Minimalism: It Works
kirindave.tumblr.com
kirindave.tumblr.com
The follow-up article gets it right. Minimalism is at its core a "process of prioritizing your life and working towards concrete goals without giving in to distraction", NOT just blindly getting rid of stuff. It is immersion, but only in one thing at a time. It is about reducing your tendancy to over-extend yourself, and focusing on the things you really need, both intellectually and physically.
Can we all just admit that the original article, http://vivekhaldar.tumblr.com/post/2525332092/minimalism-is-... , was just link-bait intended to elicit a response and/or rise from the HN community? The original article contains so little method to it's analysis and represents such a fundamental misunderstanding of minimalism that it bears little water intellectually. Not to be rude, but I'm surprised it made it to the front page.
This in itself has tradeoffs I think; sometimes "distractions" are what lead to unexpected connections and pursuits, which wouldn't have happened if you were working towards concrete, prioritized goals all the time. I know some of the stuff I'm most happy I did started out as stuff I was doing to procrastinate. (It may depend on a given person's personality and intellectual style.)
ADDED: Rereading this, I think I missed my point slightly; the problem with minimalism as described here is that it locks you in too much to your current plan; it reduces your flexibility to adjust your plans as you learn more about your problem space.
We need to be aware of value propositions and how they change. No one is saying you have to lock yourself in stone. Indeed, the minimalist approach increases your flexibility; you've invested the minimum to reach your goal, so if you abandon the goal you've lost the minimum you could invest.
You mean, that's leading a productive, meaningful, successful life at its core.
The article was good, the font was a bit of distraction. Thankfully readability is there to rescue.
FWIW I am on a mac too.
I admit it's sub-optimal for long form posts like this, but it's a tradeoff I've decided to make for the sake of the majority of my tumblr's content. I could make a script to detect when the tumblr is showing a single post, changing the font. I just haven't yet, and I don't get that many complaints. Most people are happy to see any sort of original design and deliberate typography on a blog, even if it isn't perfect.
I still think it's fairly readable. Compare it to the readability-required status of even big-name content pushers like the Chicago-Sun Times. My site is an order of magnitude easier to read, even if their body font is a bit easier in block form.
I agree. But I don't think comparing your site to a horribly formatted, but established, site is a good argument. IMO the font is not good for reading even if your site is the most accessible site in the whole world. At the end of the day I think it boils down to whether I have to squint and get distracted by the flow in order to read the content.
Also when there are more than one person complaining about the font (and others who have not complained but upvoted the complaining comments) its something to think about. They might not be necessarily right just because its a relatively popular opinion, but they might be in to something.
Such a well written post deserves a better font. IMO.
The problem, I think, is that the spaces between letters are much smaller than the internal negative spaces of the letters. The little horizontal flairs on the sides of many letters in Museo exacerbate this issue. This ends up making it really hard for me to recognize the letters which have no internal negative space, most notably i, t, and r, since they tend to bleed into their neighboring letters at this small size.
It’s a design problem. Museo is a fine font, great when compared to other free fonts. It’s also a quirky font with a lot of detail, detail that does not degrade nicely when the size of the font is reduced. Museo is a good choice for headlines or any type that’s a bit larger but a highly questionable choice for body text.
“For better or for worse, picking a typeface is more like getting dressed in the morning. Just as with clothing, there’s a distinction between typefaces that are expressive and stylish versus those that are useful and appropriate to many situations, and our job is to try to find the right balance for the occasion. While appropriateness isn’t a sexy concept, it’s the acid test that should guide our choice of font.” – Dan Mayer, http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/12/14/what-font-should-...
Fonts don't kill designs. Designers kill designs.
I've taken a couple stabs at minimalism (of possessions) in my life, staring when I moved from Austin to Seattle in 1995. I'm doing so again after relocating from Seattle to San Francisco a year ago.
