✨ KISS (Keep it Simple, Stupid!)
it's me. i'm stupid 😘 on living simply, by way of "Perfect Days" and reddit lmao
Dear friend—
A few weeks ago, I found myself on the subreddit r/SimpleLiving. I opened a thread from someone asking folks to share about their “simple” jobs—what lower-paying job had they turned to to escape the palpitation-inducing pace of corporate life? What benefits did they see?
One of the top responses was someone who had become a janitor at a nearby school. They talked about popping in their earbuds and listening to podcasts and audiobooks. They had summers off, experienced little stress on the job, and they brought no work home with them. The pay was of course not fantastic, but he and his partner lived simply and enjoyed the other freedoms such a job provides.
That’s the whole shtick of r/SimpleLiving. It’s for people who want to give (or have given) up the hustle and bustle, the grind, the material accumulation, and pare down their lives. They do it for environmental, mental health, financial reasons—or maybe they’ve just decided that Playing the Game isn’t worth it anymore.
I continued scrolling, reading accounts from people with “simple” jobs like security guard, artist, non-profit worker, receptionist. I came across a person who worked as a library page, bringing me back to my own library days.
Before I worked at Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, I was a volunteer in the Shelving Department, essentially doing a page’s work. I put returns back on the shelf, pulled holds that patrons had requested, and generally moved books around the place as needed.
Every Friday morning during the summer of 2019, I would show up to the library, sometimes dragging myself blearily (i.e., hungover) there after a long night out. I would leave my apartment on Parkview around 8:30 to make it to my 9am shift, basking in what passed as “cool” in Pittsburgh’s armpit summers, before the construction started up and the sun began evaporating the asphalt from the pavement.
At Carnegie, I, too, popped my earbuds in. I looked at cool books and moved my body, sometimes even feeling sore after a few hours of lifting tomes. I felt like part of a secret society—using the service elevators and book carts, roaming parts of the library that were closed to the public. I began learning the layout of the stacks (i.e. the shelves) and the Library of Congress codes for the nonfiction books. A for philosophy. D for European history. M and N for art, of varying kinds. I listened to music and occasionally answered questions for patrons like, “Where is the bathroom?”
I would do this job now, if not for ~money~ (The last time I checked, most pages are paid at or near minimum wage) and perhaps also my dog Hazel, who definitely prefers me working from home. I felt a lot of satisfaction with that work—learning new things, tangibly impacting my environment, seeing projects start-to-end; people watching and having just the right amount of social interaction to make me feel boosted and not drained.
This was, in short, the closest anything would get to my “dream job.” (But also, “I do not dream of labor,” etc.)
I am thinking about my experience at the library and r/SimpleLiving because I recently saw the movie Perfect Days (dir. Wim Wenders) on recommendation from some dear friends.
The movie captures a few weeks in the life of Hirayama, a man in Tokyo who cleans public restrooms for a living. He lives in a modest apartment, following the same routines each day and each week.
The morning misting of his maple seedlings and the can of coffee that tumbles in a flurry of thunks from the vending machine; the book read by the light of a single lamp until he can no longer keep his eyes open; the ritual of picking out a cassette from his collection to accompany him on his drive to work.
The film follows his days with a studied languor. It reminded me of an observation I once read about Hayao Miyazaki’s movies: unlike most American animation, Miyazaki lingers on frames and scenes. Not every second is jam-packed with dialogue and plot. We pause amidst the flowers; in a room.
I noticed this while watching The Boy and the Heron last year. There’s a scene with the main character in his bedroom, which extended for what seemed like an eternity. Not much of anything “happens” for several seconds until Miyazaki finally sees fit to release us.
(Though, that it felt like a held breath says more about my state of mind at the time—addled, slightly stressed—than the film and Miyazaki’s directorial choices.)
I definitely felt in a better state of mind while watching Perfect Days. Each pause, each quiet and “boring” scene made me feel like a sponge, thirstily soaking in every detail. The neat, practiced way Hirayama folds his comforter and futon each morning. The satisfying click-clacks as he rummages through his cassette tapes. The sunrises and the glow of sunlight through the trees. At Wenders’ pace, we are invited to luxuriate in these details.
