Posts Tagged ‘minimalism’

Something strange happened this week.

I returned from New York early Monday morning and went straight to work. Then after work went out for drinks with a friend. All this time, I still had with me my backpack in which I had taken my clothes for the weekend.

But somewhere along the way, I misplaced my bag. Frankly, I just forgot about it. I left it on the bus when I got off. It was only after some time had gone by that I finally realized that I didn’t have it, and I realized that a large portion of the few remaining things I own were probably gone forever.

But the weird thing was that I wasn’t very concerned. I stood on the sidewalk thinking about what I’d be losing — nearly half of my wardrobe along with a few of my other remaining possessions — and the thought of replacing those things didn’t bother me at all. In fact, it kind of excited me!

It’s strange; I’m dangerously close to reaching my goal of owning 100 things or less, yet it seems the less I own, the less I care about the few things I still have. Things are losing all their meaning in my life.

In the end, the bus driver was an extremely nice lady. She stopped the bus at the next block and walked back to me with my bag. But now I’m tempted to just throw all that stuff away…

The rise of minimalism is a good thing, I think, because it challenges the identity that has been foisted on us — that of the consumer. Buying less is good. Thinking more about what we own is good. Being more responsible inhabitant of our planet is good.

But there comes a point where minimalism becomes a religion, a mantra, an ideology that trumps practicality. Two weeks ago, I set out to begin defining that limit — at least for myself — by wearing the same clothes every day. I wanted to see just how little I really needed.

It began with my trip to Houston for minimalist weekend, but I decided not to stop at two days (actually three), and instead to try to do a whole month.

I made it two weeks before I had to quit.

At first, it was exciting, and throughout the first week, I mostly felt liberated by the lack of materialism. My life consisted of two outfits: my clothes, and my running outfit. And the only other possessions I interacted with were my iPhone, my MacBook Pro, my toothbrush and my towel.

Surprisingly, the lack of other possessions never bothered me. In spite of the fact that I have very few things left, I’ve realized these last two weeks that I can be happy with even less!

But the limit of one outfit was too much. By day 10, I was uncomfortable, and by day 12 it was making me unhappy. What began as freedom had become a prison.

Knowing that I only had the one outfit, I worried tremendously about how everything would affect my clothes. I didn’t want to do things that would cause me to sweat. I was paranoid any time I was near something that could stain. I was trapped in the smell of clothes damp from the rain. Washing every night and ironing every morning quickly grew tedious.

It’s possible that my lifestyle isn’t a good fit for the one dress protest or the uniform project. Or maybe such things are just better suited to women. I suppose I’m probably not qualified to make any guesses about why it works for other people; what I know is that it doesn’t work for me.

I’ve learned that I have room in my life for even less than I have now, but that there is a lower limit on clothing and having only one outfit is definitely crossing that limit.

For my minimalist weekend, I decided to try something I’ve wanted to do for quite a while: I traveled out of town without packing any luggage.

In fact, my plan was to take nothing at all, but because my new job requires me to tote a laptop, and because my flight out was directly after work, it turned out that I did have my laptop bag with me, and since I knew that would be the case, I did put my toothbrush and an extra change of underwear and socks into the bag before I left home Friday morning.

So that’s all that was in my possession for three full days: a laptop, a cell phone, a toothbrush, and one change of underwear and socks. And it was extremely liberating!

I made my way through airports in record time. I got onto and off of airplanes with more ease than ever before. And most notably, I never had to do that last-minute inventory before leaving a hotel room or turning in the rental car — you know, the one where you look in all the corners to make sure you didn’t leave something behind. It’s nice to just walk out, knowing you couldn’t have left anything because you had nothing to leave!

At every moment, I felt completely free to do anything I wanted, or to change my plans to whatever sounded fun, because there was never any reason I had to return to any place, except to the airport in time for my flight home.

I think in the future, I will always try to travel this way, bringing little or nothing with me.

Last night this came to my attention. Kristy Powell is wearing just one outfit for an entire year… and to get attention and support, she’s asking others to join her for one month (a year would be a long commitment), starting today.

As you know, minimalist weekend is tomorrow, but my flight to Houston leaves tonight after work so my minimalist weekend actually began today, the moment I walked out the door.

I’m going to be wearing only one outfit for the next three days anyway… so what’s stopping me from doing it for the rest of the month, and joining Kristy in her One Dress Protest?

I can’t guarantee that I’ll make it for the entire 30 days, but I’m going to give it a try. At the very least, it will be an opportunity to learn more about what I really use, what I really need, and exactly how much I can live without, on my way to owning 100 things or less.

