I have drastically minimalized over the last couple years. I sold my stupid big house, now I rent. I got rid of most of my stuff. I have minimal furniture, empty walls, I started biking everywhere instead of driving. I am much happier.
People who own "everything", including owning a house, plenty of belongings, a car et al, are more happy to pursue minimalism.
People who own "nothing", including renting a house, not much in the way of belongings or a car, are more likely to pursue maximalism.
I think what we can establish from it is that people want different things at different times of life in different circumstances. What suits a young person who loves to travel doesn't necessarily suit someone with a family of their own.
I am in my 30's, am married, have a first grader, I love to travel but don't get the chance much these days. I agree with your points, different tokes for different blokes, just wanted to share my experience.
You have a wife and a kid and yet just rent, have minimal furniture and empty walls? How does that work? My partner loves making spaces “cute” and need some plants, art, etc. which I’ve come to appreciate.
It works for us. Our daughter's room is probably the most decorated part of our our home. My wife loves gardening, but has found new hobbies. She doesn't share my enthusiasm for minimalism, but she has embraced it and is also happier these days. Caring for a big house was like having a 2nd job. There were nice parts, but I don't miss it. We have a nice home, we just try not to fill it with stuff. I know it isn't for everyone but I like the clean minimal aesthetic, it's calming. Renting is a luxury in some ways. Now that we don't spend as much time on the nest, we have time for other things, and much less stress.
Some people prefer to rent. It has distinct advantages and in big cities you can often rent beautiful places that you'd never be able to buy. You can have plants, art, etc in a lovely minimalist space that doesn't need a lot of stuff to be inviting and livable. I don't understand why it wouldn't work with a wife and kid. Owning a place doesn't change that.
Renting does not imply a shoebox apartment or a mediocre house in the suburbs.
In a lot of developed countries (Germany, for example) renting is as common or more than buying. It's pretty much America that has this stigma that associates renting with not being successful.
When I think of adding additional people it adds stuff - now you need space for three or more people’s hobbies, preferences, etc. and when I think of renting I think smaller spaces.
I´ve moved something like 12 times in my life, as a kid, as a young adult, maried man with kids, now divorced one with shared custody. I've lived in studios, appartments, houses, most rented but 2 owned. My conclusion is whatever space you have you might end up using all of it and only because it is available, not because you are using all that shit.
I got back to renting close to a large city center because I wanted to get rid of cars and be able to go anywhere with my bicycle, have the kids walk to school , to their friends place or outside without me having to drive them left and right. Leaving in family do not mean you need so much things/space, hobbies don't have to require space. Also a lot of things can be shared with neighbors.
I also find that people tend to enjoy things more when they aren't forced upon them. For instance, people who can afford to buy and maintain a house enjoy not buying one and living minimally, whereas people who can't afford to buy one wish that they could. Minimalism, ironically, is pursued almost entirely be rich people.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a minimalist with a cheap Ikea coffee table and a 10 year old laptop. I’m sure some exist but for any that bother posting about it online it seems like an excuse to buy expensive things that align with the “aesthetic”. I barely own anything! Except this Herman Miller armchair and this 2022 MacBook Pro and this set of hand blown Japanese drinking glasses and this $2000 rug.
There’s nothing wrong with having a few high-priced objects vs. many cheaply priced ones. My dad has maybe a dozen desktop PCs. I have just one laptop, but my 1 MacBook is probably the same cost as several of his PCs.
Sure, I mainly meant that if someone posts their minimalist stack and it’s a mattress on the floor and a cardboard box with a old ugly computer on it, they’ll most likely get made fun of at best even if they’re actually embodying more of the tenets of “minimalism”. Basically it’s just a classier version of consumerism unless you do it in a very unsexy way
I won't go into the PC/MacBook debate but there is a thing about having less, but expensive and durable products, than tons of shit that keeps breaking down and being replaced.
If you treat a MacBook decently it’ll last for a long time. My personal MBP is from 2018 and runs fine wit no repairs required so far.
However my work laptop takes quite a beating from daily commute, work travel, etc and usually winds up needing a repair every one or two years. I probably need a hard case, but I guess there’s a bit of moral hazard when work has AppleCare for all the laptops.
Funnily enough, if you walk on certain paths of computer nerdism you will find splurges of minimalism there as well.
For instance: owning a 10 years old thinkpad running st and a window manager as your main computer signals very highly among the right circles. The difference is they call excess as bloat.
