Digital Minimalism

financial independence, which refers to the pecuniary state in which your assets produce
enough income to cover your living expenses. Many people think of FI as a goal you reach
around retirement age, or perhaps after receiving a large inheritance, but in recent years
the internet helped fuel a newly resurgent FI community that consists mainly of young
people who are finding shortcuts to this freedom through extreme frugality.
Most of the attention on the FI 2.0 movement focuses on its underlying financial
insights,
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but these details are not relevant for our purposes. What does matter is the fact
that these financially independent young people provide particularly good case studies for

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exploring high-quality leisure. There are two reasons for this claim. First, and perhaps
most obvious, when you achieve FI, you suddenly have many more leisure hours to fill than
the average person. The second reason is that the subversive decision to pursue FI at a
young age, which typically leads to radical lifestyle decisions, self-selects for individuals
who are unusually intentional about how they live their lives. This combination of
abundant free time and commitment to intentional living makes this group an ideal source
of insight into effective leisure.
Let’s start this search for insight by interrogating the habits of the informal leader of the
FI 2.0 movement: a former engineer named Pete Adeney, who became financially
independent in his early thirties and now blogs about his life under the purposefully self-
deprecating moniker Mr. Money Mustache. When Pete became financially independent, he
didn’t fill his life with the types of passive leisure activities we often associate with young
men relaxing—playing video games, watching sports, web surfing, long evenings at the bar
—he instead leveraged his freedom to become even more active.
Pete doesn’t own a television and doesn’t subscribe to Netflix or Hulu. He occasionally
rents a movie on Google Play, but for the most part, his family doesn’t use screens to
provide entertainment. Where he does spend most of his time is working on projects.
Preferably outside. Here’s how Pete explains his leisure philosophy on his blog:
I never understood the joy of watching other people play sports, can’t stand
tourist attractions, don’t sit on the beach unless there’s a really big sand castle
that needs to be made, [and I] don’t care about what the celebrities and politicians
are doing. . . . Instead of all this, I seem to get satisfaction only from making stuff.
Or maybe a better description would be solving problems and making
improvements.
In recent years, Pete renovated his family’s home and then built a standalone
outbuilding in their yard to serve as an office and music studio. These projects completed,
and eager for more holes to dig and drywall to hang, he somewhat impulsively bought a
run-down retail building on the main street of his hometown of Longmont, Colorado. He’s
currently transforming it into what he calls Mr. Money Mustache World Headquarters.
What, exactly, he plans to do with the space once finished isn’t yet quite clear—but the end
goal isn’t really the point; he seems to have invested in this building in large part for the
project. As Pete summarizes his leisure philosophy: “If you leave me alone for a day . . . I’ll
have a joyful time rotating between carpentry, weight training, writing, playing around
with instruments in the music studio, making lists and executing tasks from them.”
We can find a similar commitment to action in the lifestyle of Liz Thames, who also
reached financial independence in her early thirties and blogs about it on the popular
Frugalwoods website. Upon achieving FI, Liz and her husband, Nate, pushed their
enjoyment of activity to a new extreme—leaving their home in bustling Cambridge,
Massachusetts, and moving onto a sixty-six-acre homestead sited on the side of a small
mountain in rural Vermont.
As Liz explained to me when I asked her about this decision, moving to a homestead of
this size was not a choice made lightly. Their long gravel driveway, for example, requires
constant maintenance. If a tree falls, it needs to be sawed and removed, “even if it’s ten
below outside.” If it’s snowing, they must plow often, or the snow pile will become too deep
for the tractor to push, trapping them on their property—which is not ideal, as their nearest
neighbor is a long hike away and they don’t have cell service to let them know they need
help.
Liz and Nate heat their home with wood from their property, which also turns out to
require quite a bit of effort. “We spend the whole summer harvesting wood,” Liz told me.
“You have to go into the forest, identify the trees to bring down, then you have to buck the
logs, bring them on-site, split them, stack them, while also being careful to monitor the
wood stove as it heats.” And, as it turns out, if you want to enjoy cleared fields surrounding
your house, “you have to mow . . . a lot.”
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Pete and Liz emphasize a perhaps surprising observation: when individuals in the FI
community are provided large amounts of leisure time, they often voluntarily fill these
hours with strenuous activity. This bias toward action over more traditional ideas of
relaxation might strike some as needlessly exhausting, but to Pete and Liz it makes perfect
sense.
