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Ever notice how the people with the “biggest” lives often seem the most miserable?
They’ve got the corner office, the sprawling house, the packed calendar that would make your head spin. Yet behind closed doors, they’re popping anxiety meds and wondering why success feels so empty.
Meanwhile, there’s this other group of people. They turned down promotions, moved to smaller towns, said no to opportunities that would have doubled their income. Friends called them crazy. Family worried they were throwing their lives away.
But here’s the thing: they’re the ones who actually seem happy.
I’ve been fascinated by this phenomenon ever since I made my own leap from Australia to Southeast Asia. What started as a desperate need for change turned into discovering a completely different way of living. One where less truly became more.
These people who chose smaller lives didn’t just stumble into happiness. They developed specific daily habits that keep them grounded in what actually matters. After years of observing, interviewing, and living alongside them, I’ve identified eight practices they almost universally share.
1) They protect their mornings fiercely
You know what successful downsizers never do? Jump straight into emails the second they wake up.
Instead, they treat their mornings like sacred territory. No meetings before 10am. No scrolling through news that’ll just spike their cortisol. No rushing to tick boxes on someone else’s agenda.
When I first moved to Southeast Asia, I noticed how locals approached their morning coffee. They’d sit for an hour, sometimes longer, just being present with their cup. Coming from a grab-and-go coffee culture, this blew my mind. But I tried it. And suddenly my days felt twice as long, in the best way possible.
Your morning sets the tone for everything that follows. Guard it like your sanity depends on it. Because honestly? It kind of does.
2) They practice radical subtraction
While everyone else is adding more to their plates, these folks are constantly asking: “What can I remove?”
This isn’t just about decluttering your closet (though that helps). It’s about regularly auditing every commitment, relationship, and obligation in your life. Does this client drain more energy than they’re worth? Gone. Is this friendship purely transactional? Fade out. Does this volunteer position feel more like obligation than joy? Time to step down.
In my book, Hidden Secrets of Buddhism: How To Live With Maximum Impact and Minimum Ego, I explore how Buddhist monks have mastered this art of subtraction for centuries. They understand that every “yes” to one thing is a “no” to something else.
The magic happens when you subtract enough noise to actually hear what matters.
3) They single-task religiously
Remember when multitasking was a badge of honor you’d proudly list on your resume?
These people flipped that script completely. They do one thing at a time. Fully. Completely. Without their phone buzzing every three minutes.
I learned this the hard way. After years of juggling multiple projects, constantly context-switching, and feeling perpetually behind, I tried single-tasking for a week. The result? I got more done in less time and actually enjoyed the process.
When you’re writing, just write. When you’re with your kids, be with your kids. When you’re eating dinner, taste your food instead of scrolling through Instagram.
Revolutionary? No. Life-changing? Absolutely.
4) They invest in depth over width
Most people collect relationships like Pokemon cards. These folks? They’d rather have three deep friendships than thirty surface-level connections.
They apply this same principle everywhere. One hobby they master instead of dabbling in dozen. One neighborhood they know intimately instead of constantly traveling. One career they refine over decades instead of job-hopping every two years.
This flies in the face of our FOMO-driven culture that insists you need to do everything, see everything, be everything. But depth brings satisfaction that width never can.
Think about it: when was the last time a casual acquaintance changed your life? Now think about your closest friend. Case closed.
5) They end their workday with a hard stop
“I’ll just finish this one thing” has killed more evenings than Netflix ever could.
People who’ve downsized their lives successfully have a non-negotiable end time to their workday. When that alarm goes off, they close the laptop. Mid-sentence? Doesn’t matter. Important email just came in? It can wait until tomorrow.
They understand something crucial: work expands to fill whatever time you give it. Give it your evenings, and it’ll take them. Give it your weekends, and it’ll devour those too.
Creating this boundary felt impossible when I first tried it. But you know what? The world didn’t end. Clients didn’t fire me. Projects still got done. The only thing that changed was I got my life back.
6) They cultivate useless skills
Here’s something weird: these people spend serious time on skills that will never make them money or advance their careers.
They learn to play ukulele badly. They grow tomatoes that cost three times what they’d pay at the store. They spend Saturday mornings learning to sketch when they have zero artistic ambition.
Why? Because not everything needs to be optimized for productivity. In fact, as I discuss in Hidden Secrets of Buddhism: How To Live With Maximum Impact and Minimum Ego, the Buddhist concept of “beginner’s mind” teaches us that approaching activities without attachment to outcomes brings a unique form of joy.
Having something in your life that exists purely for pleasure, with no pressure to monetize or perfect it, keeps you human in a world that wants to turn you into a productivity machine.
7) They say no without explaining
“No” is a complete sentence. These folks live by this.
They don’t apologize for not attending every event. They don’t justify why they can’t take on that extra project. They don’t feel guilty for protecting their time and energy.
This might sound harsh, but consider the alternative: saying yes to things you resent, then showing up with half your energy and zero enthusiasm. How’s that serving anyone?
The beautiful thing about saying no to the wrong things is it leaves you fully available for the right ones. When you do show up, you’re all in. People notice the difference.
8) They embrace ordinary moments
While everyone else is chasing peak experiences and Instagram-worthy adventures, these people find richness in the mundane.
They notice the way afternoon light hits their kitchen table. They savor their daily walk around the same neighborhood loop. They look forward to their Thursday night ritual of cooking pasta and listening to jazz.
When I first arrived in Vietnam, I kept searching for the next big experience, the next adventure. Then I started noticing how locals found contentment in simple daily rhythms. Same coffee shop. Same morning routine. Same evening walk. Yet they seemed more satisfied than any adventure-seeker I’d met.
The truth is, life is mostly ordinary moments. If you can’t find joy in those, no amount of peak experiences will fill that void.
Final words
Choosing a smaller life isn’t about giving up or settling for less. It’s about recognizing that beyond a certain point, more becomes the enemy of enough.
The people who’ve made this choice didn’t do it because they couldn’t handle success. They did it because they redefined what success means. They traded width for depth, busy for present, and more for better.
These eight habits aren’t rules carved in stone. They’re practices that create space for what matters. Start with one. Maybe it’s protecting your mornings or learning to say no without guilt. See how it feels to choose less in a world that’s constantly pushing more.
The biggest irony? By shrinking their lives down to what truly matters, these people ended up with something most of us are desperately seeking: actual contentment.
And that’s about as big as life gets.
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