After I watched the movie, I immediately hopped on IMDB for the Trivia, as is my ritual. I discovered Wenders has shared some backstory—Hirayama was at one point a successful businessman. Very wealthy and deeply unhappy. But one hungover morning, completely by chance, he found himself caught by the beauty of the sunlight through the leaves of trees outside his hotel room window.
Like the folks on the r/SimpleLiving subreddit, Hirayama traded his high earnings, prestige, and toxic work for the exact opposite. Peace amid humble surroundings.
One thing that really struck me about this movie is how Hirayama’s life is full of boundaries, many of which he has chosen. In the U.S., we’re often told (by parents, by society) to “reach for the stars” and that bigger is always better. We are encouraged to always go for the bigger house, fancier car, and more prestigious position, because these things are supposed to improve our lives. But what Perfect Days emphasizes—and I think what more people are becoming hip to—is that this is not really good for us. The road to happiness, fulfillment, or contentment is not paved in gold.
I have luckily been blessed with a disposition anathema to most grinds. I’m also privileged enough that I don’t need to grind to survive. I realized pretty early on during college that I am contentedly unambitious.
However, I do struggle with being content in the present, with my current surroundings and problems. My brain is often fixated on the “what-if”s; the future and the past. I am often looking for the solution to a “problem”—a discomfort, an inconvenience—instead of just accepting discomfort as a part of life. I do suffer from Instant Gratification Disease.
Perfect Days is a nice reminder that so much of this is in my head. I can choose to become comfortable with (certain kinds of) discomfort, and adapt to inconveniences instead of eliminating them. (That seems to be a recurring theme in my life lately, and maybe also a type of wisdom—parsing through what I am to endure in order to improve myself and what I should not endure in order to improve the world.)
This embrace of boundaries and contentment is embodied in Hirayama’s very modest, minimalistic lifestyle. Not only does he have few possessions; he embraces what many would call inconveniences. He does not have a shower and goes to a public bathhouse to get clean. He only listens to his music in his van, because it has a cassette player. He has a flip phone.
These inconveniences, these boundaries, allow a kind of focus and immersion when he engages in any activity. When he does something, he devotes himself whole-heartedly to it. Reading books; listening to music; taking photos of sunlight dancing past the foliage. Even the mundane, like his morning shave, feel like rich sensory experiences through Hirayama’s eyes.
Perfect Days is full of pauses because Hirayama is always pausing; taking a breath, or multiple breaths, to fully experience one thing at a time. The point of his minimalism is not to pare down his life to only the things that matter; the point is to make everything matter.
Moreover, he doesn’t just “make do” with his few possessions. He fully appreciates them and uses the hell out of them, with love. He wears the same few outfits and saves his nice silver watch for the weekends. He refuses to sell his cassette tapes, despite learning some are worth a lot of money. Hirayama’s love is not wide or ever-expanding; it’s deep. He is maintaining his relationship his possessions, not constantly hunting for new ones.
As recently wrote, drawing on the work of philosopher Byung-Chul Han, we currently live in a throwaway culture. We search for novelty and prioritize the experience (fleeting, disposable) that an object can provide for us, rather than the object itself. We avoid building relationships with objects just as much as people can be “commitment-phobes” in their love lives. We see this in fast-fashion and the rapacious upgrade cycles for tech.1
Waldun and Perfect Days make the case for a different kind of ”materialism” than what late capitalism encourages—materialism as a deep love for material objects that endures whims or capricious utilitarianism.
In her book Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer reflects on all the materials and energy and labor it takes to make something as simple as a ballpoint pen. How would our relationship with objects change if we paused and reflected on their lineage? On the miracle (or travesty lol) of their existing? And then, moving forward, what if we cherished them, gradually imbued them with memories, and maintained them to stick with us as long as possible?
