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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.
Adherents may choose simple living for a variety of personal reasons, such as spirituality, health, increase in quality time for family and friends, work–life balance, personal taste, financial sustainability, increase in philanthropy, frugality, environmentalism, or reducing stress. Simple living can also be a reaction to economic materialism and consumer culture. Some cite sociopolitical goals aligned with environmentalist, Anti-consumerism, or anti-war movements, including conservation, degrowth, deep ecology, and tax resistance.
Gautama Buddha espoused simple living as a central virtue of Buddhism. The Four Noble Truths advocate detachment from desire as the path to ending suffering and attaining Nirvana.
Jesus is said to have lived a simple life. He is said to have encouraged his disciples "to take nothing for their journey except a staff—no bread, no bag, no money in their belts—but to wear sandals and not put on two tunics".: English Standard Version He also told his disciples that they cannot serve God and money at the same time, and explained that God is capable of providing them with the essentials for life (food and clothing), so long as they "seek his kingdom first". The Apostle Paul taught that people should be content with food and clothing, and that the desire to be rich is the cause of many kinds of evils.
Many other notable religious individuals, such as Benedict of Nursia, Francis of Assisi, Leo Tolstoy, Rabindranath Tagore, Albert Schweitzer, and Mahatma Gandhi, have claimed that spiritual inspiration led them to a simple living lifestyle.
Sufism in the Muslim world emerged and grew as a mystical, somewhat hidden tradition in the mainstream Sunni Islam and Shia Islam denominations of Islam. Sufism grew particularly in the frontier areas of Muslim world, where the asceticism of its and appealed to populations already used to the monastic traditions of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Christianity. Sufis were influential and successful in spreading Islam between the 10th and 19th centuries. Some scholars have argued that Sufi Muslim ascetics and mystics played a decisive role in converting the Turkic peoples to Islam, mainly because of the similarities between the extreme, ascetic Sufis ( and ) and the Shamanism of the Tengrism.
Plain people typically belonged to Christian groups that practised lifestyles that excluded forms of wealth or technology for religious or philosophical reasons. Such Christian groups include the Shakers, Mennonites, Amish, Hutterites, Amana Colonies, Bruderhof, Old German Baptist Brethren, Harmony Society, and some Quakers. A Quaker belief called Testimony of simplicity states that a person ought to live her or his life simply. Some tropes about complete exclusion of technology in these groups may not be accurate though. The Amish and other groups do use some modern technology, after assessing its impact on the community.
The 18th-century French Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau strongly praised the simple way of life in many of his writings, especially in two books: Discourse on the Arts and Sciences (1750) and Discourse on Inequality (1754).
Henry David Thoreau, an American natural history and author, made the classic Secularity advocacy of a life of simple and sustainable living in his book Walden (1854). Thoreau conducted a two-year experiment living a plain and simple life on the shores of Walden Pond. He concluded: "Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify, simplify! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail."
In Victorian Britain, Henry Stephens Salt, an admirer of Thoreau, popularised the idea of "Simplification, the saner method of living". Other British advocates of the simple life included Edward Carpenter, William Morris, and the members of the "Fellowship of the New Life". Carpenter popularised the phrase the "Simple Life" in his essay Simplification of Life in his England's Ideal (1887).
C.R. Ashbee and his followers also practised some of these ideas, thus linking simplicity with the Arts and Crafts movement. British novelist John Cowper Powys advocated the simple life in his 1933 book A Philosophy of Solitude. John Middleton Murry and Max Plowman practised a simple lifestyle at their Adelphi Centre in Essex in the 1930s. Hardy's book details other simple living movements in the U.K. in this period. Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh championed a "right simplicity" philosophy based on Agrarianism in some of his work.
George Lorenzo Noyes, a Natural history, Mineralogy, development critic, writer, and artist, is known as the Thoreau of Maine. He lived a wilderness lifestyle, advocating through his creative work a simple life and reverence for nature. During the 1920s and 1930s, the Vanderbilt Agrarians of the Southern United States advocated a lifestyle and culture centered upon traditional and sustainable agrarianism as opposed to the progressive urban industrialism which dominated Western culture at that time.
The Norwegian-American economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen warned against the conspicuous consumption of the materialistic society in his The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899); Richard Gregg coined the term "voluntary simplicity" in The Value of Voluntary Simplicity (1936). From the 1920s, a number of modern authors articulated both the theory and practice of living simply, among them Gandhism Richard Gregg, economists Ralph Borsodi and Scott Nearing, anthropologist-poet Gary Snyder, and fiction writer Ernest Callenbach. Economist E. F. Schumacher argued against the notion that "bigger is better" in Small Is Beautiful (1973); and Duane Elgin continued the promotion of the simple life in Voluntary Simplicity (1981).
