>If you don’t have any work that needs to be done, you can sit for hours at a time just doing nothing, just listening to the birds or the wind or the silence, watching the shadows move as the sun travels, or simply looking at familiar objects.

Anyone in the US can do this today if they really wanted to. Plenty of backpackers on the Appalachian trail just do a couple months of manual labor, and live minimalistically the rest of the year.