HOW TO LIVE LIKE A KING FOR VERY LITTLE
MEDITATE.
“All human evil comes from a single cause, man’s inability to sit still in a room.”
- Blaise Pascal, Pensées
What separates a plebeian from an aristocrat? Is it wealth or good breeding or genes? Minimally so. The mark of an aristocrat is the ability to rise above emotions and the chaos of daily life. Zoom out and see the big picture.
Context is for kings.
Meditation creates enough distance between you and the world to think the thoughts that will allow you to assess how you’re feeling about life, where you want to go, and how you want to do it. It also brings you back into yourself.
EXERCISE.
MOVE! And get lots of sunlight. For 200,000 years our forebears walked a lot to hunt game and gather edible plants. And, peasants of every historical period enjoyed more sun and exercise than the modern “liberated” employee, who sits on their ass indoors for 8-12 hours a day bathed in blue light and electromagnetic frequencies. Humans were not built for this ersatz life.
The bodies we have inherited are designed for fighting, fleeing, feasting and fucking. Act accordingly. You can make time to move with intention for an hour each day. Lift, run, row, cycle – start moving and never stop. This does not mean you must train hard 7 days a week with no rest. Don’t be a moron. But, get off your ass.
DIET.
The food you’re eating will either build you or break you.
Find an agreeable diet – I recommend Carnivore, Ketogenic, and Paleo if you’re recovering from the standard modern diet. Aim to get plenty of natural foods that are as minimally processed or altered as possible. Lots of protein, healthy fats, some fibre and a bit of sweet potatoes/rice/sourdough. ZERO or minimal refined sugar. If your grandmother would not have recognized it as food, high chance you should avoid it.
Globally soil is depleted, so food today is half as rich in micronutrients as it was 50 years ago. To compensate, take the basic supplements. I recommend Magnesium, Vitamin D, Omega 3 (in fish oil), a daily multivitamin and Zinc.
SLEEP.
Sleep 8 hours. 9 is better. This advice is parroted frequently but falls on deaf ears. Do you have an infant child? Are you a night labourer? If you answered no to both of the above you have no excuse. Night owls aren’t real, your Circadian rhythm is just broken. Fix your sleep hygiene and the sleep will come. On 9 hours of sleep you will almost always feel like a king. Netflix, YouTube and all these other distractions are just excuses we use to justify our poor sleeping habits.
CLOTHES.
If you’re like most people, you already own at least 3-4 pairs of trousers, 5-10 shirts, 2 dresses/dress shirts, and a dozen pairs of socks and undies. Thats’s more than anyone in history ever owned, aristocrats being the exception.
All you really need is 5-6 outfits for work, on daily rotation. Aside from work, perhaps a couple of good, versatile pieces to work out and walk around in. You don’t need to buy more clothes. You need to find new ways to spend your time. Compulsively buying new clothes is a symptom of GREAT BOREDOM.
STUFF.
I read somewhere that the average American household contains 300,000 items. That’s a lot of things to lose! I contend that the overwhelming majority of things on the market are a waste of money. I don’t like the idea of spending my hard-earned cash on poorly made shit produced in Bangladeshi/Chinese factories where working conditions are poor and employees are treated like chattel1.
Same goes for so-called luxury goods. Beyond the slightly better materials and construction, none of it has value above massaging your ego. Buy the best thing you can afford for the job you need it to do, and use it until it falls apart.
Learn to look after your shit. Care instructions exist for a reason. If it tears, mend it. If it breaks, try repairing it before getting a new one. It takes 11,000 litres of water to produce a pair of jeans. I am no mathematician but that sounds like a lot.
HOUSE.
You don’t need a big house. Or an expensive house. Or a house in a “good neighborhood”. A house is ultimately just a box where you shit, shower, sleep, and shave. Ideally it should also have some space to store your Stuff. The less Stuff you have, the smaller your house needs to be, ergo the less money you have to spend on a house.
Diogenes the Cynic famously lived in a barrel. How did that work out? He clearly must have turned out OK, because we still talk about him 2,300 years on. Thinking that one can only live comfortably in a nice house in a respectable neighborhood with a backyard jacuzzi seems to me to be a failure of the imagination. With that money I could happily live in a wooden shack by the sea.
You’re blocking my sun. Bugger off! (The hot tub can stay though.)
CAR.
If your work is less than a five minute drive from home, walk. Or ride a bicycle. Your body will thank you for it. (See Point 2)
If you live more than a 20-minute drive away from work, consider moving. Or getting a job closer to home. Money is easy to make. What you can’t get back is time. Any time you can spend with friends and family, or sleeping/training, is more important than any extra money a 2 hour commute will net you. Do you even really need a car, or have you been the victim of lifelong media indoctrination that told you that owning a car is cheaper/more liberating? A mental exercise: Calculate the amount you spend on monthly instalments, fuel, maintenance, road tax and miscellaneous expenses due to the commute. It definitely wasn’t worth it for me. Maybe you realize it’s no longer worth it for you.
