A Nostalgia For Simple Living

This post may contain affiliate links. If you purchase through links on my site, I may earn a commission at no cost to you. For more information, please see my disclosure policy.

Lately, I have experienced an acute nostalgia for simple living, the kind of life I had as a child in the sixties. Things were easier back then, and our lives were less complicated.

But how could that be? We had none of the modern conveniences we have now. It took longer to get less done.

this Idea

Everyone moved more slowly back then. But everything got done one way or another.

The food got cooked. Cobblers were baked with the blackberries picked from the garden. Vegetables were grown, picked, and brought in to cook meals—fresh and pesticide-free.

What Simple Living Was About Then

The chickens were fed. I gathered the eggs, hurrying to get from the hen house back to the gate without the rooster pecking at my legs.

Sometimes a chicken was killed so we had a fried chicken meal.

Food tasted so good back then. There were no additives. We mostly ate food from the garden, which was then canned for winter meals. The jars were stored on rustic shelves in the old cellar and retrieved when needed.

We didn’t have an automobile. At the time, I thought that was terrible. But now I’m glad I got to live that kind of life. There was no oil to change or tires to check. It was so uncomplicated.

Maybe that’s why I have a nostalgia for simple living. There were fewer things to have to think about.

We walked almost everywhere, from town to town. If we needed to go to a nearby city, we took the bus.

How did all that get done if there wasn’t a car to rush us places? I find that curious now, as I feel nostalgic for that kind of simple living.

Back when I was young, I’d never have wanted to be old-fashioned on purpose. Now it’s a way of life many wish to embrace.

The Desire for Simple Living

I live a pretty simple life as it is. It’s a good life. I’d rather be home than anywhere in the world. My beloved cat, Ivy, is a great companion to have by my side. And now I have Simon, a black cat, and Daisy, a ginger cat.

I must have adopted that simplicity in childhood, when we rarely left home. Home was comforting, with so much work my grandmothers accomplished in a day.

Plant the garden and weed it. Pick vegetables from the garden and cook them. Create three homemade meals a day.

I didn’t realize what a big deal that was at the time. But I sure do now.

Breakfast was typically served with gravy and biscuits, accompanied by eggs and sausage. Lunch was often leftovers from the evening before. Then more food was cooked for supper. And the cycle continued.

During the summer, sliced tomatoes, cucumbers, and onions were laid out on the table. All these things were fresh from the garden.

It seemed so simple, but I didn’t appreciate it at the time.

A Nostalgia for What Home Is

Home is not just where you live. It is where you play out and tell your story. It’s where you chronicle your decisions and mistakes.

Then you get up the next day and start a new page or chapter.

Home is where you turn those pages, looking back as you step forward.

Nostalgia for simple living is that quiet ache for a time when life felt slower, gentler, and more grounded.

It’s the yearning for mornings that began with sunlight through curtains instead of screens, for handwritten letters instead of text messages, and meals made from scratch.

It’s the memory of a home where comfort came not from abundance, but from familiarity. A worn quilt, the smell of bread baking, the rhythm of daily chores that tethered you to the present moment.

This kind of nostalgia isn’t just about the past. It’s about the longing for peace in a world that feels too fast, too loud, and too full of distractions.

The Ache for a Simpler Life

It’s the desire to return to what feels real and human, such as tending to a garden, sitting on a porch at dusk, or savoring a day that isn’t rushed.

At its heart, nostalgia for simple living is a reminder that joy doesn’t need to be chased. Joy can be found even in the smallest, most ordinary moments.

Sitting and watching the birds hop around the yard. A squirrel running up a tree. The tree leaves whistling in the wind.

There’s a particular kind of homesickness that has nothing to do with a place. It shows up in the evening when you’re scrolling through four different apps at once.

Half-watching something you didn’t choose to watch, half-answering a message you’ll forget by morning. It feels like missing somewhere you’ve never actually been.

The Myth We’re Missing

Let’s be honest about something first: the “simpler times” most of us are nostalgic for probably weren’t that simple. Our grandparents worried about money, illness, and war in ways that made our anxieties and needs almost comic.

Nobody is actually longing for a world with less medicine, less opportunity, or less connection to people who live far away.

What we’re missing isn’t a decade. It’s a feeling. A way that time used to move before it got shredded into notifications.

Think about what a Sunday used to require of a person. You cooked something that took hours because that was simply how long food took.

You wrote a letter and then waited, sometimes for weeks, for a reply. And the waiting was just how conversations worked.

Boredom existed, and nobody rushed to banish it. These weren’t virtues people practiced on purpose. They were just the shape of an unhurried and less complicated world.

What we’re actually mourning, I think, is the pauses in life. Between a thought and its broadcast. Between a question and its answer.

What Simpler Actually Looks Like Now

Slowness as a choice, not a limitation. Cooking a meal that takes ninety minutes on a night you didn’t have to. Walking somewhere you could have driven. Reading a physical book with no hyperlinks tempting you to keep clicking.

Boredom as a feature. Letting a quiet ten minutes stay quiet instead of reaching for a phone to fill it. This is harder than it sounds. Boredom has become almost taboo, a problem to be solved within seconds, when it used to be the soil from which ideas grew.

Fewer inputs, held longer. One good record played all the way through instead of a shuffled playlist. One long conversation instead of six shallow ones. A single photograph printed and pinned up instead of four thousand saved to a phone.

Repair over replacement. Fixing a chair instead of buying a new one. Not because it’s cheaper. Sometimes it isn’t. But because repairing something teaches you to really notice it and be present.

This Nostalgia for Simple Living

Maybe the nostalgia itself is doing something useful. It’s not really asking us to time-travel. It’s a signal pointing at what’s missing: unhurried attention, real waiting, the specific satisfaction of a thing that takes as long as it takes.

You don’t need a cabin in the woods to live a simpler life. You need permission to let a few things in your life move at the speed they naturally want to move.

Simpler living was never really about the past. It’s about deciding, in a world engineered for speed, to keep a few corners of your life stubbornly slow.