How Little Do We Actually Need?

The life we were trying to build turned out to require far less than we imagined, and far more than we understood.

When the business sold, and the properties didn’t, it felt like relief.

Not triumph.
Relief.

For the first time in years, the pressure eased enough for us to think clearly again.
To sleep.
To walk.
To imagine another kind of life.

The rental income gave us breathing room while we worked out what came next.
And we needed it.
Because by then, we had abandoned one life, dismantled the next, and no longer knew what a sustainable future was supposed to look like.

By then, almost anything, anywhere felt possible, as long as it did not feel like a return to the lives we had already decided to leave behind.

There is a strange kind of blindness that comes with that phase of life.
The determination to keep moving away from something, as though standing still too long might pull you back into it.

So we started building again.

Not recklessly.
Not without thought.
And not without plans.
If anything, we planned more carefully than before.

But the way we solved problems had changed.

We were no longer going to build through scale, polish, abundance, or large financial outlay. We would build something sustainable enough to hold our actual lives.

We had always been cautious about debt. Everything we had built before had been COD wherever possible. But until then, we still thought growth meant infrastructure, expansion, equipment, staff, and professional fit-outs.

Now we were asking a different question entirely:

How little did we actually need in order to build something good?

The answer became a small bakery built piece by piece.
A garage became a workspace.
An old Coke fridge became a rusk drier.
Souring milk became butter and buttermilk, both folded back into rusks that lasted for months.

And while Gus baked, I loaded Angel — four years old then — into the bakkie beside me and drove from place to place, cold-calling and selling out the back until everything was gone, often only returning home after dark.

The rule was simple:
we lived only off what the bakery earned.

It was exhausting.
Stressful.
Uncertain.

But it was also strangely alive.

Not because it was easy.
Because for the first time in a very long time, our lives felt directly connected to our effort again.

We were no longer managing layers of infrastructure, staff, pressure, image, and expansion.

We were simply trying to make something work.

And somewhere inside all of that, we started rediscovering a quieter kind of confidence.

Not the polished, high-performing competence we had once valued.

Something more practical.

We could survive uncertainty.
We could adapt.
We could make things work.
We could build from very little.

We spend years adding to our lives before we learn what can be removed.

And beneath all of that sat another growing recognition:
we were still searching for the life we had hoped the first reinvention would give us.

Freedom.
Enoughness.
Meaningful work.
Time together.
A sense that life itself belonged to us again.

That had been the real reason for leaving our old life in the first place.

We were tired of performing success while sacrificing the very things we were trying to build life for. We wanted a life that felt real while we were actually living it.

The first attempt at that life had stripped us down.

Not because the dream itself was false.

But because wanting a different life and being equipped to build one are not the same thing.

We had underestimated what that kind of life would demand of us.

The dream was still there.
But it was no longer naïve.

Gus quietly acknowledged he no longer wanted city life at all, nor the isolation we currently had. What he imagined instead was a small farmhouse somewhere on the outskirts of things:

enough connection to survive, enough distance to breathe.

I remember being startled by how right it felt.

For the first time since dismantling the old life, we were moving toward something instead of only away from something.

A smallholding.
A home bakery.
Food growing in the ground.
A simpler life.
A quieter life.
A life closer to nature, and closer to each other.

At the time, it felt like alignment.
Looking back now, I think it was something more complicated than that.

We were trying to create a life that would not cost us the way the previous ones had.

A life that we could inhabit.

A life not purchased at the cost of ourselves.

A Small Invitation for This Week

Where in your life are you still measuring progress by what you can add, rather than what is actually required?

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