I realize it’s a joke but actually one of issues with aggressive minimalism is that it’s actually very nessisary to be decently wealthy to pull off. If you can not afford to treat tools and materials as effectively single use items that are frequently expunged from your spaces then it can actually be fairly wasteful and expensive. Extensive lending resources like tool libraries in cities being available makes it more tenable but otherwise yeah… Minimalism is kind of for the rich.
Why would you do that though? If minimalism is about having to much excess, wouldn’t you have tools built to last?
That requires you to be able to afford higher quality tools that are built to last. If you can’t afford the higher upfront cost, you’ll end up spending more over time, and it creates a vicious cycle.
It’s like the organic food trend - it costs a lot more to eat healthy.
The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
This was the Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socioeconomic unfairness.
- Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms
Cost and quality are very detached things in this day and age.
Expensive can be far worse build quality than cheap.
And eating healthy is a perfect example of this, its cheaper to cook your own food and use lots of veggies, that’s healthy. You dont need the latest and greatest ”superfood” to be healthy.
But minimalism isn’t about just having the least amount of stuff and purging literally everything you’re not using that minute. It wouldn’t encourage buying and purging the same tools over again. Rather, encourage you to think deeply on weather you need X tool, or maybe Y tool you already have could manage the job, or if you can borrow X tool. If you cannot substitute for X tool in any way, you would still buy it—but you still would want to be mindful of what version of X you buy, whether you need to super fancy one with lots of bells and whistles or if a basic version will keep you in working order.
Minimalism primary is an aesthetic not simply a “decluttered lifestyle”. It’s a fashion. There isn’t a bunch of stuff tucked carefully in boxes perfectly Marie Kondoed out of the way. With minimalism if you end up with spares of anything you get rid of the spares because the idea is that you are removing psychological noise for a clean look. Things that are infrequently used are looked at as the enemy of the aesthetic.
What you are thinking of is not the aesthetic movement it is the idea of having slightly less stuff. Low or Zero-waste lifestyles are a very optional part of minimalism and arguably more of a separate sustainable eco movement …but it is really hard to do those lifestyles in isolation because while you might not bring new single use things it does mean finding them elsewhere which requires someone else to have stuff or outside resources.
You do need to be living in a highly interconnected and “just-in-time” society to pull off the extreme version of minimalism.
Any disruption of your perfect delivery schedule means that you’ve gone from aesthetic minimalism to lacking necessities in an instant.
Having said that, I don’t personally know anyone pulling off the extreme minimalism lifestyle.
In my experience, hoarding is much more common. I know a lot of people that have multiple cubic meters of stuff (their children’s old clothes, toys, nice boxes, magazines etc) they will never use (they don’t even know what they have) that they refuse to sell or throw away. That also seems very unhealthy.
So I walked into the Minimalist Store and said “Give me nothing you’ve got”, and the lady replied “A fine choice, sir, feel free to look around, we have plenty of that for you not to choose, I’ll be right here if you have no questions”.
GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY LINUX TERMINAL, YOU SHELL FISHER!!! ZSH!!! LESS IS MORE UNLESS IN MAN MAN!
If less is more, imagine how much more more can be.
