Minimalism conceals the messy realities of society
newrepublic.com
newrepublic.com
My father, a man capable of building or repairing almost anything to his need lives with a shop entirely full of junk. And frequently the scrap iron or 2x4 I have mocked him for retaining has come to the rescue and helped us avoid the 60 mile trip from his home into town.
The reality is, if you wish to combine self reliance and minimalism, you essentially must embrace a life of poverty.
For example, most people take having bread for granted. If you wish to become minimalist, the best way to attain bread is to buy it. If you wish to become self reliant then you must possess ingredients and tools for making bread such as flour, yeast, a pan and an oven. To be minimalist and self reliant you must forgo bread and eat instead for grain something like wetted millet.
So you could just eat wheat but IDK how digestible that is. Perhaps someone here does?Cream of Wheat and Malt'O'Meal are the closest I've had.
Another example would be simple car maintenance. A minimalist would pay for an oil change.
One may want to become more self reliant and begin changing one's own oil. In this case you will need a catch basin, a funnel, new oil and filter. You may need a jack, jack stands and a specialty wrench.
You could become both more self reliant and more minimalist by getting rid of your car. If you live in an area with good transportation you will become slightly inconvenienced. If you live in a place with bad transportation you will become significantly impoverished.
Why not buy bread (as GP said), cut it, and freeze it? Surely that would be a minimalist approach.
Minimalism is not reinventing how to do everything, but just having what's needed now. If bread is your breakfast, then it's what's needed daily.
FYI: it's possible to be a mechanic and a minimalist. Owning equipment in a garage is not anti-minimalism, it's just common sense. Especially if you have multiple cars (e.g. a family).
Imagine instead that you grow your own wheat. You can cook the grain for hours over an open fire. And poor people did such with various grains as their daily meal for generations. That's a state that's pretty minimalist, pretty self reliant and pretty impoverished.
But if you want to make bread you must possess a mill to grind it, a source of yeast and all the other implements to make bread. To decrease your poverty you have to decrease you minimalism by owning all these things and now having them as a concern in your life or you must decrease your self reliance and depend on someone else having a mill to grind your flour or bakery to have an oven.
Trust me, as someone who is very DIY. The more self reliant you become, the less minimal your life becomes.
A good part of the few things I own, are actually tools to fix the other things with or build them in the first place. Also buying fewer things, means I can optimize more easily for quality and longevity, and that there are just fewer things that can break.
Arguably, taken minimalism to the extreme, the basic tools is what you should be left with. In my opinion, the biggest problem with minimalism is, that it should be highly individualistic, whereas most societies have a big group-think component to it about how you should behave, what you should own, etc.
E.g. I don't have any specific tools or spare parts related to fixing a car, because I don't have a car, because it wouldn't add more value than cost to my life. But just because that is true for myself, doesn't make it so for someone else. And on the other hand, I own things that I value highly, but that would just gather dust in another household.
[1] I identify more with the Swedish term "Lagom", which roughly translates to "just the right amount", and is more about appreciation of what you have, not about pushing for reduction.
As I got more serious about cooking I donated a lot of extra pans and doo-dads. Previously, I would just collect things and as I learned more about what made something good and why, I could narrow down to 1 or 2 higher quality items (knives, pans, etc). As I learned more techniques, I needed fewer specialty items.
To your point, having a lawn service means not needing a mower. Hiring out a painting service means not having old buckets, brushes, tarps, etc, laying around.
I do think (at least Americans) hoard. I know there's been a few times where I know I had something, but I didn't know where and considered just buying another. To me, that's worse than donating or giving it away years before. I know a lot of people pay monthly for self-storage, but probably don't know what's in there or wouldn't take the time to retrieve something. To me, this is what the Marie Kondo book was targeting.
To this point, there is a certain luxury in being able to keep stuff around, to even have the space for it to begin with. If I own a studio apartment I don't have room for random 2x4's to come save the metaphorical day.