Pete, for his part, offers three justifications for his strenuous life: it doesn’t cost much
money, it provides physical exercise, and it’s good for his mental health (“For me, inactivity
leads to a depressive boredom,” he explains). Liz offers similar explanations for her
decision to adopt the demands of rural living. She has a different name for these activities
—“virtuous hobbies”—and emphasizes that activities that can seem like work actually offer
multiple levels of benefits.
Consider, for example, the effort required to clear trails on their wooded property. As Liz
told me: “We have property, we want to hike it, we have to clear trails to do this effectively,
so we have to get out here with a chainsaw, cutting trees, clearing brush.” This sounds like
work, but it offers several different types of value. As Liz explained: “It is mentally freeing,
because it is very different than working on a computer . . . it requires problem solving, but
in a different way.” In addition, it offers good exercise, and it requires you to learn new
skills. “Learning to use a chainsaw is not easy,” Liz told me. Finally, there’s the satisfaction
of actually getting to use the trail once cleared. As explained by Liz, a seemingly tedious
task like clearing trails can suddenly seem significantly more rewarding than passively
surfing Twitter.
The FI community, of course, is not the first to discover the inherent value in active
leisure. Speaking to the Hamilton Club in Chicago in the spring of 1899, Theodore
Roosevelt famously said: “I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the
doctrine of the strenuous life.” Roosevelt practiced what he preached. As president,
Roosevelt regularly boxed (until a hard blow detached his left retina), practiced jujitsu,
skinny-dipped in the Potomac, and read at the rate of one book per day. He was not one to
sit back and relax.
A decade later, Arnold Bennett took up the cause of active leisure in his short but
influential self-help guide, How to Live on 24 Hours a Day. In this book, Bennett notes
that the average London middle-class white-collar worker putting in an eight-hour day is
left with sixteen additional hours during which he is as free as any gentleman to pursue
virtuous activity. Bennett argues that the waking half of these hours could be dedicated to
enriching and demanding leisure, but were instead too often wasted by frivolous time-
killing pastimes, like smoking, pottering, caressing the piano (but not actually playing),
and perhaps deciding to become “acquainted with a genuinely good whiskey.” After an
evening of this mindless boredom busting (the Victorian equivalent of idling on your iPad),
he notes, you fall exhausted into bed, with all the hours you were granted “gone like magic,
unaccountably gone.”
Bennett argues that these hours should instead be put to use for demanding and
virtuous leisure activities. Bennett, being an early twentieth-century British snob, suggests
activities that center on reading difficult literature and rigorous self-reflection. In a
representative passage, Bennett dismisses novels because they “never demand any
appreciable mental application.” A good leisure pursuit, in Bennett’s calculus, should
require more “mental strain” to enjoy (he recommends difficult poetry). He also ignores
the possibility that some of this leisure time might be reduced by childcare or housework,
as he was writing only for men, who in Bennett’s early twentieth-century middle-class
British world, of course, never needed to bother with such things.
This is all to say, for our twenty-first-century purposes, we can ignore the specific
activities Bennett suggests. What interests me instead is a more timeless piece of Bennett’s
argument, in which he fights the claim that his prescription of strained effort is too
demanding to qualify as leisure:
What? You say that full energy given to those sixteen hours will lessen the value of
the business eight? Not so. On the contrary, it will assuredly increase the value of
the business eight. One of the chief things which my typical man has to learn is

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that the mental faculties are capable of a continuous hard activity; they do not tire
like an arm or a leg. All they want is change—not rest, except in sleep.
This argument reverses our intuition. Expending more energy in your leisure, Bennett
tells us, can end up energizing you more. He’s reworking the old entrepreneurial adage
“You have to spend money to make money” into the language of personal vitality.
This idea, which for lack of a better term we can call the Bennett Principle, provides a
plausible foundation for the active leisure lives we’ve encountered so far in this section.
Pete Adeney, Liz Thames, and Theodore Roosevelt all provide specific arguments for their
embrace of strenuous leisure, but these arguments all build on the same general principle
that the value you receive from a pursuit is often proportional to the energy invested. We
might tell ourselves there’s no greater reward after a hard day at the office than to have an
evening entirely devoid of plans or commitments. But we then find ourselves, several hours
of idle watching and screen tapping later, somehow more fatigued than when we began. As
Bennett would tell you—and Pete, Liz, and Teddy would confirm—if you instead rouse the
motivation to spend that same time actually doing something—even if it’s hard—you’ll
likely end the night feeling better.
Pulling together these different strands, we identify our first lesson about cultivating
high-quality leisure.