Primal Bound

How to live a simple life: what earlier generations did

October 28, 2026

To live a simple life, cut the number of decisions and commitments you carry, and add back the shared routines that used to carry them for you. Earlier generations were not simple because they owned little. Their days were simple because work, meals and company came on a fixed rhythm with the same few people. Start with one fixed routine and one recurring meal, not a purge of your closet.

What simple looked like in a village or household

In small farming and foraging communities, the shape of the day was handed to you. The season said what the work was. The household said who did it. Meals happened at a table of people you knew, and few of the choices we now treat as personal (what to do tonight, who to see, what to eat) were open at all.

That is the part worth copying. A decluttered flat with no routine is still a day of a thousand small decisions.

What it cost: it was not less work

Simple does not mean easy, and the data says so. Dyble and colleagues followed 359 Agta people across ten communities in the northern Philippines, recording what they were doing at regular intervals between 6 am and 6 pm. The Cambridge release reports that Agta adults averaged about 24 hours a week of work away from camp, about 20 hours of domestic chores and about 30 hours of daylight leisure. People who mostly farmed worked about 30 hours a week against 20 for foragers, and women in the most farm-heavy communities had half the leisure of women in forager-only ones. One community's schedule is not a verdict on all of history, but it breaks the idea that the old way was a long holiday.

Today's intentional communities are just as plain about it. Twin Oaks, an income-sharing community in rural Virginia with around 85 adults and 15 children, says each member works 38.5 hours a week in its businesses and domestic areas, and in return gets housing, food, healthcare and personal spending money. That is a full working week. What you gain is less money anxiety and a shared load, not spare time. Village life also meant little privacy and little room to leave, and I found no source in this research that measures how those costs balanced out.

What you can do this week

You cannot move to a village by Friday. You can copy the structure.

  1. Fix one routine. Pick the same wake time, or the same walk after dinner, for seven days. A rule you do not have to decide about each day is the simplest kind.
  2. Remove one recurring decision. Repeat the same breakfast, or a standing weekly meal plan, for the week.
  3. Cut one commitment you resent. Say no to one thing that nobody would miss.
  4. Invite one neighbour or friend to a meal. Make it recurring: same evening, same pot of something cheap, every week. Say the day when you ask. See why tribes don't get lonely for why one recurring table beats occasional big plans.
  5. Do one task with someone else. Cook together, fix a bike together, or carry groceries for a neighbour. Shared work is how those communities held together.

If it fades after three weeks, that is normal. Restart it rather than redesign it.

Related

Sources

  1. Dyble, Thorley, Page, Smith and Migliano (2019), Agta time use, Nature Human Behaviour, as reported in the University of Cambridge release Farmers have less leisure time than hunter-gatherers
  2. Twin Oaks Community, home page (membership, income sharing and the 38.5-hour weekly labour figure). twinoaks.org

This article reports what these sources say. The routine suggestions are practical guesses, not research findings, and nothing here is medical advice.

Film version, with the sources on screen: What Ancient Humans Did All Day (and Why You're Exhausted) (4:26).