If you must own a car, learn how to fix your car and drive it until that thing is ready to go to the scrapheap in the sky. Don’t buy a new car (or a new anything, for that matter) – all of that is just advertising and cultural hypnosis. Cars are climate-controlled boxes on wheels that get you from Point A to Point B. A car from 20 years ago will do that just as well if not better than a car from today.
JOB.
You want to find a job that gives you at least some feeling of fulfilment. I don’t mean you have to do something you love, or a job that perfectly satisfies your Ikigai, but if your work makes you miserable and soul-drained and the only reason you stay is for the money – just leave.
Most jobs are bullshit and everybody knows it. The one thing that keeps popping up in my conversations with friends and colleagues is that they’d rather retire early or leave their current job to pursue something2 more3 fulfilling4.
And hey if that entails taking a pay cut, go ahead and take the pay cut. Even a 30%+ pay cut is worth it. Money is easy to make. Your time, energy, and health are your most important assets. They are less easy to replenish than money.
When you do what you enjoy each day – when your work brings you at least some measure of meaning, satisfaction and fulfilment, you will no longer feel the need to spend money on overpriced junk, drugs, alcohol, escapes, etc.
FINANCE.
99% of money woes stem from not having a budget. Make a budget. Stick to the budget. You can’t control your spending, you say? Have you ever tracked a month of your spending? I guarantee it will surprise you.
It’s OK to not act rich. It’s OK to stay home and read. No one cares if you’ve not been to Bali, or that that you don’t have this year’s iThing, or haven’t eaten at that new place. People are too wrapped up in their own lives to pay attention to how much you’re spending, so forget about impressing them.
Understand what hedonic adaptation is and how it turns you into a sucker.
Don’t get a credit card. The only things you should ever get on credit is a house and a car. Maybe not even car. I knew a guy once who bought a new 3 series on finance. When asked why, he said, “How else will people know that I’ve arrived?” That was 5 years ago. I don’t know if he’s paid it off.
DRUGS.
Don’t smoke cigarettes. There, you now have permission to never start. If you do smoke, you now have permission to stop. Your mind-body is perfectly capable of calibrating its emotions without the addition of nicotine.
Minimize. Tobacco, alcohol, any psychoactive/psychedelic substances really are all preventable expenses. Wholly unnecessary and irrelevant at best; actively destroying your capacity to build wealth and be happy at worst.
Why do you feel like you need any of this stuff anyway? Boredom is the likeliest culprit but most will not admit to that, choosing instead to say things like, “It really expands my mind,” or, “I can’t have a good time out if I’m not drinking.”
I don’t buy it. The best time to receive a mystical experience is when you’re stone cold sober. And if you genuinely can’t enjoy yourself without alcohol etc., you may have worse problems than simple boredom.
ENTERTAINMENT.
Streaming, video games, dating apps, foodie culture. All of it to be regarded as highly suspect. Popular culture (this includes most entertainment options) is a replacement for a personality, and a shoddy one at that.
I am befuddled by how many people don’t seem to have a single original thought in their head. Every other thing that comes out of their mouths is a reference to some hackneyed superhero movie5 or Netflix show they recently watched. At best it is a benign but ultimately fruitless way to fritter the time away; at worst it is indoctrination into a system of values that may not necessarily be in your best interest.
So I have some good news for you.
It’s OK to be bored. It’s fine to just sit still and be. You’ll be better off sitting in a dark room and breathing for 30 minutes than watching Netflix for an hour.
Next week’s post will be about things I no longer spend money on… and things I do spend on.
Until next week,
Stay Solar.
This post would not exist without Thor Harris, who wrote the original list that this post cribbed its title from. Thor, if you’re reading this, I know you won’t mind.
This post would not be what it is if not for Meta-Nomad’s follow-up piece, How to live like an Emperor for very little. I recommend you follow Meta-Nomad’s writing – he is an extraordinarily intelligent dude, whose philosophy and writing has informed my approach towards the luxuries we take for granted and the ills of modernity.
While I haven’t personally met either of these gentlemen, I owe them a debt of gratitude for showing me a new way of life, and mode of thinking. That has massively helped me.
This has happened to me, and now it’s happening to you too.
Florist
Gardener-farmer
Sourdough baker
They all tell the same story. Don’t believe me? Pick and watch any 3 Marvel movies from the last 13 years. Literally the same plot-line, with predictable character arcs. The illusion of variety is created through color swatches, design flourishes, CGI and background music (sometimes 80s, sometimes orchestral), but it’s the same warmed over monomyth underneath.