Dunno I consider myself a minimalist (my living room is basically a sofa, a coffee table, hifi and a beamer) and my coffee table is made of wood pallets found in the street.
Still I don't consider I am living in minimalism because I am not living alone and I leave alongside a ton of shit from my gf and kids. The living room is basically my only minimalist space in the appartment.
When you don't have anything, you don't know what you don't want. Once you've owned a thing, you have a better perspective of the actual value you derive by owning it. In most cases, people like the idea of owning a thing more than actually owning it, but that is difficult to distinguish without a lot of experience owning stuff. Consequently, maximalism is a natural phase for most people and many never have enough money to find its practical limits.
Minimalism, the rich people kind, is what happens when you've sampled the limits of various things and realize nothing will make you care about 95% of them. So you discard that 95% without any risk of FOMO because you've been there and done that. This is the peace of mind that allows them to focus their time and money on the 5% of things that do matter to them. These kinds of minimalists don't have much stuff, but what they do have tends to be extremely high quality and functional. It is a difference between economic minimalism and domain minimalism.
The trajectory from forced minimalism to maximalism back to intentional minimalism is not going to be inexpensive for most people. Like many people, I followed this trajectory to its logical conclusion. Looking back, it isn't obvious to me that it is possible to skip the maximalist step. It provides critical context that allows someone to understand where not to minimalize, which will be different for every person.
I used to own a lot and now I have almost nothing (not by choice), and I still prefer it that way. Money, big properties, even cars bring lots of headaches and worries that I am not so sure are really compensated by the upsides. I am not trying to be edgy here, of course having money is better than starving but I am pretty sure that most people could cut their "ideally fuck you money" amount down to 20-25% and still be very happy, saving the time and miseries of trying to get the other 75%. I was there, I risked a lot trying to get that other 75%, lost almost everything and now I realize I could have perfectly retired with what I originally had, by just implementing a few POSITIVE lifestyle changes. I am not preaching here, every life is different but that has been my experience.
It is more like reaching nirvana and enlightenment stage. When you're young probably fire is fascinating until you touch it and got burnt. People who own "everything" and go for minimalism have seen they really don't need those. People who has nothing hasn't realized they they are blessed already (a bit like Alchemist) and decide to embark a long and ardous journey to hoard as much as possible. They end up worry about their "things" and never got to enjoy it. They end up taken so much debt for the junks they acquire from a big eastern country. Is like Tiger Woods, go on satisfying his libido in the process destroy his family as he seek the plessure he lost his happiness. Junks hoarded are exactly like Tiger's sensual escapedes, ephemeral and yet extremely addictive...and destructive.
I own (almost) literally nothing except my laptop and mobile phone that I bought with my pandemic stimulus cheque and a bunch of random clothes strangers gave me or I found in the trash. Yet, every day I seek to minimalize my life as physical things just cause clutter and my brain stops functioning when there is too much clutter around me.
I noticed that people who have the ability to have either everything or very little can be happier having very little. People who don't have the financial means to have anything they want may not get the same joy out of having very little.
Someone once told me that there are some homeless people in Berkeley who actually have trust funds but find the homeless experience liberating. Not sure how true that is.
I had a closet full of clothes that I mostly didn't like. Now I have one pair of clothes I wear almost every day, and one backup pair for laundry day. I love every item I have. This is much better for me, and I don't smell bad. I suspect most people don't realize that I'm always in the same clothes.
Grass is always greener, but Americans do have too much stuff -spending many afternoons clearing out years of waterlogged clutter from American homes with hurricane damage taught me how much useless crap we have, so much so that luxury storage unit rental are a big business here..
Of course when I meet friends living in small urban apartments in Europe they often reflect longingly on the Subaran American lifestyle with its home theater rooms, endless garages etc…
This is a pretty poorly written article — even for Saturday night Hacker News.
“Simplicity hides complexity, and Marie Kondo sucks, and 2010s minimalist blogging sucked, and Apple sucks for removing the headphone jack, and the internet cables in the sea are messy.”
C’mon. This is just poorly written and a bunch of scattershot ideas.
It’s always a tug-of-war between owning too much and not enough — and I’m a big proponent of purges every 18 months. The half-life for most of the stuff we own is much less than a decade. Did Marie Kondo market her book? Yeah. Does she have some good ideas? Yeah. Should you be a minimalist zealot? No.