Those 2x4s saved the literal day for us as the time away would've cost us a day's work ;)
I am inclined to disagree here and will say you're not making the full calculation.
One of the biggest costs that most people have in their life is paying for a place to live (be it rent or buying and maybe paying back for that). If you have fewer things this allows you to have a smaller space to live in. The reduced costs from that will more than make up for the occasional "I have to buy something that I might still have if I hadn't gotten rid of it a few years ago".
In general, the poorer people I know aren't almost-homeless poor. Maybe they're just bad at managing everything (money, time, assets). They tend to be paying for those storage spaces. I see those storage spaces everywhere. I'm kind of curious what the average demographic is--like you say, space is expensive. I have used them, but only during transitions for a few months at a time. The terms of the contract made me think I wasn't the norm.
Your comment reminded me that my brother travels significantly more than I do, but travels with so much. I travel a few times a year, but absolutely hate having extra stuff. For me it's not about the cost of having an extra bag. It's about not wanting to wait for checked luggage, slinging around another extra bag (or just one heavier one), and not carrying it around. I'm sure he has his reasons for over-packing (perhaps being prepared, having appropriate attire means more to him), but for neither it's about the money. I'm sure for some people is is, though.
Or you could be a minimalist who prefers the mostly empty feeling of a large home filled with few things, just like web designers who place huge margins everywhere.
Same experience here. Conclusion : if we'd educate people better on how to cook rather than showing them hours of advertising on the latest magical tool to cook a steak, we'd make their life easier and so much more minimalist.
So, in my experience, if you learn to cook and accept that cooking takes a bit more time you mainly need (for french cuisine) :
- 1 or 2 frying pan (buy a large one, multi-ply, heavy stuff, it's expensive : around 150 euro each, but will outlast you) - a cast iron casserole (for long cook) - just one teflon-like pan for frying fish (frying fish without that is possible but requires a lot of fat) - a few cooking pots (buy inox) - a short knife (buy expensive, around 60€, make sure the blade goes to the end of the handle) - a chef knife (ditto) - a big wooden cutting board (it allows you to use your chef knife efficiently) - 2 or three large bowls (inox or earthenware, no plastic) - a hand blender - a whisker - learn to use your oven if you have one, it's very useful - baking paper is very useful and cheap the rest just comes from regular stuff (glasses, regular knife, spoons, etc)
with that material you can go a loooooong way.
(forget about KitchenAid, Cookeo, and many other things)
etc.
Minimalism means not having a lawn which needs mowing, nor walls in need of painting.
In my own little vision for a self reliant future i see room for lots of stuff...buildings, equipment, many tools, small ag, etc. Definitely in line with your comment.
You have a big misconception about Amish. They are not minimalists in any sense of the word. Don't let the button thing fool you. They're just a shitty cult at this point.
And the Amish definitely pay taxes, even for schools which they don't use. (An exception is social security in the US because they were exempted from the very start, but they can't collect it either.)
Also, how is having horses pull buggies cruelty to animals? Horses are working animals, and it's no great hardship for them to pull a buggy or a plough. They can be overworked or treated roughly, but so can any animal.
pretty sure that horses would disagree ;)
They have people drive them to Costco and the court. They take buses and it is not uncommon in an Amish Community for one of them to have a phone line in a barn for emergencies.I have seen them use farm equipment that they technically shouldn't use and plenty of them just farm out the labor to someone who will use the equipment. They usually have "go to" people outside of the Amish sect that does shit for them that technically goes against their beliefs.
I have lived around Amish people my entire life. I am in a county that is famous for them. They are in no way self reliant. They are a cult that at this point, only half asses their own ideology.
It didn't take much for man to realize he could do more by trusting another than figuring out how to do everything on his own.
You cannot help anyone else unless you have some minimal level of self-reliance. That’s why airlines tell you to fit your own oxygen mask before trying to help anyone else.
