We’ve all been MTV’d. We grew up with pop drivel invading every dark corner of our media-saturated lives: The glowing box in the living room showcasing ideal families in ideal homes living ideal lives. The car stereo blaring soul-crushing top 40-isms during rush-hour traffic. Newspapers foretelling inescapable doom and irremediable despair without any hope of salvation or redemption. Magazines twaddling the latest gossip about such and such and what’s his name.

Our collective brains have soaked up the meaningless muck and are now waterlogged with platitudes and cultural niceties and the false expectations of the way life should be.

Snap! Crackle! Pop!

American Express: Never leave home without. Coca-Cola: It’s the real thing. McDonald’s: I’m lovin’ it. 

We know these corporate slogans—and many others—by heart. We’ve let them in without even knowing we were letting them in. And by now we’ve accepted these mantras as maxims by which we should make our decisions.

If someone continuously repeats a lie, does it eventually become the truth? Is it not safe to leave our homes without our credit cards? Is the realest thing in our lives a carbonated aluminum can of sugar? Do we really LOVE the golden arches?

Even Pringles admits that they know we are programed: Once you pop, you can’t stop! Sadly, they’re right. It’s incredibly difficult to shake the sedative weight of everything we’ve learned from pop culture. But fortunately, once you go pop, you CAN stop. Although it isn’t easy.

Ain’t Nothin’ on the News but the Blues

We never opted-in to pop culture. It already had us in its sinister clutch at birth, an invisible umbilical cord that no one ever thought to cut.

After all, what’s the harm in a little TV, in a little late night news, in catching up on the day’s current events? In reality, there’s nothing wrong. But when we simply accept the the idiot box’s catchy one-liners as epigrams by which we must make our most important decisions, then we get lost rather quickly.

It’s easy to be passively entertained and informed, accepting catchphrases to be self-evident. Even the news has to be “info-tainment” these days so that it’s more palatable to the casual listener (read: consumer).

That’s because it’s easy to be entertained, but it’s hard work to seek out the truth, it’s difficult to form our own opinions based on multiple points of view, and it’s much easier to allow someone else—be it Rush Limbaugh or Keith Olberman or a faceless corporation with a seemingly endless marketing budget—to form an opinion for us.

Besides the problems of its inherently passive nature, today’s commercial-riddled pop-information can’t inform us of life’s larger problems, of our deepest troubles and fears, of what it actually means to be alive—what it means to be a human being in the most complex time in human history.

Suffice it to say, the American Dream is broken. It has been for decades. And attempting to go back to “the way things were” will not fix it. “Fixing it” would only perpetuate the inevitable, making it worse in the long-run. The longer we put off our troubles, the harder they are to deal with.

Instead, as a culture, we must take responsibility. We must to fix ourselves. We must create the disciplines necessary to be alive in this complex world. We must become aware of what’s going on around us so that ultimately we can be aware of what’s going on inside us. Only then will we be able to know what’s truly important.

—

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When I Stumbled in a New Direction

I never asked for this. I stumbled into minimalism serendipitously and haphazardly, not knowing what I was looking for. It was utterly unintentional at first.

The year was 2009, early autumn. And as the leaves resisted their change in color, my dying mother resisted the division of cancer cells in her body as they metastasized beyond her lungs to other vital organs and, eventually, to her brain.

A month after she passed, my marriage ended abruptly, and I didn’t know which way was up anymore. All I knew was that I wasn’t happy. I had worked unimaginably hard for more than a decade, chasing happiness around every bend, but the faster I ran, the further away it was.

As my twenties twilighted, I went searching for answers, looking for anything to help me figure it all out. At that point, any answer would’ve sufficed.

Then in November 2009, a single tweet changed my life. Someone I followed on Twitter, which I hadn’t used much up to that point, shared a link to a video from a young Midwesterner named Colin Wright. Don’t ask me why, but for some reason I felt compelled to click the link.

Colin had an interesting story. He too had been unhappy with the status quo, tired of slaving 70-plus hours a week as a faceless cog in the corporate wheel. But unlike me, Colin had taken action to rid himself of his discontent. He’d quit his job and decided he could work for himself. He decided he could pursue his passions—traveling the world—while making less money.