There is absolutely no doubt that I've been happiest during those periods when I've had the fewest 'things'. I look back at the time when I downsized from a 1000 sq. ft. apartment in Seattle to 500 sq. ft. studio as the most productive and enjoyable time of my life.
Since moving here to SF, my wife and I have almost halved the space we occupy from a 1600 sq ft townhouse in Seattle to a very comfortable 850 sq ft. in San Francisco. I continue to get rid of the stuff and replace it with either 'virtual stuff' (e.g. electronic books) or just happily do without (e.g. espresso machine).
The main reason I 'upsized' from the small apartment to the large townhouse was that I felt like at my age at the time (30) I was 'supposed to'. I was the only one of my friends/work-mates that hadn't gotten married and/or had children, and bought a house. Oh, what a mistake! Now, ten years later, I'm so glad I'm back to shrinking the possessions in favor of a leaner, simpler life. For the first time since I was 16 I do not own a car. I have no debt (and with the exception of the townhouse and a couple years of credit card debt, I haven't since 1998).
I'm totally sold on continuing down this path, as she is as well. We don't plan on having children. We are both 40+ and enjoy the idea of moving around some more, perhaps even relocating overseas in time.
I haven't made much use of it myself yet, but hacker spaces do that with offices to some extent as well. You can have a minimalist apartment, but still work in a hectic, filled-with-stuff place like Noisebridge.
But I still lose the plot when we start actually using the word big-M 'Minimalism', or when we start invoking Zen. Zen is many things: spiritual practice, proto-psycho-exploration, a system of psychology, a system of ethics and epistemology—but I'm not sure it has anything to do with anything that the leading Neo-Minimalists have deemed worthy of inclusion into their morning workflows. Keeping a blog, for one, is not a very Zen thing to do. In fact, the practice of Zen is in part anathema to nearly every technique of thought that a knowledge worker employs in his job. It's a refutation of the construction of narrative, of pattern-recognition, of comprehension, and finally of cognition. It's an attempt to obliterate our own understandings of the world, to destroy our conceptions of objects, uses, signs, signifiers, others and ourselves, to be replaced with pure being and hopefully compassion. And it's DEFINITELY at odds with the all-inclusive rapid-fire content-association that is at the heart of tumblr culture. But I don't see how the practice of Zen has anything to do with the way one orders one's workspace, if one never considers what one is doing with one's mind, or one's content. I don't see what possible use, that is, it would be to invoke Zen and minimalism when describing how we choose our text editors if we allow what we're writing to remain entirely unconsidered.
Which is not to say that I think these Neo-Minimalists are a sort of religious hypocrite for not practicing Zen in all walks of life. The people whose blogs I see reflecting the practices of Neo-Minimalism seem like interesting, intelligent people, writing about the same sort of thing we have been writing for years: technology, culture, memes, funny videos, food, beer. I just don't understand what they could possibly think all the fuss is about in any realm beyond what window manager they've decided to use.
I've heard a couple people talk about getting rid of all the things they don't use, which seems nice, too. But it's a housekeeping exercise. You can't possibly expect me to believe that only having five shirts in your closet will make you a different person, or even a different worker. What is the _there_ here? I haven't heard anyone discuss eating the same thing every day. Or listening to the same music. Or paring down their vocabulary. What does one do? What is there besides being able to create uninterrupted expanses of negative space (which I concede are very nice) and then appreciating their aesthetics?
stripping away everything that you don't actually use in your day to day life has a remarkable psychological effect.
There are a ton of thunguses in one's life that can be ditched to remove the maintenance of. There's a lot of validity in that particular concept.
But when one wants to develop a fuller life than virtually living - things become useful towards that goal. Let me give some examples.
* Musical instruments. iPad instruments just don't cut it.
* Older books. There are a ton of out-of-print and hard-to-find books that just aren't online, especially in the non-tech fields.
* Gardening requires tools.
* Any variant of a construction trade requires tools.
* Travelling longer distances in a place without a densely connected public transport requires (bike | car | skateboard | etc), which requires maintenance tools.