The more I've read about the lives of 19th century pioneers the more I've realized that even they depended on something more akin to modern supply chains than on real self sufficiency.
Truly self reliant peoples live in poverty. I know no counter example.
There's usually some overhead involved too: finding labour, scheduling appointments, bringing your car to the dealership etc. Doing your own oil change takes less time than driving to the garage.
You don't have to do everything on your own, but I'd save the experts for the important challenges.
Not to mention that a job that it might take a service 1h's worth of labour to do may take me 2-3h, amortized with the learning curve (say, 4-5h first time I try, and eventually down to 1.5-2h after I've done it a few times).
I do my own motorcycle repairs, because I sometimes stray far from the nearest mechanic, and field repairs can be necessary. I also cook a lot, because I have to eat every day and restaurants are expensive.
However, I paid someone to rebuild my forks, and I buy pre-made pie shells. Those things are not worth doing myself. My father rebuilds engines in his garage, but won't change the oil on a slush-covered car. He'll pay someone else to do it.
I guess it depends on how pleasant the job is to you, how often you need it done, and how much it costs to get it done relative to your own salary.
Yes, this is the most important point I think.
That cuts both ways though. I'd rather work 28 hours/week and spend more time fixing stuff myself. But jobs largely come as 40 hours/week (there are exceptions, but they would mean compromising on field, location or both, at least for me); if I could work 70% of the time for 50% of the pay I probably would.
In these times, we are drowning, not starving. It's crazy how much toys my kids have and it keeps coming. They can't even find their fun toys amongst all the junk.
You can buy anything at any given moment, and people keep giving you junk on top of it, because all holidays are now commercialised and you have to give and receive junk from everyone.
For myself, I have both the "maybe I'll need it one day" and "I have too much junk".
People brag about how little they own, and it looks perfect until you ask about the logistics of it. You quickly find out that their minimalist existence is often propped by cheap third-world labour, or by a complete lack of financial planning. They don't own any of the tooks they need to fend for themselves.
In a sense, their lifestyle is only possible as other people are there to support it. Someone else has to provide the tools, and usually the expertise.
This doesn't jive with the folks that brag about minimizing possessions - because it requires such. They might do digital art... maybe.
And rent a stocked studio? Most folks on earth aren't near such a thing nor is it something most folks can do. The few times I've seen any of this, you can't simply rent (and none have been near me). You have to apply to make sure you are good enough and do the right sort of art. At that point, you are representing the studio.
This goes for a lot of hobbies that requires a number of tools, supplies, and space, though. Simpy doing active work requires space and stuff - and some of it might go for months without use because you use different tools in different stages of work. (A woodworker might use a planer, but not every day and rarely if a piece takes a few months).
Actual, truthful minimalism accounts for this, but that wasn't what the topic in this thread was: It was the unobtainable minimalism that creates those that brag about having few possessions... and wind up having to rely on the labors of others to do sometimes basic things.
I suppose folks can give away their pictures, but I'd quickly run out of folks to give away to - hence my corner of finished art :)
I don't get it. What are you talking about?
No one should begrudge you a well-stocked and well-used workshop. That’s not what the minimalist message is supposed to be about. It’s the stuff accumulated carelessly, just because you could. Decorative doo-dads, outfits worn once, toys from kids long since grown, furniture retained out of a sense of duty. The suburban middle-class lifestyle I grew up in has a tendency to accumulate a monotonically increasing volume of possessions without much thought. My grandparents have more square footage than my entire apartment dedicated to the storage of useless, meaningless crap. It is, in fact, a necessary and useful message for many people to be more deliberate about what you choose to buy and retain. If the only things you can think to cut are tools, you are not one of those people.
You accumulate stuff carelessly because storage cost is zero. Even old junk can be source of aluminium block for machining, steel bar for welding or copper coil for wires.
Not at all.
