Do We Really Need Paper Towels Anymore?

A coffee spill and an old Nirvana T-shirt made me question how little I actually need

A hot cup of coffee hits my desk and starts spreading toward my phone like it has a personal vendetta against my day. Without thinking, I grab the closest thing within reach — an old Nirvana T-shirt I’ve recently demoted to rag status.

I hesitate for half a second before pressing it into the spill.

The coffee soaks in immediately, darkening the white T-shirt with faded letters strewn across it in rainbow colors — N I R V A N A. I wipe up the rest of the mess with it anyway, watching something I once considered worth saving become something that’s saving me.

Because that shirt used to mean something. A relic of the 90s — teenage angst, grunge, a version of me that would’ve found this moment unthinkable. Now, in this newer version of me — a mother choosing a simpler life — it’s just a cloth doing what a cloth used to do before “single-use” became the default for almost everything.

My life in a small space

A career in journalism pulled me — a true introvert — out of my house and into other people’s homes. And what I’ve noticed is how many people are reshaping life inside the spaces they already have, revisiting a past where families lived together on the land, grew their own food, kept chickens, and made use of what they had — what feels to me like a kind of modern homesteading.

Basements are becoming apartments. Attics are becoming bedrooms. Garages are becoming long-term living spaces. And accessory dwelling units are popping up in backyards as extensions of the home — inviting family, and sometimes friends, to move closer and stay awhile, maybe even help feed the chickens.

On paper, this movement is usually explained as a response to housing costs — and that’s true. But in conversation, it often feels like something else is also in motion: millennials living paycheck to paycheck realizing that the constant hustle of two, sometimes three jobs just to get by, the idea of building momentum toward some distant retirement, isn’t necessarily worth it.

So instead, people are building smaller spaces into their dwellings so they can spend more time doing what they actually want — rather than hustling just to afford a big empty house they’re never home to live in.

George Carlin once said, “A house is just a place to keep your stuff while you go out and get more stuff,” and I think more people are starting to see the truth in that. At least I know I am.

Come as you are

My life doesn’t look like a magazine version of simplicity.

I still use an iPhone. I still have a desk — but it also functions as my kitchen table, my counter, and occasionally a space where i homeschool my son. It’s where I work remotely, answer emails, and try, as hard as I can, not to knock over my coffee cup.

Is this modern homesteading — or just how we’re getting by?

Merriam-Webster defines homesteading as “the act or practice of acquiring, settling on, or occupying land under a homestead law,” or more loosely, “living frugally or self-sufficiently, especially by growing and preserving food.”

That second definition feels closer to what people like me are actually doing now — rethinking what has a use toward living life now and what doesn’t.

Maybe modern homesteading isn’t really about land anymore; instead, it’s about intention. For me, it’s about not working so hard to pay for unnecessary things that fill up my space but don’t fill up my heart.

Sometimes it looks like gardening. Sometimes it looks like preserving food. And sometimes it looks like wiping up coffee with an old T-shirt that’s been unwearable for the last ten years, tucked in the back of a dresser as a memory of a life that no longer fits.

Reaching nirvana

Instead, I toss it into my hand-powered washing machine, then hang it on a drying rack I purchased from IKEA — one small part of my day in this new life as a modern homesteader.

That moment — wiping up coffee with an old Nirvana T-shirt — was when I realized I’m a modern homesteader. Dare I call it nirvana?

Paper towels never stood a chance.

If you’re interested in more thoughts like this — the ideas, questions, and curiosities around how we eat — you can join me in my weekly column, The Edit on Substack.