The Australian academic Ted Trainer practices and writes about simplicity, and established The Simplicity Institute at Pigface Point, some from the University of New South Wales to which it is attached. A secular set of nine values was developed with the Ethify Yourself project in Austria, having a simplified life style in mind. In the United States voluntary simplicity started to garner more public exposure through a movement in the late 1990s around a popular "simplicity" book, The Simple Living Guide by Janet Luhrs.
The "100 Thing Challenge" is a grassroots movement to whittle personal possessions to one hundred items, aiming of de-cluttering and simplify life. People in the tiny house movement chose to live in small, mortgage-free, low-impact dwellings, such as or .
Joshua Becker suggests that people who desire to simplify their lives begin by simplifying their homes.
Forest gardening, developed by simple living adherent Robert Hart, is a low-maintenance, plant-based food production system based on woodland ecosystems. It incorporates fruit and nut trees, shrubs, herbs, vines, and perennial vegetables. Hart created a model forest garden from a orchard on his farm at Wenlock Edge in Shropshire.
"Food miles" is a description of the number of miles a given item of food or its ingredients has travelled between the farm and the table. Simple living advocates use this metric to argue for locally grown food, for example in books like The 100-Mile Diet and Barbara Kingsolver's . In each of those cases, the authors devoted a year to reducing their carbon footprint by eating locally.
City dwellers can produce home-grown fruit and vegetables in Container garden or miniature indoor greenhouses. Tomatoes, lettuce, spinach, Swiss chard, peas, strawberries, and several types of herbs can all thrive in pots. Jim Merkel says "A person could sprout seeds. They are tasty, incredibly nutritious, and easy to grow... We grow them in wide-mouthed mason jars with a square of nylon window screen screwed under a metal ring".
Technology can make a simple lifestyle within mainstream culture easier and more sustainable. The internet can reduce an individual's carbon footprint through remote work and lower paper usage. Some have calculated their energy consumption to show that one can live simply and in a satisfying way by using much less energy than is typically used in Western countries. Technologies they may embrace include computers, photovoltaic systems, , and .
Technological interventions that appear to simplify living may actually induce side effects elsewhere or in the future. Evgeny Morozov warns that tools like the internet can facilitate mass surveillance and political repression. The book Green Illusions identifies how wind and solar energy technologies have hidden side effects and can actually increase energy consumption and entrench environmental harms over time. The authors of the book Techno-Fix criticize technological optimists for overlooking the limitations of technology in solving agricultural problems. (2025). 9780865717046, New Society Publishers. ISBN 9780865717046
A simple diet looks different from person to person and can be adapted to suit individual needs and desires. For instance, in the United Kingdom, the Movement for Compassionate Living was formed by Kathleen and Jack Jannaway in 1984 to spread the message of veganism and promote simple living and self-reliance as a remedy against the exploitation of humans, animals, and the planet.
Some avoid involvement even with green politics as compromising simplicity, however, and instead advocate forms of green anarchism that attempt to implement these principles at a smaller scale, e.g. the ecovillage. Deep ecology, a belief that the world does not exist as a resource to be freely exploited by humans, proposes wilderness preservation, human population control, and simple living. (2025). 9780415202855, Routledge. ISBN 9780415202855
Minimalist lifestyles may contribute to reduced carbon emissions, although further research is needed to quantify their impact.Blackburn, R., Leviston, Z., Walker, I., & Schram, A. (2023). Could a minimalist lifestyle reduce carbon emissions and improve wellbeing? Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change
Positive attitudes towards living in poverty for the sake of art are becoming less common among young American artists. One recent graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design said "her classmates showed little interest in living in and eating Ramen."
David Wann introduced the idea of "simple prosperity" as it applies to a Sustainability lifestyle. From his point of view, "it is important to ask ourselves three fundamental questions: what is the point of all our commuting and consuming? What is the economy for? And, finally, why do we seem to be unhappier now than when we began our initial pursuit for rich abundance?"
James Robertson's A New Economics of Sustainable Development inspired work of thinkers and activists who participate in his Working for a Sane Alternative network and program. According to Robertson, the shift to sustainability is likely to require a widespread shift of emphasis from raising incomes to reducing costs.
The principles of the new economics, as set out by Robertson, are the following:
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Arts
The term "bohemianism" describes a tradition of both voluntary and involuntary poverty by who devote their time to artistic endeavors rather than paid labor. The term was coined by the French bourgeoisie as a way to describe social non-conformists. Bohemians sometimes also expressed their unorthodoxy through simplistic art, for instance in the case of Amedeo Modigliani. Minimalistic art inspired "rebel" artistic movements into the 20th century.
Economics
A new economics movement has been building since the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in 1972, and the publications that year of Only One Earth, The Limits to Growth, and Blueprint for Survival, followed by Small Is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered in 1973.
Additional reading
(2025). 9781576751992, Berrett-Koehler Publishers. ISBN 9781576751992
Jacob Lund Fisker (2025). 9781453601211, CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform. ISBN 9781453601211
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