Minimalism isn't the ideology that (less is more)==(less things). That comes from people appropriating philosophies to compete for attention on social media, where everything is at best one-dimensional because the point is to entertain not educate. No, minimalism as a philosophy means (less is more)==(object-essentialism). You initialize solutions among what you have, and factor the time, resource, and opportunity cost into the cost-benefit of acquiring a new object. So, as I mentioned, if acquiring a backyard of junk cars is more cost-benefit savvy than having to acquire a new junk car every time you need a resource from one, it's minimalist. However, if you acquire a junk car that adds what you already have a sufficient amount of, it's frivolity.
And frivolity isn't a relevant category to minimalism. You could be minimalist in achieving frivolous ends. Clearly you're carrying too much in the term.
Wikipedia has it as: "The term minimalist often colloquially refers to anything that is spare or stripped to its essentials."
Oxford Dictionary as: "a style of art, music or design that uses very simple ideas or a very small number of simple elements"
So in my opinion, having rusting car wrecks around in an old shed with the intent to re-use their essential spare parts later is perfectly compatible with minimalism, and what I would expect someone with the skill set and space to do so.
Contrast that with a large garage where numerous expensive cars are being parked and continuously maintained as well as cost of electricity, cleaning, security etc. for the building, although the cars are pretty much never driven.
That would be much closer to a minimalists nightmare. Not the self reliant utilitarian guy with the old shed.
The first is minimalist because it involves less physical material to store and organize. The second is self reliant because you can do for yourself without needing to draw on outside systems as much.
The example you gave is just moving the goal posts completely. The large many car garage case is both less minimalist and less self reliant, so not to the point.
The problem is that "practical utility" isn't always obvious. I have boxes and boxes of components and other oddments that collectively form a useful library, but I have no way of predicting which specific oddments will be useful in future. Any given item is currently useless, but might become extremely useful at some indeterminable point in the future. There's a very fine line between a prepper and a hoarder.
One thing I’ve noticed is that if I can’t find something, its utility is basically zero. If I forget I have it, even more so. Also, things cluttering up a room (visually and in terms of physical space) feel like clutter. So, ideally a collection would be organized enough (which could mean stuff is just piled in boxes, but I’m sufficiently familiar with the boxes), and stored in a suitable place.
I think there’s a lot of power in encouraging people to get rid of stuff that they actually would be happier if they got rid of, by helping them make their own authentic determination.
I thought "good thing everything on those drives is backed up, and nothing critical was lost."
Yesterday I got a call from one of the former owners of one of these drives. They lost the USB stick I gave them a long time ago with their software license key that I pulled from one of those drives.
The drives I had been hoarding could have saved us $500 on Adelo POS software. One man's trash really can be another's treasure.
I got an old blue shirt and it suits me just fine
I like the way it feels so I wear it all the time
I got an old guitar, won't ever stay in tune
I like the way it sounds in a dark and empty room
I got an old pair of boots and they fit just right
Well I can work all day and I can dance all night
I got an old used car and it runs just like a top
I get the feeling it ain`t ever going to stop
[Chorus]
Stuff that works, stuff that holds up
The kind of stuff you don`t hang on the wall
Stuff that`s real, stuff you feel
The kind of stuff you reach for when you fall
https://genius.com/Guy-clark-stuff-that-works-lyrics#note-85...
This seems tautological or uselessly subjective. What is a possession without practical value? You seem to have talked yourself out of seeing the value in possessions you own. Perhaps you are simply anxious.
How this attitude began to be associated with the minimalist design movement I have no clue.
...bought in to what?
Token gifts that have been gifts for the sake of gifting something.
Most things in a souvenir store.
> Token gifts that have been gifts for the sake of gifting something.
There is utility value in sentimental gifts, too, but it's obviously subjective. Why not just say "get rid of items that stress you out", like people have been doing the entirety of human history? That's hardly a social movement or a lifestyle, though.
Every description I have seen of minimalism has not been centered around self-reliance, but around anti-materialism. Since we live in a society where our collective production output and efficiency is higher than it has ever been throughout human history, it's easier than ever to collect property that has limited or no real use, and consume without being mindful of the effect it has on our environment or at the very least on your own economy.