He said this transition was easy for him, because he was a “minimalist.”

I didn’t have a clue what minimalism was, and I certainly didn’t have the desire to leave Ohio and travel around the world as a peripatetic writer. But when I heard him talk about his newfound freedom—and how minimalism allowed him to focus on the most important things in his life—I immediately said, “I’m in.”

I spent the next year simplifying my life, shedding the vast majority of my material possessions, though it wasn’t always easy. As the saying goes, the things we own end up owning us. Over time, we become our things, and our possessions become a part of us—part of our identity. But I didn’t let that stop me. I knew a more meaningful life was out there, so I kept simplifying my life, questioning my stuff, forcing myself to give less meaning to my things and much more meaning to my health and my relationships and the most important areas of my life.

By the time the summer of 2010 arrived, I’d drastically simplified the way I live. I was still working 70 hours a week, but I had more time to focus on my passion—writing literary fiction. Since I was 22, I’d wanted to write fiction. For me, fiction did something magical that no other art form could do: it allowed an exchange of consciousness between the author and his characters and the reader. I was spellbound by this exchange; it created an emotional resonance that made me want to participate, to create, to write. So at 22, I started tinkering around with fiction, writing whenever I could, whenever a free moment presented itself, cobbling together stories of lives far more interesting than the banality of my own corporate-driven existence.

In June 2010, a year before I turned 30, I decided to take a week off work and stay with a friend in Brooklyn, a week in which I planned to sort through things and determine the right direction for my life. A day before I left Ohio, I saw another tweet from Colin. He was back in the states for two months, and he wanted to know if anyone had a smartphone he could use.

I did.

He asked me to mail it to New York City, where he would be for the next week. Hey, I thought, I’ll be in New York too. Let’s do lunch. 

It just so happened that Colin was starting an indie publishing company, and I wanted some advice about publishing my fiction. I’d been writing for seven years, and I’d become quite good at it, but all I had to show for it was a two-inch-thick stack of rejection letters from scads of literary agents.

In New York, Colin and I had lunch; he liked my writing, and so he offered me an idea: he said I should do something online—anything—I should start a website and see what happens. I dismissed this idea at first. Hell, I didn’t know how to start a website. And I was completely ignorant to the whole nonfiction genre. So I sat on the idea, not paying it much mind—at first.

Then in October 2010, a year after my mother died, my best friend, Ryan, began noticing a marked difference in my attitude. For the first time in a long time, I was happy. Life wasn’t perfect, and I still wanted to change a shedload, but I was happy and it showed. I shared with him what I’d done over the last year to simplify my life, showing him Colin’s site, as well as some interesting insights from Leo Babauta, Joshua Becker, and Julien Smith (all of whom would eventually become personal friends of mine).

Just as I had a year earlier, Ryan also unearthed the freedom that minimalism brought to his life. Together, we were able to sculpt an interesting story from our newfound meaningful lives. He understood that I was passionate about writing, and I knew he was passionate about helping people change, so we decided to document our journey into minimalism online, adding value to other people’s lives.

The rest of the story is history, as it were, though that history is the most exciting part.

Clueless and fumble-prone, we launched a website, The Minimalists, on December 14, 2010. And over the next year, something astonishing occurred: people actually found value in our words, and they shared our essays with their friends and loved ones. Our site grew and thanks to some incredibly kind people, we were featured all over the web. We left our six-figure corporate jobs and published three books, including my first fiction book, all three of which received phenomenal praise and ended up becoming bestsellers on Amazon. And now, despite the fact that I don’t have a college degree, I’m teaching an online writing class to help people who want to learn from my years of writing experience.

Most importantly, Ryan and I have been able to contribute beyond ourselves. Minimalism has allowed us to shed the excess so we can live intentionally and contribute to others in a meaningful way. And that is the most fulfilling part of this entire journey.

All of this, the result of a single tweet.

You never know what small decision will lead to great change. I can’t imagine what my life would be like if I hadn’t leapt down the rabbit hole that day.

Three Midwesterners and a Brit Walk Into a Bar…

This year, Ryan and I are embarking on a new journey. We’re teaming up with Colin Wright and Thom Chambers to collaborate on a special publishing venture called Asymmetrical Press, an organization designed to help talented writers, artists, and content creators publish great work and find the best ways to get their work out to the world. Think of it as an independent record label (for publishing) with an online interactive community. Click here to get informed.