Watch her TV series. It is better at illustrating how her principle works in real life. A lot of Americans have hoarding problem. This is relatively an American phenomenon where they own big abode and higher purchasing power than the rest. It is quite good assuming you have and realize hoarding problem. Otherwise, as the saying goes, she can only explain it to you but can't understand for you.
I think that there is a certain level of "living with" complexity that people are capable of handling until they fall back on fast thinking systems. For example, the complexity of the cereal aisle or picking a new show to watch on netflix, picking a new person to date on an app - once there is an overwhelm that requires deep thinking to solve a problem, a person defaults to an intuitive internal model to solve the problem. The cereal box with the fruit on it doesn't tell the whole story, the show with 5 stars is actually not a good show for you, that person might have a great smile - but be a horrible partner. This leads to sub-optimal choices for many things from getting a car loan, picking the healthiest food at a restaurant, marrying someone that has is toxic.
All this is to say, American's feel as at least their living space is under their control and able to be simplified. And so the appeal of minimalism.
I think the Marie Kondo fad is overblown and might be a result of 1) excessive need for direction/hand-holding in all aspects of life and 2) the west's weird obsession with anything Japanese. That being said, Marie Kondo herself does not espouse minimalism. Personally speaking, having fewer things has contributed to better mental health, although it obviously is not true for all people.
Almost none of the stuff people have sparks joy but it is often useful and effective for solving their problems, its just weird advice to me - my comb doesn't spark joy - should I throw it away or spend a long time finding a new "joy sparking comb"?
Objects don't have to be imbued with special meaning all the time.
To be reductionist, the only items in my house that spark joy are alcohol and maybe one or two pills.
But to be fair, consider a form of mindfulness called negative visualization. In other words how would you feel if you lose everything (say in a fire). If you had no comb, and your hair were a tangled mess would you feel the opposite of joy?
Likewise there’s almost certainly stuff you wouldn’t replace if your house burned down. Maybe you bought a blender or weights for a long forgotten New Years resolution that’s now gathering dust. That’s what Kondo wants you to discard.
The "sparks joy" part gets the most attention, but if you read her actual writing her advice is keeping things that are useful OR "sparks joy". That is, she's just saying to really think about your stuff and consider whether it's actually either useful to you or something you like. If it's neither, then consider whether you really need it.
I honestly have a pretty negative attitude towards minimalism for two reasons that the article points to as well. One is that it's like a sort of lifestyle veganism, a social signifier for whatever the local upper caste is, the mentioned 'digital minimalism' I see a lot in that context, pretending to be Steve Jobs, adopting some watered down version of meditation often comes with the package etc..
Second function I think is also pretty bad is as a sort of neurotic attempt to impose order or self-optimize, Marie Kondo tells you where every towel goes and then all your stress goes away. In some cultures you'd have a feng shui consultant come and rearrange your furniture and the western secular version is hiring the minimalism assistant.
In that sense I think people are mostly consumers of minimalism as a replacement for whatever else they were consuming, it's not actually about cutting useless stuff out which doesn't need an *-ism because it's a banal wisdom you find in every religious book on page 2.
Other example of this phenomenon btw is note-taking apps. There appears to be a non-trivial amount of people who are so obsessed with the process of note-taking they spend more time optimizing note-taking than they take actual notes, or do something to write about.
> Other example of this phenomenon btw is note-taking apps. There appears to be a non-trivial amount of people who are so obsessed with the process of note-taking they spend more time optimizing note-taking than they take actual notes, or do something to write about.
Yes! This and the "life management systems" that seem to be a popular trend on HN, seem to ignore the fact that people with messy lives are often just doing more than people who spend all their time cleaning up loose ends. At a certain point there is no value to cleanliness if there isn't any increased productivity to show for it.
My take on Marie Kondo was people were more willing to listen to an outsider that told them to get rid of old things and clean up their house than someone they knew.
If your local friend came over and said “clean up your shit” you’d just ignore them. But when Marie Kondo asks what items spark joy (with some subtext of eastern wisdom) - suddenly it’s statusy to listen.
Western people have been joining dumb cults and gurus for decades for similar reasons, at least this variation is less harmful than average.
My parents moved a house after 15years, the amount of useless shit they end-up accumulating was staggering, but worse they didn't want to throw it away!