On my minimalist path to owning 100 items or less this year, I have sold a lot of things on Craigslist — a lot! — and I’m starting to get kind of good at it. I’ve figured out a few tricks to getting good results, quickly.

The most important thing to do when selling something on Craigslist is to put yourself in the buyer’s shoes. Ask yourself “would this ad interest me?” If you were looking for this item, would this price interest you? Would these details interest you?

Often when people list an item on Craigslist, they write a simple title, and an uninformative one-sentence description of the item. Many times they don’t even include a photo. I don’t know about you, but I want to know about an item before I buy it.

Photos are a must. There is a box on the search that lets people see only the results with photos. Don’t let your ad be filtered out before it ever has a chance. It takes a few minutes to snap a photo and attach it to your ad. Do it.

Use a descriptive title. List important details: manufacturer, model number, color, size. You’ll get more people to look at an add for “Apple iPad 16gb WiFi only” than you’ll get for “ipad wifi”, just like an ad for a “Canon EOS Rebel XSi digital SLR camera” will attract more attention than an ad for “Canon Rebel dSLR”.

Give a detailed description of the item for sale. Far too often I see people write a short, one-sentence description of the item for sale. Ads like that scare me off. Knowledge is power, give people knowledge and let them feel powerful.

When I list an item on Craigslist, I begin with a descriptive sentence, usually formed by copying the title I used, and adding “in excellent condition” to the end. Then, I add a bullet-list of information about the item, telling the important features and what is included with it. Details like “in original box”, and “includes original manual” do a lot to attract responses.

Check your spelling. Read, re-read, proofread your ad. Make sure you’ve spelled everything correctly, especially the important details like brand name and model number. These are details that people are searching on, if you misspell them, you may never show up in a search. But even if you do, spelling is still very important. People feel safer buying from someone who writes properly.

Set a reasonable price. Let’s be realistic. This is Craigslist. You’re probably not going to sell a used item and get back what you paid for it. If there’s not much difference between your price and the brand new cost, people will prefer to buy new and get the warranty.

As I said above, put yourself in your buyer’s shoes. Would that price attract you? If a new camera is $250, I probably won’t buy a used one for $200, but at $175 it might be a good deal. A new iPad at $500 (plus tax) doesn’t cost significantly more than the used one at $450, and it’s guaranteed to have never been dropped, but I might take the chance on a used one for $375.

Expect attempts to negotiate. People want to feel like they got a bargain. Whatever price you set, make sure you’ve left room for the buyer to try to talk you down. If you’re willing to take $375 for that iPad, list it for $400. If you’re willing to take $175 for that camera, list it for $190.

Use the rule of give-and-take. Most people play their cards too soon. They will try to get you to reduce the price during the email or phone call. When they do this, they give you the upper hand! You’ve already priced the item with room to come down, so you’re not losing anything. When they ask you to take a reduced price, tell them “I can do that if you come today. If I have to wait, I know I’ll get what I’m asking.” Now this person will feel the pressure to come right away lest they risk losing a great deal.

Never deal with someone you don’t like. You don’t have to respond to every email you get. If you get offers you don’t like, just ignore them. If you don’t like the way someone writes, or you think they seem rude, don’t respond. Don’t worry… if you’ve written a descriptive ad, used a photo, and set an attractive price, you’ll get another response soon enough.

When I sold my iMac, it was more than three years old, yet I sold it in one day and got more than 70% of what I had paid for it. When I listed my original 16gb iPad for $375 (price firm), I got more than 25 responses to the ad in just the first hour!

Over the past few months, I’ve sold furniture, lamps, tools, DVDs, video games, cameras, film, lighting gear, darkroom equipment, video gear, and computer equipment… and I’ve continued to pay my rent every month, without a job, while I traveled all over the world. When you know what you’re doing, you can get a lot on Craigslist.

In the spirit of the minimalism challenge I’ve taken on this year, I’m really excited about the idea of the Minimalist Weekend… mostly because this is the perfect excuse for me to test out an experiment I’ve been wanting to do: travel with no luggage whatsoever.

So when the weekend of June 4-5 arrives, I’m going to fly to Houston and visit my friend Tanisha, who I met in Bologna during my trip to Italy this January, and when I go, I will not take any luggage whatsoever.

I’m really looking forward to this, because it will give me an extreme “test run” for my theories about future travels!

But what are you going to do? This weekend is for everyone… you don’t even have to be a minimalist! In fact, if you’re not currently a minimalist, but you’ve been curious about it, this is an excellent opportunity for you to give it a try for 48 hours and see what you think.

And if you are a minimalist, there’s really no excuse for you not participating. So get creative! Do something interesting. Make a few waves.

