Simplicity as resistance

We can’t beat the forces that want to keep us down, but we can play a different game

When I surveyed my situation after the election, I knew I’d need to radically reimagine my financial priorities to survive in our new reality. My living situation, my consumption habits, my work — everything went up for grabs. All of these millennial-finance-blogger buzzwords floated to the surface: frugality, minimalism, underconsumption, mindful consumption, shopping bans, corporate boycotts.

Drastically dropping my consumption suddenly became appealing, despite my deep distrust of any lifestyle predicated on restriction or discipline. I’ve been rallying against restriction under budget culture for the past four years. Am I really challenging my own consumption now?

This is what I’ve been mulling for the past three months. And I think I’ve figured out what, exactly, is calling to me.

Embracing voluntary simplicity

Quaker tradition encourages a practice of voluntary simplicity, a rejection of the “consumerism, materialism and waste of modern industrial society.”

The traditional approach has a religious tinge; simplicity is a way of living in alignment with spiritual beliefs. But I learned about the practice through family members who live in an intentional community that was founded in the mid-20th century by Quakers but is no longer exclusively religious. I see members modeling a secular approach to simple living that resists the worst demons of our culture without any religious dogmatism.

The level of simplicity is different for everyone, but it boils down to some form of conscious consumption and sustainable living. Voluntary simplicity often means skipping new clothes and opting for thrift-store shopping and sewing your own. It could mean driving less and using less electricity. Eating homegrown foods and home-cooked meals. Buying from independent artisans and local businesses instead of corporate giants. Occupying your time with service, joy, connection and community rather than hustling in the pursuit of wealth.

Proponents of voluntary simplicity — Quakers, but also the more ascetic Amish and Mennonites, and others — cite the indisputable ills of capitalist cultures: environmental destruction, waste, chronic dissatisfaction, greed and striving. Simple living is a step to combat those ills culturally and to heal them personally.

The practice shares some values and characteristics with millennials’ minimalism, Gen Z’s hashtag-underconsumption and personal finance influencers’ frugality.

But minimalism is more of an aesthetic than a set of values. Underconsumption reads to me like just… being in your 20s? And frugality is largely a laundered spin on budget culture restriction.

What I see missing in all of these trends that seems foundational in voluntary simplicity is freedom.

The freedom in voluntary simplicity is the thing that rang so true for me when I started to imagine a life with less — not to keep myself small or to strive harder for accumulation, but to resist the expectations of a world that’s gone completely sideways.

It’s time to stop striving

In 2015, I went from living in poverty to lower middle class almost overnight when I started my first professional job.

I’d been earning about $12,000 a year as a freelance writer and took a job that paid a $42,000 salary, then quickly moved up the ranks of the startup into a position earning $67,000 after three years. I left to freelance and earned $72,000 my first year back on my own, then grew my freelance business to take home about $100,000 in each of the next two years. My partner took his first full-time job, and our household income shot to nearly $200,000 in 2022.

That’s a huge leap to make over eight years. It’s not one I ever expected or even hoped for as a working-class creative. But I appreciated the spoils, built a comfort fund, qualified for credit cards, bought a new-used car, took out a mortgage and gave money away.

Our household income was dialed back in 2023 when my partner returned to freelancing and I started writing my book. We’ve kept our savings and our credit intact, but we’ve given up a lot of the luxury our $200,000 household enjoyed.

I’ve spent the years since first securing financial stability striving to keep it. (That’s the plight of the millennial middle class, I’ve heard.)

But what if I just stopped striving?

I followed a code of simple living innately in my early adulthood without knowing what it was. I never wanted my life to feel heavy; consumption and accumulation make a life very heavy.

I’m not surprised I detoured from simplicity when I had the chance. I put up with being poor for years because I chose writing over anything else; when writing vaulted me into the middle class, I needed a moment to believe I was worthy of everything poverty had kept from me.

Now we’re staring down a fascist regime and worrying about protecting our relative prosperity from a full slate of unknowns. That worry makes us brittle. I’m embracing some version of voluntary simplicity to opt out of the striving, instead of beating my fists at the doorstep of this regime.

Letting it go in 2025: Simplicity as resistance

I’m not surprised simplicity is calling me back in this cultural moment. Voluntary simplicity is a rejection of our capitalist society, and that makes it a vital way to resist the fascist movement this society has spawned.

It’s resistance against “consumerism, materialism and waste,” yes — but against so much more, too.

Consuming less means participating less in Trump’s economy, depending less on the rich men who support him, working less for capitalists who benefit from his misdeeds.

It’s resistance against the oligarchs who’ve stolen our resources and pitted us against each other to access the scraps.

Against this regime that will promise us prosperity while decimating the resources and protections that make it possible.

Against the violence and oppression in which capitalism has made us complicit.¹

Against the chronic drive to make more money, to hoard more, to protect our elusive prosperity against an unknown future.

Against the desperation of puzzling together a life in an enshittified world.

Against the paralyzing expectations of parents, neighbors, colleagues, peers, kids’ teachers, life coaches, advisors, everyone who says we can do better, be better, just need to work harder.

Against the suffocation of a life filled with stuff that was supposed to soothe the suffocation of society’s expectations.

Against staying small because we can’t afford to grow.

Simplicity is something — one small thing — I can do to push back in this moment when I am desperately searching for a way to push back.

The more we reject the premise of capitalism, the harder it is for capitalists to hurt us. The less we need their money, their employment, the junk they sell, the less we have to compromise as their power becomes more entrenched. The less interested we are in achieving the goals they’ve set, the less afraid we’ll be when they throw new obstacles in our way.

I remember earning $12,000 a year, couch surfing and driving a 10-year-old car. I remember knowing the Great Recession was happening and not being afraid, because I didn’t have savings or a job or a house for the crisis to take from me. I remember a friend’s grandmother telling us she didn’t remember any of what we were learning about in school about the Great Depression, because the poor farmers of Wisconsin hadn’t been benefitting from the 1920s economy, anyway.²

I no longer have the wanton financial freedom of my six-figure household to absorb whatever this administration will throw at us — but I remember how to be so poor I don’t even feel it.

That’s a freedom I can reclaim.

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1. For a way more comprehensive look into opting out of capitalist expectations, please read Tricia Hersey’s Rest Is Resistance.

2. I spent an entire day crafting this essay, and then my partner found this TikTok that said the same thing in nine seconds 🙃

@stuckinhuntsvillethe car horn was a paid actor

Tiktok failed to load.

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