And don’t worry, everything at The Minimalists will remain business as (un)usual.

—

Speaking of tweets, the fine folks at Twitter recently gave me a cool new username: @JFM. Talk about minimal—following me is now easier than ever.

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Sometimes the best plan is to have no plan at all. Wing it. Play it by ear. Go with the flow.

We embraced this kind of no-plan planning during our 33-city meetup tour. We simply picked the cities and dates and found 33 eager people to help us find meetup locations in each city. So far, this un-plan has worked incredibly well.

Until now.

You see, we’ve been attempting to pin down a venue in Washington DC for months. We’ve had scores of outstanding people pitch in an attempt to secure a location. But no dice.

Did we fail? No. If our non-planning has worked for every city so far, yielding a relatively stress-free tour, then why not keep going with the flow?

With over 150 RSVPs in DC, we couldn’t find a big enough venue, so we’re creating one. Ultimately, we’re determined to turn this snafu into a more fun, more memorable event.

Plan A. We’ll meet on the bottom left side of the front steps of the Lincoln Memorial (as you’re facing Abe with the reflecting pool behind you).

Plan B. If the weather is bad (rain, snow, tsunami), we’ll meet in the Atrium of Union Station between the elevated bar and the doorway into the mall (near-ish the Godiva Chocolate store).

If you’re in DC and you’re coming to the meetup on Friday May 11th, please make sure you’ve RSVP’d. We’ll keep you updated via email.

This will be a true minimalist event, so wear comfy shoes, bring your own gummy bears, and be sure to pack a flexible attitude to accommodate whatever spontaneity arises. It might end up being the most memorable event of the entire tour.

Lesson Learned

Too often, we overplan. But, in reality, we can’t plan for everything; inevitably, something will go wrong sometime. Such is life.

Thus, it’s better to find a direction, start moving, enjoy the journey, and hope for the best. Often, this will lead to a new, unique experience that you never expected. Like, say, meeting with a hundred people to talk about minimalism at Abe Lincoln’s feet.

And no matter what happens, you’ll be OK. We’re certain of it.

Special thanks to Laura Nicholson for this idea.

We all make mistakes. Sometimes our mistakes take us to an unexpected place. Other times we screw up and we have to face the mess we’ve made.

We were standing amidst one of those mistake-fueled messes last night at Boulder Coffee in Rochester, NY.

Boulder Coffee is an interesting place—a beautiful, open-area coffee shop with plenty of tables and chairs and artwork and, of course, plenty of space. Perhaps too much space. At least that’s what we noticed when we arrived for our evening meetup. Expecting to find the shop brimming with the 37 people who’d RSVP’d for the event, we were instead greeted by Alex and Mike and three other smiling faces—and a sea of empty chairs.

Where is everyone? we thought. The adrenaline was still rushing through our veins from the night before where we were greeted by 35-or-so Clevelanders in a similar venue, and we were ready for an excellent repeat. But no dice.

So why was Rochester any different? Apparently, one thing was radically different. Online, we had unknowingly posted two Rochester meetup dates, informing readers that our meetup was scheduled for either May 3rd or May 8th, depending on which page you viewed.

Crap. That was a big mistake.

So we had two options at that moment:

1. Panic. We could transition into panic mode, cancel the event, and reschedule it for a date in the distant future. Or…

2. Enjoy the Mess. We’d made a mess—no doubt about it—but we still had an opportunity to enjoy the moment. Instead of 37 people, we had 5 sitting with us, listening intently. Why not toss our expectations out the window and make the most of the evening? Why not enjoy the mess we’d made and find a way to make the evening a meaningful one?

We chose the latter, and we enjoyed an outstanding meetup with a handful of outstanding people.

You see, whenever we make mistakes, it’s important that we learn from those mistakes, that we use them as an opportunity to grow. But it’s just as important to enjoy the moment for what it’s worth, to be happy with whatever is in front of us, to find value in our mistakes, to enjoy the mess we’ve made while we clean it up.

That’s all you can do.

