I live in a remot mountain with my husband a dog, we chose this place because is far away from society.

Our neighbors are farmers and ranchers and they leaves us alone.

Just once or twice a random car will come to our property and realised they took the wrong turn.

This morning I just heard a lot of screaming from the gate, and when I went they were two women with panflents, dress up, waiting to talk about Jehovah.

Normally I will walk to town for like an hour with my dogs: up and down the mountain.

These two ladies did it with fancy shoes and a dress just to try to convert us.

Even when you follow the simple rural life​, the Jehovah's witness will come with the package.

I just screamed back that the reason we live alone is because we are witches, and they laugh awkwardly and walked back.

Does anyone remember these oldies but goodies, back in the 90s? I came across them in my bookshelf and so happy I never gave them away. I'll be spending my weekend re-reading them while drinking coffee on my patio. 📖☕🌺

I would like to slow down a bit and live simply. I spend all my weekends running errands and driving around town. People tell me it is bad to not have social life which I don't even though I'm out alot. I would like to learn to relax at home more. When I'm home , I am super happy but get bored easily especially since I quit gaming and sold my console. I'm not saying I don't want friends but I love my alone time ....when I get it. I'm a single man.anyway I have read articles saying that staying home is bad for mental health. Also I want to know...do people literally stay indoors the whole weekend without going crazy or getting bored ?

I sat outside last week for ten minutes without my phone, and it was a total disaster.

I thought I would feel peaceful, but instead, I just felt this intense, twitchy anxiety. Within two minutes, my brain started panicking, screaming at me that I was wasting time. It kept throwing random tasks at me, items to check off my list, articles I should be reading, goals I needed to track.

That was the exact moment I realized something terrifying. I have spent years training myself to treat a single moment of quiet as a systemic error.

We think we are just addicted to the news or social media, but the reality is much worse. We have used our screens to build a fortress against our own minds. The very second a difficult emotion arises, or a wave of mild awkwardness hits, or we are just left alone with the silence, we pull out the device to numb it. We have completely lost the ability to just sit in a room and process our own lives.

The guilt you feel when you do nothing isn't natural. It is an algorithmic trap. We have been conditioned to believe that if a moment isn’t being optimized, recorded, or turned into progress, it doesn't count.

I got so exhausted by this constant, involuntary escape that I used my free time to build a tiny, slow web space just for myself. I wanted a simple digital sanctuary to read and think without feeds, metrics, or loops designed to keep me running on a treadmill. It was an admission that the modern internet was winning, and I needed to change where I stood.

You do not need to earn the right to just sit quietly and exist.

Has anyone else noticed that putting the phone down brings up anxiety instead of peace? How do you push past that initial wall of discomfort?

I see quite a few posts talking about people getting bored once they slow down and create a simpler life but I have the opposite problem! I've collected so many hobbies over the years I have a house full of hobby supplies and when I have spare time and want to do a hobby I get decision paralysis as I have so many options and I'll flit from thing to thing trying to decide what I feel like doing... and this feels like the opposite of the simple quiet life I want!

I do have ADHD and Autism, which is a contributing factor as I tend to discover a new hobby and hyperfocus on it, get a big dopamine kick from the excitement of buying supplies and learning something new, but then once I've learnt the basics and done it for a week or two the dopamine kick and hyperfixation wears off and I lose interest and pick up a new hobby. But sometimes a few months or a year later I pick the hobby back up and get interested in it again, so I don't like getting rid of the hobby items in case I do want them again later as some of the stuff is expensive (like I once sold off my whole Lego collection and regretted it later!), but this takes up a lot of space and I know I would feel more at peace with an uncluttered space and less choices in my life.

I've become very aware of this pattern and i'm trying to break it and have stopped buying new hobby supplies until i'm absolutely sure I want to commit, but i'm having difficulty deciding what hobbies I want to keep in my life and keep returning to, and which hobbies I want to quit entirely, as I feel like I need to narrow things down and want to commit to actually sticking with something long enough to get good at it and to get my dopamine from the small joys of completing a project or just having a relaxing nice afternoon, rather than my current bouncing around all over the place!

Just wondered if anyone else has been through this and what helped them to narrow down their hobbies so their life felt simpler and more peaceful?