I Moved Away From Civilization For a Week
And I learned that happiness is in simplicity.

A few days back, I checked out of my apartment hotel and hailed a cab to drive me to Peredelkino — an old ‘dacha’ place for Soviet writers, near Moscow. Pasternak, who won the Noble Prize for Literature, lived here. So did many other famous Russian artists, writers, musicians, composers.
I rented a small cabin, the size of my family’s living room alone, in the woods, away from civilization. My personal Walden.
But I had trouble sleeping the first night. First-night anxiety, I guess. I tried distracting myself with all sorts of things that usually help: guided meditation recordings, writing down thoughts, reading fiction, reading non-fiction, texting, thinking, counting backward from 1000 (I usually fall asleep somewhere at 940, this time, I gave up trying at 860), what have you. I wanted to fall asleep earlier — i.e., at 10–11 PM and wake up at 6–7 AM.
As they say, “Man plans, God laughs.” I ended up falling asleep well after 2 AM and woke up around 9 AM, getting seven hours of low-quality, anxious sleep.
Perhaps that’s the real problem: expecting too much. We (read: I) expect too much of myself. I want to live a certain way (e.g., wake up at a certain time and go to bed at a certain time), and if I don’t live this way, I feel bad about myself. I get anxious. Perhaps if we let go and listened to what life is telling us, we would be happier. People hold on to the steering wheel of life too much even though life can perfectly be lived on auto-pilot.
On the first morning run — which I usually use to look around a new place I move to — I had to run half of the way through the traffic, coughing on exhaust fumes and messing up my clothes in the dirt. And on the other half, when I was running through the woods, I wet my shoes and almost fell in the frozen pile of mud. Pure bliss.
After the run, I made myself a modest breakfast: two fried eggs. That’s it. No vegetables, nothing. Honestly, I didn’t have anything else. I ate it straight out of the pan, like a real hermit. Or a bachelor.
And you know what I realized while scrubbing the second fried egg from the pan, watching it break and spill with its golden liquid all over the fork?
We want too much. Our generation. That’s our biggest problem.
We live by desire rather than necessity. And all our problems stem from that.
If we started buying only what we needed, we would stumble upon the same eye-widening realization I did as I tried putting the spilled yolk in my mouth: we may want much, but we don’t really need much.
We need much less than we assume
Two fried eggs. That’s it. That was my breakfast. A packet of dozen eggs costs 100 rubles (about $1.5). Divide $1.5 by 12, and you get $0.125 per egg. Multiply by two, and that’s $0.25 per two eggs or one breakfast. 17 rubles.
Yesterday, fighting my Sunday hangover, I went to a cafe and ate breakfast for 700 rubles. That’s a month worth of fried egg breakfasts.
Of course, I am pushing the line here a little bit. Nobody can (or should) eat two fried eggs for breakfast, every day, all the time. I regret not having vegetables and other protein sources. I will take care of that shortly after I finish writing this by going to a grocery store.
But the idea still holds: we need much less than we assume. And that’s liberating.
- We don’t need a new computer. The old one is just fine.
- We don’t need a new iPhone. In fact, we don’t need an iPhone at all. Android phones have all the text/messaging/GPS/Spotify/YouTube/Kindle capabilities — and cost ten times less.
- We don’t need to eat fancy. That’s for sure. Most of ‘fancy eating’ comes down to wanting to impress someone, including ourselves.
I don’t want to sound here as if I bought a frugality seminar from Mr. Money Mustache. I am all hands in favor of a good life.
But I keep returning to that scene in Captain Fantastic, where someone asks the main character — a father who lived with his (Ten? Twelve?) children in the woods, “How do you still have money?”
The guy replies, “We buy only what we need.”
What would our lives be like if we lived only by necessity? Or, at least, strived to do so — because it’s good to treat ourselves well from time to time.
I say we’d be happier.
Almost three years since, I still remember that intense pleasure of a hot shower and a cheeseburger after five days of ‘Survival Week’ at Draper University, where I slept in tents, ate the same food on $3/day every day, killed chickens, and hiked 10 miles each day. Upon return, my dopamine receptors were so clean, and I could have had an orgasm from just smelling a French fry.