There is a balance of minimalism and buying/keeping everything.
I feel significantly better when my spaces are clean and empty. It’s like my mind feels less cluttered. It goes the same for note taking - it is like offloading my thoughts. I write it down, and it frees up space. Does it result in more productivity? Unknown so far. But it relieves me.
> Marie Kondo tells you where every towel goes and then all your stress goes away.
That’s very much not what she does. Her entire method is based on teaching people to let go of things they know they don’t need but are holding on to for reasons that basically amount to either self-delusion or inability to let go of the past. All the stuff about how to fold your clothes is just organizing tips that are tangential to the central thrust of her advice. She spends the vast majority of her time coaching people into various ways of disentangling their stuff from the emotional or sentimental feelings they have attached to that stuff. That’s what alleviates the stress, not being bogged down by the collected cruft of older versions of yourself.
Almost all criticisms I’ve read of her method seem to be levied by people who never bothered to read her book and are working off some generic assumptions about what “minimalism” means.
I find that her book is a bit hard sell or difficult to practice vs what I saw her how she did it on the TV series. Critics need to watch that to understand. Reading and thinking is hard for those critics these days (maybe that is why good journalistic content seems rare these days vs reality TV scriptings).
"Veganism, a social signifier for whatever the local upper caste is"
You lost me here, as most vegans are not wealthy, and in the US have approximately the same income as non-vegans on average. (A simple google search will point to many studies which refute your statement)
I lost you there because you missed the word I qualified veganism with. Yes, plenty of people are probably vegan for practical reasons, but within upper social class voluntarily forfeiting certain goods conveys status because it's a sign of purity and frugality and religious cleanliness. In the US in the form of literal Puritanist traditions. Don't smoke, sleep on a hard mattress even if you're a billionaire, it's why Zuckerberg loves talking about living in a crappy house for ages, and why Musk loves talking about how he sold his material possessions and lives in a container.
Caste discrimination and trying to snuff out lower caste members by seeing who observes a vegan diet is prevalent in Hindu communities because it happens to be the case that Brahmins observe vegetarianism much more strictly.
Also important, class and income aren't the same thing. Your bohemian artist who lives only off ethically sourced food and earns half as much as the meat-eating, smoking blue collar union guy is broke, but not poor.
There is a lot of social anxiety for individuals to conform, which is a way of not being seen as different. And yet we have these exemplars of non-conformity.
I struggle to see that as a marker for status as you describe it—purity. Instead I’m reminded of something the author Seth Goden says a lot, people like us do things like this.
>Other example of this phenomenon btw is note-taking apps. There appears to be a non-trivial amount of people who are so obsessed with the process of note-taking they spend more time optimizing note-taking than they take actual notes, or do something to write about.
This obsession predates apps. Even decades ago when I was in school, you'd find a subset of students who were obsessed by the note taking process itself -- they would have incredibly organized notebooks with ink in different colors, beautiful renditions of diagrams from the chalkboard or textbook, etc. Often they were far from the most successful students on exams though.
All these opinions aside, organizing my shirts in the style she suggests has brought much improvement to my morning: I can see them all and it has become obviously which ones I am not wearing, making them easier to throw away.
My life became much easier when I adopted a "work uniform" and can just grab any pair of pants and any shirt out of the work section of my closet, reducing my morning cognitive load to zero. I can get ready for work in the dark if I want.
Any philosophical system for living becomes a caricature when it goes fashinable. It then falls victim to "more is beter", virtue signaling and/or Goodhart's Law.
Not living a clutered life is of course beneficial. One can get the 80/20 benefits by doing an anual clearing of old unused stuff. But that's just normal and brings no sense of superiority, no chance to brag, to share on social media or to form religious like groups.
Common sense minimalism (or if you want to be a smartass "minimal minimalism") also does not sell books, seminars, consulting, etc. It's the same as Agile or healthy eating or whatever else system. It becomes ridiculous by being marketed.
I'll never understand the peculiar mania Kondo seems to induce in people who seemingly willfully misunderstand or misrepresent her. Even in this thread you have people who have clearly never read what she's actually written or said but are attacking her based on vague things they've heard.
She's not preaching minimalism, or any particular aesthetic at all. She's just saying to really think about your stuff and consider whether it's actually either useful to you or something you like. If it's neither, then consider whether you really need it.
But that's up to the individual. If they find they like or need their spaces filled with things, great. If they like a minimalist space, also great. Whatever works for them.
