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| midnightimpulse.wordpress.com |
by Josh Sanburn, Time.com: http://time.com/3738202/minimalism-clutter-too-much-stuff/
The first thing you need to know about Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus is that they like to hug. “Bring it in, man!” Nicodemus says as he pulls me in the first time I
meet him. “We’re both huggers,” he says, pointing to Millburn.
These two early-30s, overly sunny dudes are The Minimalists, two of
the better-known apologists for a lifestyle of less.
Millburn and
Nicodemus, both 33, have written two books chronicling how they grew up
poor in Dayton, Ohio, achieved six-figure salaries by their late 20s,
fell into existential ruts, realized they weren’t happy and eventually
shed most everything they’d accumulated for a life in a Montana cabin as
if they were modern-day Thoreaus.
Millburn, Nicodemus and a growing number of similarly minded purgers
around the U.S. have forgone non-necessities in exchange for a much
simpler existence in the last few years. Minimalists like to say that
they’re living more meaningfully, more deliberately, that getting rid of
most material possessions in their lives allows them to focus on what’s
important: friends, hobbies, travel, experiences.
It’s impossible to know how many people live this way, but the ones
who have gone public have gained a following. Millburn and Nicodemus
launched their website in December 2010 with just 52 visitors the first
month. Last year, more than 2 million visited the site, and since then
they’ve attracted almost 30,000 people on Twitter and 80,000 fans on
Facebook.
Their road to minimalism began in October 2009 when Millburn’s mother
unexpectedly died the same month his marriage ended. At the time,
Millburn managed 150 wireless and telecom stores throughout
south-central Ohio. He had a three-bedroom house. He owned 70 Brooks
Brothers shirts. As a 28-year-old, he couldn’t ask for much more
financially. But a month of tectonic life changes shifted his thinking
about what mattered.
“I had everything I ever wanted,” Millburn says. “But it took getting everything I ever wanted to realize that I wasn’t happy.”
Millburn soon discovered Colin Wright, who was traveling around the
world with a mere 51 things (most of us have thousands of things in our
home, if not tens of thousands). Soon, Millburn began connecting with
others who described themselves as minimalists, and he eventually
decided to give it a shot.
He started small, getting rid of one item a day for a month. He
chucked his Brooks Brothers shirts. He got rid of his DVDs. He ditched
his TV. He sold most of his shoes. Later, he sloughed off kitchenware,
tools, electronics, artwork. Eventually, he moved into a smaller home
and soon persuaded Nicodemus, his buddy since fifth grade, to do the
same.
The two moved to Montana and began writing about their experiences,
branding themselves The Minimalists and publishing a book about their
collective purge.
They befriended guys like Joshua Becker, a father of two in Peoria,
Ariz., who began minimizing in 2008 after realizing he was spending more
time cleaning out his garage than playing with his son. “Everything I owned wasn’t making me happy, and worse, it was
distracting me from the very thing that did bring me happiness,” he
says.
After discussing with his wife, he was soon filling his van with
DVDs, CDs, clothes, Tupperware, spatulas, toys, old towels, sheets. The
first couple of vanloads to Goodwill were easy, but by the third and
fourth trips, he began an inward journey about why he’d accumulated so
much. “Was I really that susceptible to advertising?” he asked himself.
“Was I just trying to keep up with what the neighbors were buying? Was I
trying to impress people? Was I trying to compensate for a lack of
confidence?”
It turned out, the answer was yes to all those questions.
Similarly, Graham Hill, the founder of eco-friendly design site
Treehugger.com, got rid of most of his non-necessities after years of
living in a four-story, 3,600-square-foot Seattle home. Today, he lives
in a 420-square-foot studio, owns just six dress shirts and has 10% of
the books he once owned. His New York
Times op-ed,
“Living With Less, A Lot Less,” was one of the
Times’ most read and e-mailed articles in 2013.
Hill’s idea is spreading. The so-called “tiny house” movement has
taken off in the last few years among people who are looking to
drastically downsize. The homes, which are now subject of several
reality TV shows, are no bigger than 400 square feet and can often be
built for $30,000 or less.
The overarching narrative for many minimalists is this: At one point
they were rich, realized things weren’t bringing them happiness, and
then they purged. Some of them have received criticism for getting rid
of their things when many families are barely getting by, that their
behavior is only for people of a certain income level. For the most
part, however, it seems that they’re merely real-life examples of what
study after study indicates: Possessions don’t bring us happiness.
“As much as we like our stuff, they really aren’t a part of us,” says
Thomas Gilovich, a Cornell University psychology professor. “Arguably,
we are the sum total of our experiences. It’s almost like building up a
resume by virtue of the things that you did.”
Gilovich, who has been studying happiness as it relates to
experiences and possessions for over a decade, says there are three main
reasons why doing something brings about more pleasure than owning
something: experiences become part of our identity; they promote social
connections with others; and they don’t trigger the kind of jealousy or
envy we often get when thinking about someone’s material things.
“Materially, that thing will always be there, so it’s very easy for
people to say to themselves: ‘If I have the experience, it’ll be fun but
it will come and go in a flash. At least I’ll always have the thing,’”
Gilovich says. “That seems compelling, even if it turns out to be
psychologically wrong. But you adapt to it and eventually you don’t
really notice it anymore.”
He does, however, believe that there is a sort of experiential
awakening happening, in which people truly are recognizing that there is
greater value from experiences even though it will always be tempting
to buy material things.
“We hold onto these things because we think they’re going to be
useful in some hypothetical future that doesn’t actually exist,”
Millburn says. “We hold onto almost everything just in case we might
need it some day. I learned that the memories aren’t in things either.
That’s why I was holding onto so many things because I thought the
memories were in those things, but they weren’t.”
Toward the end of our interview, before one final hug, Millburn tells me he’s about to turn 33. And he’s never been happier. “To me, that’s the most important part,” he says.
by The Berkana Institute: http://berkana.org/sharingourlearning/toolkits/engaging-community-kit/