So, in my mind, "minimalism", whatever that means, is not a means to self-reliance, it's a questioning of modern consumerism and whether we are perhaps over-spending on things that do not improve our lives. Whoever is trying to combine minimalism with "prepping", "self-reliance", call it what you will, is at the very least confused in my book.
Your dad is capable of repairing anything because he has the mindset, creativity and skills. Were he rich he could take that same self reliance down to the local hardware store and buy what he needs to repair anything.
Though arguably if he were richer he wouldn’t be repairing so much, he’d be doing something else successfully as a self reliant guy.
The higher you go the more abstract what your self brings to the table becomes. It’s obvious that your dad relies on himself and his possessions. A self reliant guy in a company can easily have his natural ability and organized self reliance hidden under metrics and overlooked by class groupings.
Why?
If you take minimalism to the extreme, and keep stripping away until reaching the bare essentials of living, then the basic tools and materials are what you left with.
It would be "against" minimalism (which is not well defined anyway) to buy say a chain saw because you think you might need it one day or need it for a one off job, instead of borrowing it from a neighbor or yes, paying (monetary or through favors) someone to do it.
Nothing wrong with relying on society to a degree.
If you want to be self reliant without having a lot of money to waste, you'll have to practice minimalism. Not the inner city hipster version of it, but being mindful of what the utility and value of all the things you have is.
No you don't. A big pile of junk is no drain on your self-reliance; if you're living in the kind of place where you can even begin to hope to produce your own food then space is not going to be an issue.
My fathers side of the family is all farmers for generations. They piled up a lot of junk and reused continously around the properties. But those weren't just random piles, but sorted and to a degree inventoried and cleaned so it can be used efficiently.
They could e.g. plan ahead for new projects how much can be build from scrap vs new materials.
Sure just throwing stuff on a pile doesnt cost you anything, but i dont see how you are going to reuse that stuff somewhat efficiently later without upfront assigning some value to different types of junk
Are you trying to be a homesteader, entirely off-grid and not reliant on society? Or are you trying to be financially self-reliant, not relying on a paycheck? Or are you trying to be personally less reliant on things and items? These are all different ideas that get wrapped up into this conversation, and like the OP said, they're not all compatible.
If you want to be an off-grid homesteader, you're going to need a lot of tools, materials and skills. If you want to be less reliant on things, then you are going to have to be content with being able to do less.
None of those things are bad, but the conversation is incomplete if we don't make clear what we're really talking about when we talking about self-reliance and minimalism.
Minimalism is about having what is essential to a fulfill a certain need or goal. What is essential varies from person to person and of course is vastly different whatever we are talking about a software engineer living in a city apartment vs. a farmer.
So I see minimalism being about prioritization. During "normal" circumstances it is pretty much purely voluntary, but the more self reliant you want to be, the more it becomes a necessity. With limited resources you have to prioritize what tools, skills and materials you acquire in what order, quality and quantity. You end up with good enough, minimal solutions for a lot of the problems.
My farmer grand parents where 10x the minimalists I ever was in my view. But for them, it was just how they grew up, not a lifestyle choice about aesthetics.
This is what I mean by poverty. Most people who are ingenious live a balance of self reliance, minimalism (usually due to lack of money) and poverty.
By poverty I do not mean that taking one step into self reliance makes you instantly impoverished but it frequently means doing without some luxury or need fullfiled that people are accustomed to. It usually comes in the form of "making do".
Some of the happiest days of my life have been when I labored to field dress a moose I had just shot and then canoe with it for days down an isolated river near the arctic. Or helping my brother build his house or working in the vegetable garden.
If you call that poverty, you're missing the point entirely.
