My History with minimalism

A story of how I went into a new lifestyle

It was about 2017. I remember it pretty clearly, and remember the feeling that almost made me throw up. Before you guys think THIS IS INTENSE, WHAT HAPPENED, it wasn’t that crazy. I got myself so worked up over something, I was so pissed off that my stomach felt this extreme knot that I couldn’t let go of.

I walked into the office, and there was the new guy. He was younger than me, wore a Rolex, and earned more than I was earning… that threw me into an immediate rage - not because I was underpaid, but because he was better than me, and had money. At this point in my life, I wasn’t struggling but I wasn’t well off. This guy had the bling, and had the cars/lifestyle to go with it. He reminded me immediately of a guy I know… and it wasn’t a great feeling.

That day, I was so tired of feeling envious, and that knot in my stomach, so I decided I needed to do something about it.

When I think of suffering (and also minimalism) I think Buddhism. I started reading up a little bit about it and how to get rid of suffering. A lot of it started to read like possessions were a cause of suffering, so was addiction and etc… This got me onto the road of: maybe living a more minimal life with less things was the way forward. I started researching a little bit about it and started the rolling of things.

Among some of the literature were the typical things that every minimalist picks up:

• The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing
• Spark Joy
• Minimalism
• The year of less
• Goodbye, things
  
  

I started to read some of these throughout the year, and then started to put these things into practice.

So what exactly needed to be practiced?

The first thing I wanted to do was completely declutter the house. It sounds like a religious thing, but items were becoming evil in the household. This does 2 things for me.

1. It forces me to really make some decisions on things that do bring me joy and don’t. Kind of like a cleansing of both the physical and mental. Cleansing the soul in this case is important.
2. It forces me to really look at how much stuff I have. There’s so much Junk that I can’t part with sometimes, and this forces me to really dive deep and throw out shit.
   
   

Now just to be clear, I’m not saying that you need to throw out things you enjoy, but purging things that don’t bring you joy has a lovely therapeutic feel. Once I started doing that, I realised a few things:

• I’ve spent some money on needless crap that I didn’t need
• The items that I had, good majority were cheap shit that don’t last
• The tax associated with these items is bad
  
  

What exactly do I mean by tax: I mean either the effort to maintain it, space to store it, etc. Now don’t get me wrong, when all this shit is stuffed inside your drawers or out of site, it’s easy to not care about it, but do yourself a favour and take all of it out of your drawers: then try to put it back together. 2 things will happen:

• Question why the hell you have all this shit
• Stuff it back together worse than it was earlier.
  
  

Sometimes it’s appealing to remove shit out of a drawer or out of a closet. This isn’t just for the physical aspect of having a nice looking drawer or etc, but it’s also nice for mental health. I get a massive boost when I throw away a lot of shit.

Adopting minimalism started to have this lovely mental clarity effect on my whole wellbeing. I started looking at all the things I had, and was like - this is where I’ve wasted my money… Well no more. It’s time to clean up both my spending habits and my junk.

I took about 2 weeks to fully declutter all of my shit, and then started really tidying up the konmari way - which involved folding up all my clothes and changing how all my stuff was displayed. When I was finished, I felt so overwhelmed with calm that I just didn’t know what to do except lie down on the ground… my exceptionally cleaned ground. This was the start of things.

I then started to really appreciate the things that I did have more. I started to revel in the beauty of things, the space that I claimed back, how much lighter/freer/less stressed I was about things. This is not a great strategy but start adding up the price of the things that you throw away, and then question yourself why you bought it in the first place. It helped me definitely appreciate things a lot more.

I know what you’re thinking, it’s a waste to throw all that stuff away: don’t worry I got great usage out of a lot of things that I purchased, and also I thanked it for its service.

This was the the start of 2017, and what felt like a much freer, happier time.

Fast Forward to 2021

A few years later, I haven’t kept up with Minimalism at all, but now more than ever I really do need it. When I moved from Leeds back to Ireland, my wife stripped out a lot of things. There were many, MANY things that didn’t make the cut so we pretty much threw out 50% of our possessions. That was an eyeopener because we moved with about 10 medium boxes and 5 large boxes. That sounds like a lot to me, but compared to others it’s relatively small. The movers took about 90 minutes to move all the stuff (in the middle of a snow storm) and they were well happy that there wasn’t that many items, but in my opinion there was still far too many items.

I’ll show you an example. I revamped my home office setup while I was Leeds (around 2017), at the top was the before, bottom is what it looked like after I done a konmari.

To many people, it doesn’t look like a huge difference, but what if I was to say to you we need to move that table downstairs now. Before a konamri, you’d have more items to move… and that’s exactly why I need to get back into minimalism.

The other day I had to swap desks with my wife, and I had to take my setup with me. On my desk, there were 2 notebooks, 2 pens, Macbook, keyboard, mouse, microphone plus boom arm, travel mug, water bottle, another cup of tea. I then had to move the desk a bit, and then along came all the fucking wires that needed to be cleaned up. That desk swap took 15 minutes.

From a minimalistic perspective - all of that could have been slimmed down to 1 item… my Macbook. Keyboard and mouse is a luxury that helps me work, but I wasn’t going to be at that desk for very long.

I do this to myself quite a lot, where I end up maximalising the situation for not much gain. The best way to describe it is, there’s a nail that needs hammered down, but you show up with a tool box, a mitre saw, a spirit level, a nail gun, a van… and the hammer. Was all that shit really necessary?

While I agree somethings will make us more comfortable, sometimes it’s not really about the comfortable in the situation, it’s about only what is functional. You’re hardly ever going to wear more than 1 t-shirt at a time, why would you have more items than you need to. Reflect on that for a bit.

Why am I adopting it again?

2021 is going to be the year where I adopt both minimalism again, and the zen buddhist feel. There’s a few things that I don’t like about moving back to Ireland: there’s the fact that there is a lot of clutter/crap inside my parents house, and that everyone here seems to have this “I’m better than you” mentality. It’s time to fight back against that negativity.

This starts with going back to what I know… by Konmari-ing all my possessions again, and only relying on the necessary - rejecting the unnecessary.

This is going to be a long journey, but one that must be taken because it cleanses both my soul and mentality. While convenience might be great, sometimes being uncomfortable is necessary. I want to be able to get out of my bed very happy that there is:

a) less to clean

b) less to worry about

c) space to breathe.

Those bits are extremely important to me. The less chaotic life is, the more clarity we have for getting on with life. This year I strive to minimalise as much as possible and ensure that my new home has as little as possible.