So, to Rochester, thank you to the folks in attendance last night; thank you for the meaningful conversations. And if you planned on attending on May 8th, we’re sorry. Sometimes shit happens; sometimes we make mistakes. We’ll be back. One day. In the meantime, we’d love to meet you at a different tour stop this month or during our online meetup next month.

—

If you missed the collaboration essay between @JFM and @Julien, then check out The Short, 16-Step Guide to Getting Rid of Your Crap.

I recently teamed up with one of my favorite writers, Julien Smith, to write The Short, 16-Step Guide to Getting Rid of Your Crap, an essay for his popular website. It was a fun collaboration that resulted in a great piece of narrative nonfiction. Click the link to read. Enjoy.

You can also follow Julien on Twitter.

The fourth leg of The Minimalists 33-City Meetup Tour starts May 2nd. Find your city and RSVP for free here. We’ve also added a one-time online meetup (details below).

Over 1,400 people have RSVP’d so far—and we hope to see you at one of our meetups, too. We’ll be talking about our story, our troubled pasts, our journeys into minimalism, and our new book. And of course we’ll spend a couple hours answering your questions and having meaningful discussions. You can check out photos of our past meetups here.

Note: we’re still looking for a Washington DC venue for Friday May 11th at 7pm. Email us if you know anyone willing to host 50-or-so people in the DC area.

As always, be prepared for a hug. If you bring a Sharpie, Joshua will sign/deface your Kindle (we have a picture to prove it). And Ryan will likely ask you to sign his old high school yearbook.

While we’re on the road, this might be a good time for you to catch up on our most popular essays of all time, as well as some of our TV, Radio, and Print interviews. And make sure you follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ if you want to be kept abreast of our on-the-road shenanigans.

New: Online Meetup!

If you don’t see your city listed, don’t fret! You can attend The Minimalists Live Online Meetup on June 17th. Details and RSVP on our tour page (scroll down to June).

Spread the word. Tell a friend:

When you get rid of most of your stuff, your life invariably changes. Without all the things in your way, you have the opportunity to focus on the most important aspects of your life.

Once I jettisoned the superfluous stuff in my life, I was able to focus on my health, cultivate meaningful relationships, get into the best shape of my life, grow as an individual, and contribute beyond myself in myriad ways.

But there was also an unexpected benefit from my newly uncluttered life: now I truly enjoy everything I own.

Before I embraced minimalism, I had a lot stuff: A three bedroom house teeming with stuff. A basement and a two-car garage filled with boxes overflowing with stuff. Spare bedrooms and closets and cabinets jam-packed with stuff. Every nook, every cranny—more stuff.

It was hard to keep track of it all. And, to be honest, all that stuff added very little value to my life. Often, it just made me feel anxious and overwhelmed and even depressed.

I was unhappy with the way I felt, so I started questioning everything I owned.

Today I don’t own much, but the things I do own add immense value to my life. When I got rid of my extraneous material possessions, what remained were the things I use every day.

Now nearly everything I own is my favorite thing. All of my clothes are my favorite clothes. All of my furniture is my favorite furniture. All of my possessions are my favorite possessions—all of which I’m able to enjoy every day of my life.

How about you? What if you enjoyed everything you owned? How would it make you feel if you were surrounded by your favorite things every day?

—

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We used to be “successful.” At least that’s what everyone said.

People frequently told us that we had things “figured out,” because by age 27 we both worked “great” six-figure jobs, we were climbing the corporate ladder, and we owned all the things that were supposed to make us happy: the big houses, the luxury cars, the fancy material possessions.

But we sure didn’t feel like we had it figured out. And we certainly didn’t feel successful. Instead, we felt overwhelmed by the so-called success in our lives. We were unhealthy, unfulfilled, and our lives lacked meaning. And the long hours we worked and the stuff we bought didn’t fill the void we felt inside.

Unfortunately, we’d subscribed to the ridiculous cultural standards promulgated by our heavily-mediated society. But despite what people said, we weren’t successful. Rather, we were fools. Successfools.

But you needn’t be fooled like we were by the false cultural pressures propagated by the ads on TV, proliferated by the ghosts haunting the cubical farms at your job.

A six-figure job doesn’t make you successful. There’s nothing wrong with earning money, but the money alone will not make you happy.

