I recommend decreasing your gadgets to just a phone (for when you go out) and a tablet or laptop for home. That is, no TV, no stereo, no games console. Assuming you live on your own, you can do all the same things you did before, just move your laptop screen to a comfortable distance. I suppose you could buy headphones if you also want loud audio, but personally I prefer to go out to a bar or nightclub or movie theater to get that experience.

You can also optimize most of the furniture away. The last few places I lived I just had a mattress in the main/living room and cooking supplies in the kitchen. Not only is the up-front cost less, but you can live in a much smaller apartment, cleaning the whole place is much faster, moving house is easy. Personally I like to work lying on my stomach, so I don't need a desk, but I suppose you could get a small table and chair if your body isn't comfortable lying down or sitting on the floor for a lot of the day. More available floor space means it's easier to pace or work out too.

Other recommendations... Best to live somewhere without carpet, so you can clean it with a broom - saves buying a vacuum cleaner. You can use toilet paper for the bathroom and also in the kitchen and also to blow your nose. You can use shampoo for everything in the bathroom, including washing your hair, hands, body and clothes (if your house doesn't have a washing machine). You can use dishwashing liquid to clean most surfaces in the house, as well as your dishes. You can avoid using lights for most of the day/night by keeping windows uncovered and using the ambient light from outside.

The upsides are exactly as you say - since you're not spending as much time and money maintaining your house, you have more time to go out and visit interesting places, and you can spend more money at nice restaurants or splurge for a comfortable hotel if you want to enjoy some luxury every now and then. But I find I don't really want to. Life is a lot more enjoyable, in my opinion. Way less stress than cleaning and maintaining a bunch of stuff.

I'd wager there's a rather large number of folks like GP intending to minimize the effort required to do drone-ish tasks rather than eliminate them. I don't deny that it's only a logical next step to eliminate them entirely, but that seems a step too far for social conventions. After all, culture defies logic rather often.

(Bonus with a furnished place - I don't need to worry about the kinds of bills that the OC was talking about because one flat monthly payment covers rent, water, electric and internet. My only other bills are phone and media/content subscription services, all of which are also flat rates, set up once and paid automatically.)

For me simplifying my life doesn't mean living with nothing at all, it just means living without unnecessarily complicated or laborious things. Clearly different people will draw a line at different places.

The point of my previous comment was more that it doesn't hurt to try eliminate things from your life, if it seems they're just a hassle. Who cares about the social conventions? I think a lot of people find themselves caught up in the rat race and take part without really thinking about why they're doing it, or whether it actually is worth all the effort. It turns out you can forego a lot of things and, actually, life isn't all that bad. That's especially the case if you are earning a decent salary, so you afford to can go out and treat yourself whenever you feel the urge. I think now is probably a better time than ever before to live simply, because we have immediate access to all the world's knowledge and art from a tiny computer in our pockets.

Living in Japan now, I had a few months with a padded mat + quilt on the floor as is tradition (and a damn cheap one), but upgraded to a mattress on the floor because the floor was too cold in winter as you mentioned.

There's as much to be gained from taking stuff away that isn't useful, as there is from adding useful stuff to your life.

Now I am back in the North America I think it's harder, because people build houses much bigger, and seem to associate not having much stuff with being unhappy or underprivileged instead of well-optimized and free.

I've found a bit more in common with the rubber tramp and liveaboard communities in this part of the world. They are very mindful about everything they buy because space is limited, so trying to find things that are multifunctional is a high priority. A lot of those things work in houses too.

On the other hand, I don't think their lives are as low stress as I would like, because they end up needing maintain an entire vehicle as well as the stuff in it.

Two other hacks, for women at least, is to quit makeup and shaving. I quit makeup about 5 years ago by accident forgetting to put it on one morning, and then I realized no one at work noticed anyways. Quitting shaving has been more of a corona era thing. I'm not sure if I'll stick with it over the summer, but I've been out a few times in shorts and it seemed nobody much cared. That cuts a bunch of unnecessary maintenance time out of my life, which I can now use for other things.

But if you prefer the independence of minimal living, that's also advantageous.

There are so many better things to spend time on than the mundane parts of life.

You’re probably familiar with auto bill pay (I think most services have it, and many banks offer it as well), and index fund investing with automatic transfers, so I’m guessing those don’t solve the problems you’re talking about. I’m interested what you mean then.

The index fund investing with scheduled transfers is exactly what I meant by automated financial services. I probably micro-manage it a little too much right now for no real benefit.

I do my best not to even log in to my account. One could go so far as to change one’s password to something impossible to remember, then delete it, so that signing in becomes a huge hassle of password recovery and identification verification at a banking institute (one of Dante’s levels of hell iirc)

Soylent is terrible for your insides.

But this experience of finding value in cooking is not really universal. I have some friends who legitimately, actively dislike the process. It's not that they're bad at it, they just consider it a waste of time. For them Soylent, or a food delivery service might be just fine.

I think the key is to aggressively optimize out the things in your life that aren't working for you. We shouldn't feel like we "need" to do things just to have a "normal" life, I think that's one of the causes of stress and unhappiness for a lot of people.