Here are some ideas for things you could do:

• Don’t turn on your television or computer for the whole weekend.
• Use only one plate, one fork, one knife, and one glass, and one frying pan.
• Spend the weekend boxing up all the things you no longer use.
• Give up the car. Walk or bike everywhere.
• Ditch all the contents of your pockets and spend an entire weekend with only a bank card, an ID, and a house key.

Try something new. Push your boundaries. For 48 hours, test how much you can do without. I’ve even heard rumor of one person who might try to spend the entire weekend homeless!

What will you do?

I’m starting to see a pattern developing. Travel is really affecting me. But when I travel to the sites of tragedies, I really grow. A lot.

Last winter, I traveled to several landmarks of American tragedies, all within a few days of each other, and I noticed that doing so had a profound effect on me. And I felt a strong connection in the Colosseum when I saw it in Rome, in February.

Well, I don’t think I can raise the stakes any higher. Today, I visited the site of history’s worst tragedy ever: Auschwitz. After this, it’s all downhill.

Walking around in Auschwitz feels like walking around in a summer camp. You’ve got the plain buildings, the dirt and gravel walkways, the barbed wire and watchtowers. Okay, so it’s a summer camp that doesn’t want you to leave…

For me, the profound moment was when I saw the hair. An entire room, filled with human hair. Everything else was a fact – a piece of history being recited. But seeing all that hair, suddenly I had a very tangible appreciation for the scale of the horrible thing that happened in that place.

The last thing you see on your tour at Auschwitz is a crematorium: the smallest one – a death-factory the Nazis thought was so insignificant that it wasn’t worth destroying. Then, you go to Birkenau, where all the style points disappear, and you learn about scales of quantity. Here are the ones they did destroy, but you can see their size, even in the rubble.

This entire experience was probably amplified by my visit to the museum in the old factory of Oskar Schindler yesterday. And even moreso by the memorials and reconstruction and monuments I saw in Warsaw last week.

Poland has been through hell. This country and its people know more about suffering than most of us in the US can ever imagine. And yet the people here are amazingly proud and upbeat. Jews or not, oppressed or not, these people are Poles and they’re proud of it.

Whether it’s the people I’ve met, who live in simple apartments with barely enough possessions to fill two suitcases, or the people I saw in photos in Auschwitz who packed everything they cared about into one suitcase… the theme has resonated with my own minimalism project this year.

Poles don’t derive their identity from their possessions. They don’t measure themselves by their jobs or their cars or their clothes. From the guy in the suit behind the hotel desk to the girl in the embarrassing uniform at the pierogi restaurant, everyone here walks proud. They love their family, they love their friends, and they love their land, their home, Poland.

After these two weeks, I’m finding myself surprisingly content with the simple fact that I’m alive. For 35 years, I’ve passionately chased hobbies, I’ve fed controversy, I’ve chased adventure, and I’ve done it all with a chip on my shoulder and an appetite for destruction. But today, at this moment, I don’t care.

Today, I’m just content – happy to be alive, and to have people I care about. Happy with my possessions that fit into two suitcases, and my right to travel to places like Auschwitz with a tour-guide rather than a gun in my back. And I’m happy that tomorrow I can go home, because I have something the millions of people in Auschwitz never got: a return ticket.

The hot new fad is minimalism. It seems like everywhere I go, I’m meeting minimalists and talking about minimalism. It’s like a club, where people sit around quoting other people.

It’s become like a religion. A lifestyle choice so sacred that the world gets shaken up when a beloved minimalist blogger does an about face and says “fuck minimalism.”

But underneath it all — underneath the surface of practicality and frugality, after the acceptance of fitting into a group, beneath the glamour of elitism, beneath the obsession with counting possessions — there’s a truth to which most minimalists still seem blissfully ignorant…

Minimalism is bullshit.

That’s right. It’s a joke. A lie. It’s a load of crap.

Minimalism is a cargo cult. It’s literally someone taking something away from you and then making you pay them to give it back. Minimalism is bottled water.

You see, most minimalists decide to become minimalists to get unstressed, or to declutter, or to reduce debt. Most of them eventually want to travel. They want to see the world.

But you know what’s waiting out there for them when they finally do travel? What’s waiting out there is a world filled with minimalists. The rest of the world is all minimalists.

Think about that. There are approximately 7 billion people walking the face of this earth. Out of those people, approximately 400 million live in North America. A quick bit of math reveals that almost 95% of the world are already minimalists. Only they don’t call it minimalism, they just call it life.

People in Italy, Poland, Korea, Thailand… people in the rest of the world are online right now, seeing this wave of minimalist blogs swallow the internet, and they’re hating us. And rightly so! Who the fuck are we to wear some big badge of accomplishment for catching up to what everyone else already does, and has always done?

