Thoughts on Minimalism

In the last few months, I have been learning about the minimalism movement for a while and I will like to share some thoughts about this.

What is Minimalism?

You can find minimalist references over multiple disciplines where you can find a lot of different concepts like design, aesthetic, or architecture.

If you look on Pinterest for minimalists things like houses, spaces, or objects you will get images related to concepts like peaceful, beautiful, simple, order, warm light, clean, bright space, and probably some ideal perfection. Notice the power of white over black, pastel colors, or the combination of woods.

Is all of this related to the minimalism lifestyle movement? Probably not, or not at all. All these concepts are mixes of minimalism, modern and contemporary design.

In general, the minimalism style represents the concept of focus on function. But in art, you can find that they refer to simple geometric shapes based on the square and the rectangle.

When we talk about a minimalist lifestyle or movement, we refer to a particular way of living.

The Minimalism mindset

According to Ryan Nicodemus and Joshua Fields Millburn in Minimalism: A Documentary About the Important Things (2016)(I highly recommend this documentary, it’s much better than the new one), We can extract the physical and mental keys about what is minimalism:

• Avoid being manipulated, being part of the consuming society.
• Thinking about what is good and essential for you.
• Thinking about what is good and essential for others and to the world.
• Search for origins impulses that your brain makes that you desire things or even goals in life.
• Analyze why you need to buy stuff that you are supposed to buy.
• Minimalism is not about living with fewer things. Is about live with the things that bring you the most value, the ones that are essential.
• The less stored things you have, the fewer dependencies of owning you have,and the fewer things to worry about.
• The physically lighter you are, the lighter you feel.
• You will notice that you have irrational dependencies or pending issues to close in your life.
• Letting go of material things is a step towards making more space in your life for the non-material stuff, like love or spending time with those who matter.
• Your ecosystem and your chaos management, condition your stress.
• Looking for essentials even farther than material things, things like notifications and distractions are not essentials.
• Love people, and use things, the opposite does not work.

Some topics of this mindset are related withe a wake up from matrix idea, to change the way of we look our reallity in this interconected and fast world. Another big recomendation about this topic is: The social dilemma by Netflix, probally a masterpiece that will make you never see the world equal again.

Minimalism mindset == Abundance mindset ?

Wait… What? Fewer things are equal to abundance? No. minimalism is not about less, is about most value, Is the abundance principle about this?

The fear of losing money or private physical possessions are aligned with the scarcity mindset. The need or wish for more money and possessions belong to this kind of thought.

On the other hand, in the abundance principle, there is no fear of loss, because it’s based on enough for everyone. Possessions and money become less important because It’s assumed that they are there, there is no need to obsess about having things. You do not need hundreds of clothes, there will be available clothes to be bought when your current ones became useless in the future.

Scarcity is against minimalism. Making the fear of loss accumulates useless things. Minimalism and abundance principles can be complementary because they both focus into appreciate things only enough. Both focus on life and experiences more than on material things.

You can read more about this comparation here.

What I Think?

Minimalism feels like an interesting lifestyle from where you can get in touch with a lot of awesome good practices and questions. But, is just that, a way of thinking, not the definitive way of thinking.

Remember that meditation, the return to essentials, make less impact on the planet, or the simple living, are not new things. You can found many similar concepts in the stoicism principles or in the Taoism. The current Minimalism lifestyle trend for me feels more like a marketing label than a movement.

I had a similar the sensation about this movement when the Straight edge or the Hipster movement was trending. Keep in mind that ussally people like to belong to movements to be part of something, and selling their lifes that as a result of that “transformation”. But te real transformation is individually, the real change is iniside every brain. There is no idea, or movement that is the real swiss knife or the correct philosophy in life.

Minimalism is not about having a Mackbook PRO, or living in an apartment with white walls, wood ground, and plastic plants. Minimalism is not about wearing a no logo T-shirt and pretending to be Steve Jobs. Everybody has their likes, their inspirational needs, and their freedom.

On the other hand, remember that we only have been in the consume society for few decades as humans. At the end of the day, we still are animals with smartphones. We are literally starting to analyzing our adaptability and stupidity and our predictive animal behavior. That is what marketing nowadays does with technology, to inject consumption into individuals. The most powerful words that I had heard in this research belong to psychologists, not from any minimalist guru.

Peace