this post was submitted on 06 Jan 2026
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Simple Living
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What the hell is this? There's like four good pieces of advice in this list of fifteen:
The rest is either impractical (automate everything!) or amounts to "make your life more boring": boring clothes, boring home, avoid social situations.
I disagree. The article could have been more brief but I found every point to be good. Simplifying your wardrobe to pieces you do wear and you could wear together doesn't make it boring -- I speak from experience, but more practical.
Routines and automation are also very good. They reduce greatly mental load and help physically to manage efficiently tasks that always come back.
I don't really agree with the idea of "saying no to social situation for your own good" but I guess it could be useful to people in an overly extrovert culture that tend to overbook and exhaust themselves, especially if the activities they do are payed ones. That advice doesn't fit in my life at all but maybe in someone else.
EDIT: spelling errors
I have not read the list but note that boredom can be an amazingly efficient help to refocus on what (should) matter.
Beside that, I quite like your 4 points summary of it ;)
automation is great when its a societal thing benefit wise but everyone automating their own lives is just more nuisance. Like my taxes should be automated in the sense I should not have to do them if what the government sent me does not need correction.
While that's often true, personal automation can be so freeing. It's more like a hobby for me, but my life is much better having more agency over how things get done.
Email and media are two underrated examples of common, potentially mind-altering, timesucks but I do also automate my accounts and taxes, e.g. most transactions are automatically journalised and year end closing spits out the fields I need to file taxes.
It works for me because it's highly personal. I love that I can nudge systems this way or that and the only agenda is one I choose explicitly.
I have no idea how you do that since almost all my tax documentation requires going into a portal to download the pdf. None of mine come straigtht into email. You are in the us? Anyway the fact you mention it as a kinda hobby is the issue. People have a lot of hobbies and some have no time for them. Its great if people enjoy it but its inneficient for everyone to be reinventing the wheel all the time. Things should be done such that its as easy as possible at the individual level while also being secure and private. It amazes me all the technology we have and how very little of it works for the typical individual (works as in empowers them and saves their time and helps them get the best deal or such as opposed to making it cumbesome unless they roll over and give all power to the entity their doing business with)
Agreed. I spend time on it and am inefficient but it's overall worth while taking into account the benefits. There are many critical or difficult things I wouldn't automate myself but my goal is to reduce my requirements down to substitutable services where my counterparty doesn't have a monopoly over me.
I'm a freelancer, and make my own documentation supported by invoices/receipts etc. As an employee, yeah, it doesn't make sense to self-report when the government already has the information it needs. A lot of countries use withholding so only send a statement of what you've paid and somewhere to complain when it's wrong, like you suggest.
I think some change is coming wrt technology. There seems to be more interest again in open source.
whats frustrating with the us is we have a perfect for irs to send us a filled form. Its called the 1040x and you use it to change a tax return you submitted. It has two columns so they could send one of the those or something configured like it, with the left side filled out and you could then sign or make adjustments on the right column and sign.