* Cooking & baking requires a multitude of tools; hosting people for dinner requires kitchenware.
* Offline gaming usually requires game boards & misc accouterments.
I could go on, but those examples are from my own life. The existence of a monk is simply not pragmatically livable for people who fancy dealing with the physical. I like some of Christopher Alexander's writings as he searched for a pattern language in architecture. He considered highly complex systems where people engaged in their environment and lived and hypothesized the idea of the "Quality without a Name", and he had this to say about it, "It is a subtle kind of freedom from inner contradictions". What I see the Minimalism people striving for is this freedom, and they are seeking this freedom by removing as many pieces from the system as they can so that the contradictions go away. I - obviously - don't think that this is the complete solution.
While environments and ourselves do mutually shape each other, I believe that a complete solution is to work towards being consistent and uncontradictory with the things we have both in our heads and outside of them. Sometimes that's getting rid of things, sometimes that's adding things, and other times that's simply changing things around.
Well, that's my 0.02c anyway.
(edit1: formatting)
There is this idea of zen and asceticism that has crept into the conversation and honestly I'm not sure what reputable source people are drawing it from. No one is saying you should be living on a tatami mat and with 256kb of storage. No one worth listening to is saying you should avoid owning a pet or enjoying an occasional drink with an umbrella in it.
A lot of people, particularly in our affluent western world, simply say "yes" to the do-I-want-more-stuff proposition. They don't ask, "Do I need this? Does it serve a purpose?" I think the world would be a better place if people made a habit of asking that question and not being afraid of saying, "No." Even if the answer is "Yes," the conscious consideration of utility has benefits.
As for Everett Bogue, for someone espousing minimalism he sure has a lot of books to sell you.
I think I'll go found a movement based on coupon shopping. Be one with the discount.
"Where'd I put those snow chains?"
Possessions make life simpler.
Snow chains are great if you do things that require them. I used mine just today. But, we all know that guy with the monster 4x4 truck who never actually goes into the woods.
Possessions that you use regularly, value, and are worth more than the trouble they bring you might make life simpler. Possessions that are merely things you're storing "in case you need them", and are moving from one place to another, certainly don't make your life simpler.
I've known many people (including myself) who have found themselves in a position where they wanted or had to move and discovered in the process that when it came down to it, they could happily live without half of the stuff they had accumulated over the years. I did that in my most recent move, and a year later I do not miss any of it, and am still getting rid of things (30+ computer science books recently, and am now moving onto the photography equipment that just gather dust in the closet).
Aside from the negligible space they take up, they certainly aren't having a negative effect on my everyday life, so removing them would have no tangible benefit. In fact, their loss would deprive me of the artifacts of what's been a fairly interesting life so far. Any bulky items (eg small appliances, furniture) that would create any sort of hassle have already been given away to friends who would find them useful.
But I'm not sufficiently self-absorbed to call this a 'movement'. In the words of BSNYC^, it's just a matter of categorizing my things under 'Shit I Need' and 'Shit I Play With'. There's nothing complicated about that.
^ http://bikesnobnyc.blogspot.com/2010/08/new-smugness-keeping...
One is dumping out most of your stuff because while part of you would still like to have them you think you'll be happier that way. (And because others are doing it also so there must be something on to that.)
The other one is having learned to not need that stuff any longer.
My take on the two articles: http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2011/01/01/periodic-minimalism...
This is not a sisyphean task unless Vivek has a very strong motivation to ignore my explanation.
Minimalism is having one very good screwdriver instead of a whole drawer of lousy ones that you're "meaning to go through one of these days".
Focus is good, but an excess of it results in tunnel vision. It also leaves little room for whimsy or humor.
I don't know about minimalists not having a sense of humor (actually first time I heard this) but I agree you are less likely to do things just for shitz and giggles; but I don't know if thats such a bad thing. Some people just don't enjoy doing things for shitz and giggles. I guess it boils down to personal taste and preference?