A Simple Life Well Lived
Imagine this: you’re alone on a patch of land. No grocery store. No doctor down the road. No Amazon truck rumbling up the driveway. You grow your own food, patch your own clothes, mend your own roof. If something breaks, you fix it—or you do without. There’s no one to call for help. No backups. No specialists.
It’s all on you.
Food. Clothing. Shelter. Medicine. Protection. Warmth. Sanity. You are the hunter, the gatherer, the seamstress, the doctor, the carpenter, the night watch. You are the sole line of defense between your family and the world.
Now imagine one other family lives a half-day’s walk away. That single relationship changes everything. You can trade eggs for potatoes, or cloth for honey. You can share tools. You can learn from each other. Suddenly you’re not alone, and that sliver of community feels like a lifeline.
That’s the value of connection when you’re truly self-reliant.
Now flip the lens.
Look at your life today. Most of us don’t grow a thing we eat. We don’t make our clothes—we probably don’t even know how. We live in houses we didn’t build, with electricity we didn’t wire, full of conveniences made by strangers in other countries. Nearly everything we rely on comes from someone else’s labor.
And we take it for granted.
Modern life has made us soft in many ways. Not because comfort is wrong, but because we no longer see it as comfort. We see it as deserved. We think we’re entitled to fresh produce in January, fast internet, air conditioning, Netflix, smartphones, and two-day shipping. But the truth is, none of that is essential. It’s all gravy.
The problem isn’t the gravy—it’s forgetting the meat.
There’s great wisdom in choosing to learn skills that reconnect you to the essentials. Growing food. Preserving it. Cooking from scratch. Fixing things. Sewing. Raising animals. Chopping wood. These things slow you down. They simplify you. They demand that you live with your hands, not just your head. That’s where gratitude is forged.
It also means laying down the weight of others’ expectations. The modern world constantly tells us to do more, own more, share more, be more. But there’s dignity in smallness. There’s freedom in contentment.
As Tolkien wrote:
“It is no bad thing to celebrate a simple life.”
When you can separate your needs from your wants, you start to see clearly. You stop chasing what doesn’t matter. You stop outsourcing your soul. You begin to understand what it means to be truly free.
That’s when you realize:
The rest?
The rest is gravy.
