It’s just past six in the morning here in Spain. I’m sitting at my desk on the second floor in my townhouse, coffee in hand, looking at the screen. It’s completely quiet. I open the balcony door and I hear the birds. This is my favorite hour of the day. It won’t get better than this.

You know how people always talk about “getting away from it all”? They picture a cabin in the woods, a hut on a mountain. And look. Nature is beautiful. But it’s not practical. If you live in the middle of nowhere, you need a car just to get a loaf of bread. You become a slave to the logistics of staying alive. A broken-down car out there isn’t an inconvenience; it’s a crisis.

Peace isn’t about how many miles you are from the nearest person. It’s about how much noise you let into your head. And once I understood that, everything got simpler. To be a hermit in the city, you just have to close the right doors. No news. No YouTube rabbit holes. No arguing on internet forums with strangers you’ll never meet. I stopped doing all of that, and I want to tell you — the silence that followed was better. I’m trading the “out there” for the “in here.”

Let me tell you how I stopped news and YouTube. I keep two bowls on my desk. One is full of small, colored plastic cubes; the other is empty. For every hour that passed without reading news or watching YouTube, I moved a white cube from the full bowl to the empty one. That’s it. Just a cube moving through the air and landing in the bowl. The next day, I started over.

Here in my townhouse, 200 meters from the sea, I have everything I actually need. I walk by the sea. I read. I sit quietly. Thousands of people live a few blocks away, and I barely see any of them. That’s not loneliness. That’s freedom.

The necessities are simpler than you’d think: a roof and a bed, water and power, a fast internet connection. And coffee — six cups of Bellarom, natural molido, extra fuerte. It costs €4.70 for 500g. That’s the whole list. My days are books, meditation, long walks along the coast, and the work I actually want to do. In my case I like to write essays. It helps me think things through and putting them out into the world doesn’t hurt either.

The numbers might surprise you. I bought this place in 2011 for €150,000. I don’t own a car. Everything is within walking distance. Here’s what the quiet life actually costs me on average each month in 2026:

Food — €350
Buffer — €300
Electricity — €100
Community Fees & Taxes — €70
Internet & Mobile — €50
Taxis & Buses — €50
Health (private) — €50
Water — €30

Total: €1000 a month. That’s it. That’s the whole budget for a life by the Mediterranean, 200 meters from the sea, with everything I need and nothing I don’t.

I don’t have to run away to find peace. I don’t need a mountain top or a cabin in the woods. I just need to figure out what my real necessities are, strip everything else away, and let the world’s noise wash past me. The town already gives me everything I need — the bakery, the doctor, the internet, and the sea. I close the door.