I believe your disconnect comes from you thinking "The only kind of minimalism is extreme minimalism" which doesn't have to be true. I have a lot less "stuff" than most people, so I consider my self a minimalist, but I still have possessions I value and enjoy that I'm not capable of making or repairing myself (rifle, laptop). That's OK. Minimalism doesn't mean "Have nothing you didn't make with you own bare hands", it means "Have less things, and only the things that bring you happiness". Like so many things in life, it's not black and white like you're trying to make it out to be.
It makes minimalism seem like a rigid ideology specifically for white males who command poor people to build and craft expensive housing and objects for them (and many of those objects are in the shape of penises?)
A whole lot of discussion on random art and murder from one of the people who made that style of art.
I thought this was going to be about minimalism, which to me is:
Q: What is minimalist living?
A: It’s simply getting rid of things you do not use or need, leaving an uncluttered, simple environment and an uncluttered, simple life. It’s living without an obsession with material things or an obsession with doing everything and doing too much. It’s using simple tools, having a simple wardrobe, carrying little and living lightly.
It's basically being more content with less which ties in nicely with financial independence. Instead I got lectured to for not being a woman of colour who renounces my privilege and whitewashing of things in an art history that I don't care for.
I at one time described myself as minimalist, but now I would describe myself as an anticonsumerist. It's not a perfect term either, but I haven't gotten in any stupid arguments about it.
I guess minimalism tries to catch the cool of the real hard work of simplicity by trying to copy simplicity as if it is simply an aesthetic but in the end it turns up empty.
chinese historical/wuxia dramas often heavily feature taoist/buddhist “grandmasters”, who typically have (near-)superhuman abilities (from years of meditation on enlightenment, presumably). yet they’re reluctant to use those abilities because they also strive for detachment from the world and its base human emotions (for some reason that’s required to reach immortality).
the tension is often between allowing destiny to unfold without interference and staying on the path to enlightenment, or defying fate and risking heaven’s wrath. there are adverse consequences either way and it’s a test of character which way one chooses.
In Taoism, they say - accept the flow and about Yin-Yang philosophy.
> "And to me that's not gonna change the world"
This is a mystery. I'm from India, and I've read few Vedic texts where it says, all these elements we've accumulated and grown with, by elements I mean Father, Mother, Son, Wife, Mine, Not Mine are just aggregated and don't assign much significance.
This is to our rational minds seems really absurd! Hence it is a mystery that would unfold when you start delve into it deeply.
Another messy reality of society is overproduction, manifesting in that box or drawer with extra HDMI cables and USB thumb drives and USB-to-PS2 connectors, and throwing some of that crap out feels good :)
No it's no, you grossly misunderstand the fundamentals of minimalism.
It's make do with whatever you have, and to be content with less, including less money, less possessions, less prestige and less of everything. It's accepting the degradation of social status.
"Going back to parents after selling everything and travelling around the world" is not a message of minimalism. Selling your mansion, forgoing your salary and title, travelling around the world in a brief suitcase with not a penny to your name even after you come back from travelling and be contented with living from day-to-day in a one bedroom flat, _that's_ minimalism.
I must have missed it, who is in charge of the definition of minimalism?
You will be surprised how similar it feels to have your tools well organised, versus removing them all together.
I think it comes down to our brains attempting to forecast and predict everything we do. So when your workspace is messy, your brain can't look very far ahead, it doesn't know where everything is so it can't accurately forecast the situation. It gets flustered and you work slower. When you're organised, your brain can subconsciously connect all the dots and suddenly everything feels easier and more simple.
Lacking any original insight, the author wedges in an unsupported claim about minimalism requiring privilege. Now, I’m not saying it does or doesn’t. There are several good responses here to support the idea. But the article itself does a really poor job of supporting the thesis.
Indeed, it seems more like neo-liberal buffet. It pokes at everything from the phallic shape of light-bulb (which couldn’t the just as easily be uterine) to the affluent readers of Dwell. I’m surprised a swipe at Goop didn’t get shoe-horned in.