This idea of maintenance also ties to Hirayama’s chosen work—cleaner. I’ve seen this point made before, by plenty of others: What if we prized maintenance as much as we do innovation? Like all the other activities in his life, Hirayama is focused and dedicated to his work, to the benefit of his city and the people in it. Society runs on this maintenance, from clean-up crews to caregivers, store clerks to bus drivers. And yet (especially in the U.S.) the work isn’t rewarded in recognition/social capital, nor with incomes that are actually sustainable.
While this film gave me a lot to appreciate and chew on, I do have one note of, not really critique, but perhaps prodding? Less at the film itself than, like, the film vis-a-vis the American ~milieu~.
Perfect Days almost seems to romanticize a kind of independence that I find difficult to countenance. Hirayama is content to keep to himself and has mostly surface relationships. Not to denigrate these kind of relationships, which are integral threads in the social fabric and in our happiness, and which can be profoundly impactful—but he has no deep, encompassing relationships (except for maybe one, which I won’t mention because spoilers).
As someone who both craves Alone Time and realizes how bad it is for me if I get my wish too often, this was the one element of the film that nagged at me.
There are many ways to interpret Hirayama’s solitude: as healing and rebalancing in a society that demands we people-please and network and maintain all manner of shallow or toxic relationships for other ends. Hirayama as maverick, standing apart from the trends and the noise of society.
We can also see him as a healthy reply to narratives that say we need our one true love or a thousands friends to be a complete human being. Alone =/= lonely, etc. And Hirayama’s story isn’t, like, a prescription. He is just one guy living his best life, lol.
But seeing Hirayama make his way through Tokyo without any deep loves or interdependence made me think about how too much solitude has failed to serve me, and how it often fails to serve people in general, especially here in the U.S. with our already highly individualistic culture.
Interdependence is important for plenty of reasons, but it can also help us live more simply and more minimally. In her book Saving Time, Jenny Odell writes about making time through mutual aid. Something like cooking for a group of friends (and being cooked for) can free up our time and make our lives easier, on top of strengthening those relationships.
Similarly, in r/SimpleLiving, I saw someone point out that a tight-knit community makes minimalism easier—instead of each household owning a vacuum or a stand mixer or a hammer, people can borrow what they need or grab something from, say, a community tool library.
Also, as the video essayists say, “The answer is not a cabin in the woods.”
In some corners of the internet, it has recently been in vogue to imagine a homestead away from the vagaries of society, hypercapitalism, all the horrors of the world, a la Thoreau’s famous retreat to Walden Pond. But (in my corner of the internet) I am seeing some pushback against this, for important reasons.
Solitude makes life simpler and more peaceful in a lot of ways, but it precludes the support and relationships that are not only good for our wellbeing, but that also make possible a cultural/political/practical reorientation toward more simplicity for everybody. How can we, people in the U.S., live simply and appreciate the little things when we or the people we care for are crushed by student debt, untreated chronic illnesses, or the inability to access basic needs?2
Perhaps that can be done one-by-one, with people progressively following others’ footsteps. But I’m becoming more convinced that such a thing won’t happen on a large scale or equitably without some collective action. Without community and interdependence, simple living will become a new class signifier; those at the top can afford to pare back and take a breath; those at the bottom will continue to grind, because they have to.
TbQh I don’t have a neat ending to this letter right now except to say that I’ll be thinking about all this for a long time and trying to put these thoughts into practice. The vibes are not there for me to wrap it up properly or neatly, so thank you for being down to read whatever I put out there and excusing my lazy writing, lol.
That all said, I hope you can see Perfect Days or The Boy and the Heron if you haven’t already! I hope you get to spend time with your people today!! I hope you can pause and enjoy the sunlight through the foliage! Go touch grass today, bestie!
Much love & appreciation,
—mia xx
before you go!! r e c s
Some pieces I have read recently and continue to revisit …:
Not talking about people who buy fast fashion or Ikea furniture because that’s what’s available to them! More drawing attention to the cultural reasons why we might feel the need to buy new things constantly—advertising, panem et circenses, etc. etc.
RE: Perfect Days, Japan seems to have a better handle on this than the U.S. Hirayama can enjoy simplicity in part because his government isn’t spending more $ on dropping bombs on other people than providing education, healthcare, and social benefits.