She just urges you to seriously think about your possessions and your living space, because it's so easily to mindlessly accumulate without really considering how you want to live.
I was into minimalism and saw the rise ift Marie Kondo. It had a mininal impact on the related communities in my opinion. It just gave them useful vocabulary for existing practices.
I slowly lost interest because minimalist communities had an unhealthy put object count above practicality. It became "the minimum" instead of "just the right amount".
Minimalist content creators also hit a wall when their practices were at odds with affiliate-based monetisation. It's hard to pocket a commission without selling something.
72 comments
[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 144 ms ] threadPeople who own "everything", including owning a house, plenty of belongings, a car et al, are more happy to pursue minimalism.
People who own "nothing", including renting a house, not much in the way of belongings or a car, are more likely to pursue maximalism.
I think what we can establish from it is that people want different things at different times of life in different circumstances. What suits a young person who loves to travel doesn't necessarily suit someone with a family of their own.
What demographic do you fall under?
Renting does not imply a shoebox apartment or a mediocre house in the suburbs.
I´ve moved something like 12 times in my life, as a kid, as a young adult, maried man with kids, now divorced one with shared custody. I've lived in studios, appartments, houses, most rented but 2 owned. My conclusion is whatever space you have you might end up using all of it and only because it is available, not because you are using all that shit.
I got back to renting close to a large city center because I wanted to get rid of cars and be able to go anywhere with my bicycle, have the kids walk to school , to their friends place or outside without me having to drive them left and right. Leaving in family do not mean you need so much things/space, hobbies don't have to require space. Also a lot of things can be shared with neighbors.
However my work laptop takes quite a beating from daily commute, work travel, etc and usually winds up needing a repair every one or two years. I probably need a hard case, but I guess there’s a bit of moral hazard when work has AppleCare for all the laptops.
For instance: owning a 10 years old thinkpad running st and a window manager as your main computer signals very highly among the right circles. The difference is they call excess as bloat.
Still I don't consider I am living in minimalism because I am not living alone and I leave alongside a ton of shit from my gf and kids. The living room is basically my only minimalist space in the appartment.
Minimalism, the rich people kind, is what happens when you've sampled the limits of various things and realize nothing will make you care about 95% of them. So you discard that 95% without any risk of FOMO because you've been there and done that. This is the peace of mind that allows them to focus their time and money on the 5% of things that do matter to them. These kinds of minimalists don't have much stuff, but what they do have tends to be extremely high quality and functional. It is a difference between economic minimalism and domain minimalism.
The trajectory from forced minimalism to maximalism back to intentional minimalism is not going to be inexpensive for most people. Like many people, I followed this trajectory to its logical conclusion. Looking back, it isn't obvious to me that it is possible to skip the maximalist step. It provides critical context that allows someone to understand where not to minimalize, which will be different for every person.
Someone once told me that there are some homeless people in Berkeley who actually have trust funds but find the homeless experience liberating. Not sure how true that is.
But the funds come with strings: stop doing drugs, stop being gay, go in to the family business, etc.
The liberation is having an autonomous life from controlling family, not the act of being homeless.
You think you don't smell bad.
“Simplicity hides complexity, and Marie Kondo sucks, and 2010s minimalist blogging sucked, and Apple sucks for removing the headphone jack, and the internet cables in the sea are messy.”
C’mon. This is just poorly written and a bunch of scattershot ideas.
It’s always a tug-of-war between owning too much and not enough — and I’m a big proponent of purges every 18 months. The half-life for most of the stuff we own is much less than a decade. Did Marie Kondo market her book? Yeah. Does she have some good ideas? Yeah. Should you be a minimalist zealot? No.
Plainly the author, from his writing style, does not.
1. Are you buying for future need and enjoyment, or is the act of buying the enjoyment you crave?
2. Are those things in storage realistically going to see any use in the next year, or do you simply hope they will?
both say there is more meaning from less stuff, but the latter is less of everything while the former is more of "less stuff you don't care about"
Objects don't have to be imbued with special meaning all the time.
But to be fair, consider a form of mindfulness called negative visualization. In other words how would you feel if you lose everything (say in a fire). If you had no comb, and your hair were a tangled mess would you feel the opposite of joy?