I am as ready to damn the man as anyone, but this article is a cash grab. Bleh.
From a ui design standpoint, I can't stand minimalism most of the time. The lack of immediately apparent information and context can be infuriating. Whereas a minimalistic design in some kind of manual tool would tend to make things more straightforward and easy.
Minimalistic music can be great for setting atmosphere under certain contexts, but wouldn't be great for a dance party.
Minimalism is a tool that should be applied.to situations where 'having less is more'. Otherwise it just detracts from whatever you're trying to do and should be used sparingly.
Mix it up, but only when you need to. Don't overthink it, yet spend the time needed to make it juuuust right.
As Mark Twain famously said:
“I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”
P.S. `less` is literally `more` on most UNIX systems.
See for example: https://youtu.be/daSid6Lh9Vs
this track hits me where it feels: https://youtu.be/3AT8szyLD0k
Turns out, two "movements" (repeated?), and little bit of variation is enough to dance to, and generally make for a pretty good song.
It may be just my own pessimism but it’s seems to becoming a movement that requires you to get rid of things and buy new “minimalist” items to replace them.
There's also many degrees to minimalism. My objective is being able to fit everything I own in a studio apartment without clutter. Others have the goal of being able to fully everything in an 80L backpack. Others just want to go into their basement without tripping over storage.
A lot of people can benefit from reducing their debt, lowering their cost of living, eating less food, saving more money, and focusing on things they enjoy more and things they don't less.
You don't have to go from living on 110k to 30k, nor do you have to throw everything out and replace it with white walls and black accents and an odd art piece here and there.
It’s like the life philosophy of not spending time around friends who don’t spark joy in you. And then someone comes along and says, “I see, it’s about spending less time around people, in order to look cool!” No, that’s just your shallow, ego-based take on it. “Not mine, that’s totally what people are doing. I can tell they think they’re cooler than me, going on about how much they enjoy their ‘me’ time... It’s just another fad, of course.”
I always see this criticism and don’t understand it. I’ve been going on ever since I was a 10 year old kid in the 90s (well before “minimalism” was trendy) about how one day I wanted a tiny, well-designed house with giant floor-to-ceiling glass windows. I think it’s natural to enjoy sunlight, so I’m not sure what the article is suggesting—that people should want tiny windows again?
I think that some people, like Colin Wright, have the right idea with their brand of minimalism, but too many others have co-opted it and put their own rules on it.
I like the idea, but I own a house, and a yard, and appliances. And I maintain all of them. So, in the garage, I keep good-sized stashes of scrap lumber, random pieces of plastic and metal, screws, bolts, washers, grommets, and tools. I have fixed or MacGuyvered countless things with these random parts.
And at some point, I jumped off that minimalism train and jumped onto my own train: practicalism (lowercase p, because I have to maintain some pretension).
practicalism (tm): Own only what is practical -- and maybe just a little more.
Also, for people to conclude that minimalism in the lifestyle sense isn't working in some way is pretty bizarre. What exactly is the answer, then? Just giving in to the human impulses of hoarding and consumerism? Whether or not that's the alternative, this conclusion that minimalism as a lifestyle doesn't seem justified in any way. It seems more like a case of "this thing has been trending for the last few years, therefore we have to now point out how bad it is for the sake of it".
Buying a bigger TV than your neighbor gives you a dopamine boost, you feel like you've achieved something, you're moving up in life. It's addictive.
And the industry wants us to consume. The plastic industry pumped recycling initiatives to make it seem like plastic could be harmlessly recycled. They want us to think we can use as much plastic as we like, they don't want us to reduce our use of plastic.
Back home, I would have a keener awareness of the opportunity cost, including “where am I going to put this”. My family back home seems more homey as with fewer possessions their homes feel more harmonious.
Of course I am sampling large distributions...
I like that the book doesn't attach itself to any one definition of minimalism, but instead tries to explore all its definitions, what ties them together, and why we keep coming back to these ideas.
