Minimalism?

What Is Minimalism?

To be a minimalist you must live with less than 100 things, and you can’t own a car or a home or a TV, and you can’t have a career, and you have to be able to live in exotic places all over the world, and you have to write a blog, and you can’t have any children, and you have to be a young white male from a privileged background.

OK, we’re joking. Obviously.

But people who often dismiss minimalism as some sort of fad or trend usually mention some of the above “restrictions” as to why they could “never be a minimalist.”

The truth is that minimalism isn’t about any of those things, but it can help you accomplish all of that stuff (well, to be fair, it can’t help you become a young white male if you aren’t one. But who cares about that anyway?) If you desire to live with less than 100 things or not own a car or travel all over the world without fear, minimalism can help. But that’s not the point.

The point is that minimalism is a tool to help you achieve freedom. Freedom from fear, freedom from worry, freedom from overwhelm, freedom from guilt, freedom from depression, freedom from enslavement. Freedom. Real freedom.

A minimalist can, however, own a car or own a house or have children or have a career. Minimalism looks different for everyone because it is about finding what is essential to you. There are tons of successful minimalists who do some or all of these things. So how can they all be so different and yet still be minimalists? That brings us back to our original question: what is minimalism?

Minimalism is a tool we use to live a meaningful life. It is a tool to achieve happiness, which is (let’s face it) what we are all looking for. We all want to be happy. Minimalism can help. There are no rules in minimalism. Rather, minimalism is simply about stripping away the unnecessary things in your life so you can focus on what’s important.

Minimalism has helped us in several ways, including:

• Reclaiming our time
• Ridding ourselves of excess stuff
• Enjoying our lives
• Discovering meaning in our lives
• Living in the moment
• Focusing on what’s important
• Pursuing our passions
• Finding happiness
• Doing anything we want to do
• Finding our missions
• Experiencing freedom
• Creating more, consuming less

How has minimalism helped us with these things? Minimalism is a lifestyle choice. Minimalists choose to get rid of the unnecessary in favor of what’s important. But the level of specificity is up to you. Minimalists search for happiness not through things, but through life itself. Thus, it’s up to you to determine what is necessary and what is superfluous to your life. Through our word we intend to give you some ideas of how to determine these things and how to achieve a minimalist lifestyle without having to succumb to some sort of strict code or set of rules.

A word of warning: it isn’t easy to take the first few steps, but the journey gets much easier and more rewarding the further you go; the first steps into minimalism often take some radical changes in mindset, actions, and habits.

So, if we had to sum it up in one sentence, we would say, Minimalism is a tool to eliminate life’s excess, focus on the essentials, and find happiness, fulfillment, and freedom.

This is just our take on minimalism. Some other minimalists have their different take on it too:

Leo Babauta’s Description of Minimalism

Joshua Becker’s Benefits of Minimalism

Colin Wright’s Minimalism Explained

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