Envying a Simple Man
You see him at the hardware store on a Saturday morning. The Simple Man. He's comparing drill bits with the kind of dedication you reserve for yearly board meeting. His life runs on a effortless clock: work, lawn, family dinner, the occasional fishing trip that requires no spiritual explanation. He belongs to his town, his church, his Tuesday softball league. His identity isn't constructed — it's picked up and worn smooth by repetition. He seems content in a way that makes your jaw tight.
The Simple Man lives inside a structure built from external rules and borrowed ceremonies. His moral compass came pre-calibrated — religion, family tradition, the unspoken code of his profession.
He doesn’t wake at 3 AM interrogating his life choices. The questions rise, but they hit no mark — not from lack of intelligence, but from a built-in immunity that spares him the struggle. His life is stitched together by ritual: the same breakfast, the same route traced to work, the same stories spilling at familiar tables. The territory is small, but he moves through it like home.
There's safety in that. A kind of structural peace that looks like sleep from the outside but functions like buoy from within.
What is second nature for him becomes performance for you.
Minimalism as practiced by serious men is often armor dressed as aesthetics. You pare down your possessions and call it simplicity, but really you're building a contrarian badge that says: I've transcended ordinary wanting. It's austerity as signal. The meal replacements, the monochrome phone screen, the bare desk lit by a designer lamp — they’re not about freedom. They're about control. And underneath all the curation there is envy. You're trying to reverse-engineer the Simple Man's pared life without admitting you're doing it.
Minimalism has become a lifestyle design, which means it's no longer simple.
The envy itself is worth examining.
You're not longing for ignorance — you're craving the things that came with the simple life: ease, belonging, clarity, ritual, and meaning that operates at a human scale. The Simple Man doesn't need to search for his purpose. He fixes cars or teaches fourth grade or runs the family restaurant, and the work is enough. His joy comes from competence, not self-actualisation. He has people. Sunday dinners that don't require sending calendar invitations. The envy points to what's missing now — the feeling that you're holding your life together with psychological duct tape while he's just... living.
Regression isn't a return — it's self-deceit. You can't un-ask the questions. You can't re-inherit the certainties. The Simple Man's peace was never a choice; it was a condition. And conditions, once broken, don't reassemble. You can move to a small town and join a church and take up woodworking, but you'll be performing simplicity, not inhabiting it. The consciousness that made you serious doesn't switch off because you bought overalls. The only honest direction is forward: reconstruction, not reclamation. You have to build a life complex enough to hold what you've become.
Which means the envy isn't the affliction — it's the sign.
Try this: Stop copying the Simple Man’s rituals. Invent one he could never have. Break a pattern in public. Carry a paperback to a bar and read it; refuse small talk and drinks. Hold a notebook but make no notes in the meeting, then write a single line — the thing that mattered most for you to remember. The aim is to feel the weight of ceremony when it’s stripped of normalcy. The Simple Man has inherited rituals; you get to invent your own, even if they look unreasonable to everyone else.
The unreasonable life isn’t about recovering innocence. It’s about ongoing construction. You take what the Simple Man had by default — ritual, principles, durable work, small-scale purpose — and deliberately weave them into the complexity you now inhabit. You don’t reclaim ease; you manufacture it. You don’t stumble into belonging; you cultivate it. The Simple Man was given a life. You have to make one. That’s the cost and the dignity of waking up.
Envy the Simple Man if you must. Then borrow what he has and build it into something that can bear the weight of your ambitions.