Likewise there’s almost certainly stuff you wouldn’t replace if your house burned down. Maybe you bought a blender or weights for a long forgotten New Years resolution that’s now gathering dust. That’s what Kondo wants you to discard.
Second function I think is also pretty bad is as a sort of neurotic attempt to impose order or self-optimize, Marie Kondo tells you where every towel goes and then all your stress goes away. In some cultures you'd have a feng shui consultant come and rearrange your furniture and the western secular version is hiring the minimalism assistant.
In that sense I think people are mostly consumers of minimalism as a replacement for whatever else they were consuming, it's not actually about cutting useless stuff out which doesn't need an *-ism because it's a banal wisdom you find in every religious book on page 2.
Other example of this phenomenon btw is note-taking apps. There appears to be a non-trivial amount of people who are so obsessed with the process of note-taking they spend more time optimizing note-taking than they take actual notes, or do something to write about.
Yes! This and the "life management systems" that seem to be a popular trend on HN, seem to ignore the fact that people with messy lives are often just doing more than people who spend all their time cleaning up loose ends. At a certain point there is no value to cleanliness if there isn't any increased productivity to show for it.
"Productivity" isn't the only value that matters.
If your local friend came over and said “clean up your shit” you’d just ignore them. But when Marie Kondo asks what items spark joy (with some subtext of eastern wisdom) - suddenly it’s statusy to listen.
Western people have been joining dumb cults and gurus for decades for similar reasons, at least this variation is less harmful than average.
There is a balance of minimalism and buying/keeping everything.
That’s very much not what she does. Her entire method is based on teaching people to let go of things they know they don’t need but are holding on to for reasons that basically amount to either self-delusion or inability to let go of the past. All the stuff about how to fold your clothes is just organizing tips that are tangential to the central thrust of her advice. She spends the vast majority of her time coaching people into various ways of disentangling their stuff from the emotional or sentimental feelings they have attached to that stuff. That’s what alleviates the stress, not being bogged down by the collected cruft of older versions of yourself.
Almost all criticisms I’ve read of her method seem to be levied by people who never bothered to read her book and are working off some generic assumptions about what “minimalism” means.
You lost me here, as most vegans are not wealthy, and in the US have approximately the same income as non-vegans on average. (A simple google search will point to many studies which refute your statement)
https://www.statista.com/statistics/738868/vegan-vegetarian-...
Caste discrimination and trying to snuff out lower caste members by seeing who observes a vegan diet is prevalent in Hindu communities because it happens to be the case that Brahmins observe vegetarianism much more strictly.
Also important, class and income aren't the same thing. Your bohemian artist who lives only off ethically sourced food and earns half as much as the meat-eating, smoking blue collar union guy is broke, but not poor.
I struggle to see that as a marker for status as you describe it—purity. Instead I’m reminded of something the author Seth Goden says a lot, people like us do things like this.
I think there is a difference.
This obsession predates apps. Even decades ago when I was in school, you'd find a subset of students who were obsessed by the note taking process itself -- they would have incredibly organized notebooks with ink in different colors, beautiful renditions of diagrams from the chalkboard or textbook, etc. Often they were far from the most successful students on exams though.
Not living a clutered life is of course beneficial. One can get the 80/20 benefits by doing an anual clearing of old unused stuff. But that's just normal and brings no sense of superiority, no chance to brag, to share on social media or to form religious like groups.
Common sense minimalism (or if you want to be a smartass "minimal minimalism") also does not sell books, seminars, consulting, etc. It's the same as Agile or healthy eating or whatever else system. It becomes ridiculous by being marketed.
For everyone else I’d recommend checking out Clutterbug: http://clutterbug.com This is the organizing system featured in HGTV’s Hot Mess House.
(Full disclosure: I am related to the founder of Clutterbug as well)
She's not preaching minimalism, or any particular aesthetic at all. She's just saying to really think about your stuff and consider whether it's actually either useful to you or something you like. If it's neither, then consider whether you really need it.
But that's up to the individual. If they find they like or need their spaces filled with things, great. If they like a minimalist space, also great. Whatever works for them.
She just urges you to seriously think about your possessions and your living space, because it's so easily to mindlessly accumulate without really considering how you want to live.
I slowly lost interest because minimalist communities had an unhealthy put object count above practicality. It became "the minimum" instead of "just the right amount".
Minimalist content creators also hit a wall when their practices were at odds with affiliate-based monetisation. It's hard to pocket a commission without selling something.