Not only happier — but we’d be freer. Richer. We’d save all the extra money we don’t spend, we’d invest it, and we’d have financial security. And that’s a feeling that doesn’t come cheap or easy. It’s a big luxury to feel in control over your life by having some cash stashed up in a sock drawer, especially in the world of impulse buys, short-term thinking, and Bitcoin.
Stop being a slave to consumerism
Of course, it’s easier to write these things than to live by them. Few people will decide to move to the woods, like Captain Fantastic. Plus, we’re such herd instincts — we can’t help but live the way everybody does when we’re part of a particular society. I notice this in myself all the time.
When I am in Moscow, I can eat at restaurants three times a day. Heck, I’ll get in debt to go to a restaurant. It’s an important part of life in this city. And when you’re here, it feels like it’s a normal thing: breakfast, lunch, dinner. Three restaurants. (They are relatively cheap and good here too.) But when I am in London, I couldn’t care less about restaurants. Instead, I run a lot, do yoga, and listen to Pulp. When I am in the States, I ‘Netflix and chill’ more than when I am in Europe. In France, all I want to do is drink wine and eat pain au chocolate. So on, so forth.
Of course, when we’re part of civilization, it’s hard to go against the tide. People will think you’re a dork. What are you doing walking with that old Nokia of yours? It’s 2021, for fuck’s sake!
But I also believe we owe it to ourselves: we must bring ourselves back to focus on what’s important. We must make ourselves realize and witness, in practice, that we don’t need much. That we can survive on very little. That it’s perfectly possible to live on $500-$1,000 per month, including rent, and anything else is a luxury. This realization makes you stronger. And happier. You stop being a slave to consumerism.
You can only do that in solitude. In silence. By getting away, even if for a while. Even Bill Gates goes on ‘thinking weeks’ once in a while. And Seneca — the famous Stoic philosopher — is known for practicing poverty, on purpose. It relaxes the mind to know that you don’t need much.
It’s scary, yes. But that’s exactly why it’s worth it. And unlike Seneca, we have Airbnb and cheap plane tickets, so it’s easier to do that than ever.
In fact, if I could add one more thing to my list of “what to do in your twenties,” it would be this: build your character, learn about yourself by putting yourself in uncomfortable situations, on purpose. Imagine trying all sorts of crazy shit for the next decade, like taking $100 and moving to a rural village or traveling Europe with a backpack. You’ll turn 30 or 35, and you’ll be unstoppable. You’ll know nothing can hurt you. This is the advice my grandmother had given me, and I agree with her wholeheartedly.
Can you make yourself happy?
I am starting to believe that you can’t find happiness. Nor can you create it. No matter how convincing those self-help books might be.
I think that happiness, satisfaction, success in life — these things are all about the right perspective. It’s an internal game much more than an external one. The question of happiness is not about where you live, how much money you’ve got, or who you know or spend time with. It’s whether you can go and make yourself happy.
“Do what you can, where you are, with what you’ve got,” said Theodore Roosevelt.
The happiness game is about that: are you able to create magic out of your life? Some people live on $1,000–2,000 per month and are genuinely happy. They’ve created a life for themselves by making use of the resources at hand.
And there are numerous examples of rich depressives who have dedicated their lives to achieving, filling that void inside them, only to realize that the void persists. Why? Because they got it all wrong. The void has to be filled from the inside, not from the outside. You first make yourself happy.
Then everything falls into place.
As a society, we’re quickly becoming spoiled. Most of the things we have, we don’t need. We might think we need them. But if you can survive without something (e.g., a new iPhone), you don’t really need it. Keeping that in perspective, is key.
As Henry David Thoreau said, “It’s not what you look at that counts, it’s what you see.”
When I look out of my window now, I see a squirrel munching a nut that fell from a pine tree. It’s quiet now.
Money can’t buy happiness. But it sure as hell can pay for an Airbnb and buy a few days of peace. Happiness itself, as it turns out, doesn’t have to be complex.
It’s purest when it’s simple.
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