I would consider myself a lifelong minimalist, but this book challenged my notions about minimalism in many ways. It's a good read!
Most millenials, even the upper-middle class ones, see a future with less material prospects than their parents had. I do not believe that minimalism is fundamentally a cultural phenomenon driven by the wealthy, but by the impoverished.
You can say that Marie Kondo and Bauhaus have some subterranean aesthetic connection, but I think Marie Kondo and the 40 year old guy living alone in his "tiny home," watching Netflix, have a much deeper cultural connection.
#vanlife as a lifestyle rather than simply 'living in your car'. A 'tiny house village' for people who don't want to say 'trailer park' etc.
I consider myself a (not-so-hardcore) minimalist, even since before this hip KonMari... "thing" that suddenly "made" a lot of people into minimalists. Yeah, for sure it did.
As everything, this is a journey, yada-yada. However, what I think is worth pointing out is that different cultural settings would adapt "minimalism" (whatever that exactly is) differently. Living in an European city, I absolutely don't need to have a car. Having this mindset in Texas would be absolutely impractical.
My journey in this led me to just asses myself and introspect; consider if certain objects would make me happy, my life easier, do I really need it, can I rather borrow it, etc. The thing what I used to call minimalism became to me just "common sense" - although apparently is not common at all (thinking of people renting storage spaces etc...)
But what really, really helped me (also mentally) is the reduced distraction that objects, services, etc caused me; I see other people handling this complex world much better than I, but I made peace with the fact that the current level of complexity of our world is not comprehensible, form an evolutionary perspective, to the human (or maybe just my) brain :-)
Anyhow, this article was painfully boring, however, the HN comments are worth to read!
Society accepted minimalsims is a kind of minimalsim where your net consumption remains where it is now.
At one point I might have called myself a minimalist, but these days I'd call myself more of an anticonsumerist or something along those lines.
In terms of Marie Kondo and decluttering, or Zen — I’d say there’s a difference between minimal and essential. One is an aesthetic exercise, the other is a goal of finding that point where it’s “just right”, no more, no less.
The minimalism then basically goes unoticed to the outside world, it doesn't "punish" you socially while maximizing your own time and reducing the cognitive load.
You could ditch your gym subscription and get into calisthenics/bodyweight training instead, or prepare your meals in advance. There's a lot of stuff you can do that sums up. Making those trade offs is kinda fun..
First of all, the unnecessary mention of "mostly white male". I'm So. Bloody. Tired of this trope being injected into every article at every opportunity. I get it. Life unfair. Move on. It's like how every NYT comment section will mention Trump within the first two comments. Give it a rest already!
Then, the vague-at-best connections between minimal art and Minimalism as a response to the excesses of Boomers. It's really not that complicated. Grow up in a house of hoarders, and you're well on your way to embracing minimalism.
Lastly, this whole "Your bedroom might be cleaner, but the world stays bad". Yeah! Minimalism doesn't promise world peace! It's just a way to make your own life more manageable and sane!
Just because a piece is longform doesn't mean it's good. Reading this article was a terrible waste of my time.
That's very convenient if you are going to weave a narrative of privilege in a US-centric context, and I think that was the writer's aim.
After school, measured my minimalism by counting the things I owned. As long as over half of them had been given to me, I was doing good.
Living with other people for awhile, find myself sometimes fantasizing about if I could get my life down to two steamer trunks.
Minimalism can help you lead a more focused life. Of course it’s relevant for people who have accumulated a lot, but even poor people can hoard things.
> I caught one mention of “inequality.” Instead of digging into systemic problems like poverty or exploring ideas of wealth redistribution, the film frames having less as an individual, moral choice with no political strings or implications. Not everything has to do with politics.
> In fact, the alleged blankness of Minimalism can serve as a facade that conceals a disturbing reality. An incident that Chayka doesn’t discuss in his book demonstrates this in an extreme way. What? How this one incident is relevant in the minimalist movement?