What does a low-demand life look like?
Musings on low-demand living + prompt for 2025
Welcome to the first edition of 2025! I hope you had a wonderful festive season & I look forward to sharing more neurodivergent insights with you in 2025, as well as my new series, the ✨ Digital Minimalism Diaries ✨, detailing my journey towards a more analogue life.
Is it any surprise that my second most popular post so far is about living a low-demand lifestyle? Clearly most of us feel the strain of living in a culture that glorifies toxic productivity and hustle culture. I define a low-demand life as one where the demands on you do not exceed your capacity for demand. Obviously this means that everyone’s low-demand lifestyle will look different, because we all have a different capacity for demand.
Ideally, a low-demand life is one where you spend less time doing what it is you have to do so that you can spend more time doing what it is you want to do. I don’t want you to have enough capacity just to meet your demands; I want you to have fewer demands so that you have capacity leftover to dedicate to your interests and passions (meaningful work might also be included here). And sometimes that looks like doing less, so that ultimately you can do more (of what you love!).
Unfortunately if you look online you won’t find much information about living a low-demand lifestyle. Low-demand living is an offshoot of low-demand parenting so most of the resources and information you’ll find online is geared towards parents. That said, if you’re not a parent (like me), I encourage you to take inspiration from what you find and see what resonates with you. One of the reasons I want to talk about low-demand living is that I can do so from the perspective of someone who is childfree, but I encourage you to dig into low-demand parenting resources to glean some of their wisdom.
Ultimately, whether you’re a parent or not you get to decide what a low-demand life looks like for you. If you have dependents, a low-demand lifestyle may look very different out of necessity (or may not be achievable at all, especially if your kids have special needs or while your children are younger and their needs are more demanding). Be realistic, but also don’t assume that a low-demand lifestyle is out of reach for you just because you have children or other life circumstances that maybe aren’t so conducive to a low-demand life.
A low-demand lifestyle doesn’t mean not having any demands at all. The idea is to reduce demands so that you have the time, energy, and mental and emotional capacity to do more of what you want, and so you don’t have to do so much of the things that are draining you (or do them at all!). With your freed up time and capacity you might focus more on your health and fitness, dedicate more time reading, leisurely walks in nature, arts and crafts… Whatever it is you want to do, with less stress and more joy.
So what does a low-demand lifestyle look like for me? At the moment it includes lots of short dog walks, Pilates, reading for half an hour every morning (a recent addition, and one I’m very much enjoying), and following an easy and enjoyable housework routine (I base mine off TOMM). I’m also training as a counsellor, so study sessions are interspersed with everyday life and creativity such as puzzles, graphic design, etc.
I also try to find ways to reduce the demands on me, even though from the outside it probably seems like I don’t live an overly ‘demanding’ life in the first place. I don’t have a job and I don’t have children, so of course I don’t have as many demands as someone with a 9-5 and kids, but that doesn’t mean that I (and other unemployed/self-employed people) don’t have any demands at all. Recently I’ve been considering having my food shop delivered; low-demand living really is as simple as reducing and removing those demands that just aren’t necessary (unless you want to do them!).
So how can you create a low-demand life? If you haven’t read it already, then my post on low-demand living is a great place to start. I detail a framework to help you to eliminate, delegate, consolidate, automate and regulate demands. But aside from that post, I encourage you to rest, because really, a low-demand life is a restful life. Did you know that there are seven different types of rest? This post by
shares the seven types of rest as well as resources and prompts to help you.And if I had to give you some parting words of advice or wisdom, I would say to create a vision (a vision board, if you like) of a less demanding life. You need something to work towards, a vision of a less demanding future. And again, please refer to my previous post on low-demand living as to how to reduce demands in the here and now.
Prompt: If you could live a low-demand life in 2025, what would that look like? Let me know in the comments! If you're interested in reducing demands from technology and living a low-tech life look out for the first instalment of the ✨ Digital Minimalism Diaries ✨ later this month. Til next time,
J x