Minimalism isn’t a lifestyle. It isn’t a growing experience. And it damn sure isn’t a religion. Minimalism is nothing more than a correction: it’s a path to the solution for a problem we Americans created for ourselves.

Don’t stop. It needs to be done. Keep throwing out all that clutter. Keep reducing your wardrobe. Don’t stop donating books. Don’t stop selling the things you’re not using. It’s good that you’re doing it. It’s necessary.

But don’t think you’re special. You’re not special. Minimalism isn’t special. It’s not a badge, and it doesn’t make you better than anyone else. Minimalists are just Charlton Heston, unaware that the Planet of the Apes isn’t some other world, it’s earth, and in spite of what they may think, it is they who have been acting strange.

This week was a major turning point in my minimalist mission. Since my return from Italy, I have removed at least one item from my closet every day. Most days more than one. After four weeks, I had amassed such a pile that it filled six large plastic bags.

And this wasn’t junk. Remember, I got rid of everything that didn’t fit or look right back in November, right after getting rid of everything white. No, in this huge pile were designer shirts, designer pants, suits, sportcoats, wool winter coats, sweaters, dress shoes…

Gosh, I had a lot of clothes! Think about that for a moment: I’ve been dumping clothes since November — that’s almost five months! I’m certainly not a hoarder, and I never thought of myself as much of a consumer, but holy cow, I had an unreasonable amount of clothing!

But think I’ve finally gotten down to a what is reasonable. Now that everything has been donated, this is all the clothes I own::

• 2 pr of jeans
• 1 pr of gray cotton pants
• 2 pr dress pants (1 black, 1 gray)
• 3 t-shirts (2 black, 1 gray)
• 7 long-sleeve button-up shirts
• 3 short-sleeve button-up shirts
• 3 polo shirts
• 1 gray sweater
• 1 black zip-up sweater
• 2 suits (1 black, 1 brown)
• 1 long wool winter coat
• 1 short nylon winter coat
• black leather boots
• black leather shoes
• brown leather shoes
• athletic shoes
• 1 Adidas workout suit
• 4 pr boxers
• 4 pr socks
• 1 pr shorts
• 1 pr swim shorts

I suppose it’s possible that I’ve missed something, but I’m pretty certain this is everything. So if you count everything, that’s 42 items. And if you cheat the way popular internet minimalists do, you can group the underwear and group the socks and call say 34.

For now, I’m going to leave it at 42, because it’s a lucky number, and because I’ve still got things to dispose of on my bookshelf and in my desk. I know I’m still over 100. But the really exciting detail is that finally, after more than 4 months, I’m done with the topic of clothing! I may drop one or two more items, later in the year, but I can say now, without any doubt in my mind, that I have a minimalist wardrobe.

And on the topic of donating, I also donated an older laptop to someone in need of a computer. I probably could have sold it, but the money I’d have gotten wouldn’t compare to the feeling I get from helping someone. So while I was taking everything else out of the apartment at the beginning of this week, I carried that laptop off to UPS and sent it away, too.

One of the things that makes this modern minimalist movement possible is multifunction electronic devices — basically, computers. These days your computer can be your phone, your mailbox, your photo album, your library, your radio, your television, your movie player… and tons more.

The ability to turn one device into a replacement for all those other things has the potential to greatly declutter your life. But it also brings with it a new kind of clutter. Included with a computer you also get boxes, manuals, software discs. And then all of your peripherals all come with more boxes, manuals, and software. Then you buy still more software, which comes with more boxes and manuals… and license codes that need to be saved.

Every camera comes with a different battery charger, and three different cables. Every music player has a sync cable and headphones. And all of those extra cords and connectors all get saved, cluttering drawers or boxes or shelves.

Today I purged the bulk of that mess. All of the boxes are gone. Most of the manuals are gone. Instructions and warranty cards are gone. All but the most important CDs are gone.

All that remained to be dealt with was a big pile of cables and adapters. For those, I used a false book — basically, a small box, designed to look like a book. I filled the false book with all of the adapters, cords, cables, headphones, and accessories that I felt needed to be kept, and now they’re neatly tucked away, out of sight where I never have to see them unless I want to.

Having all that “junk” out of my drawer left the drawer nearly empty! In fact, most of my desk drawers are rapidaly approaching a state of “empty.” The desk was perhaps the worst of my clutter spots. As I wrangle it under control, I grow closer and closer to the point where I’ll be ready to do an actual count on my possessions.

Maybe in a few more weeks. There’s no rush — I’ve got until the end of the year to get down to 100 things. Of course having an actual count is really going to put a lot of things into perspective…