A shiny new car doesn’t make you successful. There’s nothing wrong with owning things you enjoy, but your material possessions alone will not bring you bliss.

Consider your daily actions. Do you pacify yourself with short-term pleasures, sacrificing true success and happiness and fulfillment for ephemeral pellets of momentary gratification?

Are you truly successful? Are you happy? Do you feel fulfilled? Are you living a meaningful life? You can. And, more importantly, you deserve to.

Choose your daily actions wisely. Meaningless short-term pleasure often equals long-term suffering, while short-term pain can offer you long-term joy and growth and contentment. The choice is yours to make.

—

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Please share this essay with others if you found value in it:

Free is the new black. When an idea is powerful and free, there are no barriers to prevent it from spreading.

When an essay or a book resonates with us—when it adds value to our lives—we tend to share it with others. In fact, such sharing has been the key to this website’s growth. Our readers have been incredibly kind in sharing our free essays via email and social media.

A Free Book

We started this site to add value to other people’s lives, which means that the more people we reach, the more value we add. Thus, we’re giving away our bestselling book, Minimalism: Essential Essays, for free during the next five days.

We published this book last year to rave reviews from our readers. In fact, this book still remains our best-selling book, selling even more copies than our most important work, our #1 Bestseller Live a Meaningful Life.

So, from April 21st to April 25th, you can pick up a copy of Minimalism: Essential Essays for free. No gimmicks. No strings attached. All the details are below.

The price will go back to $3.99 on April 26th.

Your Help

In exchange for this book, we’re asking for two small favors:

1. Spread the word. Please share this message with others via email and social media, so they have the same opportunity to get this book for free.
2. Review the book. If you enjoy this book, please leave a positive review on Amazon (top secret reviewers hint: the more stars, the better). Those reviews help us reach more people through Amazon’s recommendations.

About the Book

Minimalism: Essential Essays is a great introduction to the meaningful side of minimalism (not just decluttering but focusing on the most important areas in your life).

This 133-page book is a collection of 29 of our favorite essays about living a meaningful life with less stuff. It also contains a special forward by Joshua and Ryan and two unpublished bonus essays that can’t be found anywhere else on the web: Dealing with Overwhelm and Focus on What’s Important.

The book itself is organized into seven interconnected themes:

1. Living in the Moment
2. Emotional Health
3. Growth
4. Contribution
5. Passion and Mission
6. Taking Action
7. Change and Experimentation

The order of this collection is deliberate: it is meant to be read from beginning to end. Doing so will result in a better overall experience—a different experience from reading our essays all over the web—connecting various concepts that might otherwise seem unconnected.

This book is short enough to be read in a few sittings, or it can be digested slowly, reading one essay per day for an entire month, applying its principals each day to your own life.

Download this Book for Free (5 Days Only)

Minimalism: Essential Essays is available for free exclusively on Amazon.

Don’t own a Kindle? No problem! Kindle books can be read using the Free Kindle Reader App for your Web Browser, PC, Mac, iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry, or Android.

And if you want a PDF or ePub version, you can email us your Amazon receipt and we’ll send you the PDF or ePub files for free (N.B. we need the Amazon receipt to provide you with an alternate version). If you’re in a country where you can’t yet purchase books from Amazon’s Kindle store, please email us, and we’ll work it out.

You can also listen to Joshua & Ryan discuss this book on Beatnik Radio.

Links

If you’d like to support our paid work, you can:

Purchase our full-length nonfiction book Minimalism: Live a Meaningful Life for $7.99.

Purchase Joshua Fields Millburn’s short story collection Falling While Sitting Down for $0.99.

Sign up for Joshua Fields Millburn’s online writing class How to Write Better (class size is limited).

For free essays from The Minimalists, subscribe via email or RSS.

Share the value. Tell a friend:

I will always be OK. I will always be successful. I will always be happy.

I will. Think about these two words for a moment. Life’s revelations are found in the simplest of words. That’s why most people will miss this. That’s why some people who read this will brush it off as babble, as cliche, as a trite platitude.

On the other hand, if you can grasp these words and understand what I’m trying to convey, you will have the upper hand in life. And let’s be honest, we all want control of our own lives.

—

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