Happy Friday! Sit back, relax, grab a bowl of cereal and watch this Fair Companies video of Dan Price and his Hobbit hole home. Be prepared to feel like your life is a wasteful, complicated mess. It’s fairly tough to get much lower impact than Dan. He lives in a tiny subterranean Shire-like structure that is almost wholly constructed of reclaimed materials. He pays $200 a year for the land his house sits on (or, rather, under) and his annual expenses total $5K. He gets most of his water from a spring. His feces are composted in a toilet he made 25 years ago. He uses the tiniest bit of electricity. His diet consists mostly of raw fruits and veggies and cereal. He has very few possessions. Almost everything in his life has been edited–a word Price, once a professional photographer, uses liberally–down to the most essential. Despite his radical level of editing, Price sees himself as a pretty normal guy, albeit one who has and consumes very little stuff.
The video is really worth the full 34 minute viewing time. It’s the chronicle of a man who has consistently chosen to live according to his own rules (His lifestyle is no flash in the pan. Before the Hobbit hole, he lived in a tent, teepee and tiny house). And while he considers himself a normal guy, he alludes to how his lifestyle is partly the function of being a bit of a hermit–that more human contact would put him under more scrutiny, making it more difficult to do his own thing, which he seems to enjoy quite a bit.
Even if you don’t want to live like Price, to know this level of minimalism is not only possible, but being carried out, might help inspire whatever bit of modest editing you might be having difficulty incorporating into your life.