own food? There are several reasons, one of them being temporary residence permits. I would love to grow my own food, but it takes time to establish a garden. In every new country, I had to adjust my sustainability practices and learn about empowering and constraining social systems. Learning takes time. Facing health crises made me change some of my practices temporarily. And so on. If you want to read the article and do not have free access, please email me for a free copy.