Do you consider yourself a minimalist?

[Duelist]

I am an accumulator, also known as a pack rat, and I'm lazy. So getting rid of anything is usually too big of a pain in the butt.

But I have desires to declutter and simplify. I own a lot fewer guitars an I used to - but the ones I have are better than the old ones. I own a lot more guns than I used to. I probably could stand to own fewer, and not really have a negative effect on my life or ability to do what I want to.

I could definitely donate or sell some clothes that don't fit, that are out of style or whatever. THat would probably make parts of my life easier, actually.

[lwt16]

If my wife would let me, I'd rent a full sized dumpster and have it parked within "throwing" distance of the front door.

We have way too much crap we never use. A ton of it is old baby toys/clothes/etc that she can't let go of.

Junior is almost 19......for some reason, we still have his crib and bassinet. Mattresses and linens too.

Drives me batty.

[ubervic]

I'd hardly say I'm a minimalist. But my determining factor is "will I use this". I have no problem buying or keeping something just because I want it, but it has to be something that I'm going to use or enjoy one way or another.

This fits my notion of minimalism.

[ubervic]

To be clear, I don't view 'minimalism' as dogma. It's simply a construct that frames how, when and where we commit our resources, whether we're talking about money, physical space, attention, effort, worry, remorse, etc.

I am not against buying things and holding onto them, provided that they serve an essential or desirable purpose, or if that thing genuinely brings you joy. Buying and having things is not bad. But what does it take to be able to buy and have all the things that we want, or think we want?

I wonder about the silly things that I use to buy, thinking that I bought them mainly because they've been marketed so well that I find myself wanting it even while guessing or knowing, intellectually, that I don't NEED it. I am reminded of this when I look into a drawer and find such silly things, realizing that I bought them 2 years ago and never really did anything with them. That's waste. Maybe a lot of us do that now and then, but minimalism, as I view it, gives me effective tools to better manage such purchase decisions. I'm finally getting good at making smart purchases (i.e., I rarely feel buyer's remorse).

[willie]

Likestyles consistent with frugal living and saving money for the future tend to make some of us minimalists especially if we have modest incomes. Others, though, are caught up in consumerism. Spending and acquiring gives temporary but shortlived gratification and must be repeated. Buying the same objects as friends and neighbors is often motivated by social insecurity and the desire to keep or improve a place on the totem poll. Parents of baby boomers often indulged their children in an attempt to give them all those things absent in their earlier lives.

I never made much money but managed to own a good house in an excellent neighborhood. We had the good sense to buy top tier furniture one or two pieces at a time. We bought other high quality furnishings by shopping wisely. My vehicle is the 8th one owned since 1963. I seldom buy lottery tickets. Winning would complicate my life. But if I did win, I'd fly to New York City and walk around like a big dog. Then I'd buy a fancy car and drive home.

[Salamander]

First, my compliments to the OP on a thoughtful post.

Philosophically I really like the idea of minimalism, and I've read a fair amount on it and on related topics. In practice of course it's a little harder to live for many of us. As one example, on weekends and evenings I often really am one of those guys in jeans and a black (logo-free) tee shirt. Then in the morning I need to go the the office and it can't be quite that simple. I also spend some time on project sites and construction sites so there's usually a spare set of field clothes and boots in the trunk just in case. My work also seems to get more complex every year and even though several of us slay the bureaucracy tentacles at every opportunity there are always more of them.

We're less materialistic than many, and my wife gets a lot of credit for that. That's a change from my younger years in the big city, and the move to a smaller place coincided with that move away from the things associated with the rat race.

I'd love to pare down the quantity of things we still have. Realistically, that's a gradual and halting process because there just isn't enough time. Got to leave something for retirement I guess. One exception, last spring I moved my elderly mother out of her long-time place and a little closer where we can keep an eye on her, lost three weeks out of my life but got rid of a lot of things in the old place that had in some cases been accumulating for 60 years. Now I don't have that hanging over me for some short-notice crisis at the worst possible time, it's done and over with.

Every now and then I skim through a couple of books on wabi sabi as a reminder that a few old worn things with character can be more meaningful than the latest fastest "best" whatever. And I really do get more personal enjoyment out of my old worn 1903a3 than out of the shiny new things at the LGS.

[Clobbersaurus]

The older I get the more weighted down I feel by all the superfluous stuff we have. I loath clutter, and I’m working slowly to purge as much excess stuff as I can without driving my family crazy. I’m not a minimalist, but I understand the attraction to it most days.

[Salamander]

One more thought. One of my uncles was, in a material sense, a minimalist long before it was cool to be a minimalist. Maybe that came from his time carrying a rifle across Attu Island in 1943, I don't know for sure but anything must seem like luxury after rock and tundra and not enough warm clothes while being shot at. He spent the rest of his adult life in one-room apartments on Chicago's northwest side, commuted on the train to a professional job downtown, never bought a car. His only real accumulation was books, thousands of them on every possible topic and point of view. I still have some of them along with a few bring-backs from Attu... a saki bowl and diary taken from a Japanese soldier, a unit history, a 37mm anti-tank shell.

Turned out he had plenty of money sitting in the bank, all carefully allocated to brothers and cousins and nephews when he passed away. He just never spent it on himself. In one sense I admire that frugality. I'm also a little sad that he never had much of a social life as far as I know, and that he never really shared all the knowledge he took from all those books, except with me. When he passed, after passing through my own existential crisis, I used it as motivation to write, to publish, to share in other ways what I learned from him and whatever I could build from it. I moved his old and very minimalist desk out here not long ago, passed through his brother to a daughter/my oldest cousin and finally to me when she could no longer keep it.

[Cypher]

I'm not sure if minimalist is the right word but the older I get the more driven I feel to reduce the clutter in my life.

Just a little bit more than 5 years ago my wife and I sold our four bedroom 3500 square foot house and moved into a two bedroom 720 square foot apartment. Moving into the apartment has simplified our lives beyond even the lack of possessions. We don't have to worry about the lawn, we don't have to worry about snow removal, we don't have to worry about maintenance and upkeep and on my day off I can scrub the entire apartment one end to the other in about 4 hours.

I spent thousands of dollars in my life on things that I absolutely had to have and when we moved out of that house a whole bunch of those things that we couldn't live without went into a dumpster. Some of them were still in the original wrapper.

Over the last several months my wife and I have come up with a plan to go through our home one room at a time and eliminate everything that we don't have a specific use for.

I can't; explain why but as the clutter goes my stress level drops I think it's because even if everything is cleaned when it's cluttered it looks messy to me.

As far as the clothing thing goes, I've worn a uniform to work for the majority of my adult life and what I found is it it makes my life that much simpler. I don't give any thought to what I'm going to wear to work today I grab the next uniform and I put it on.

Right after I got out of the army I went to work for a carpet cleaning company so of course I spent a lot of time in people's houses and I will never forget one day I was cleaning somebody's house and I went into their daughters bedroom and she had a handwritten calendar on her wall where she had sat down and planned out what she was going to wear for the entire month. I have no idea how much effort she put into it but she had it laid out so throughout that entire month she would never go to school in the same outfit twice. I never want to be that wrapped up in how I dress.

I've said this in other threads but a year or so ago I decided to go out and buy 5 roughly identical pairs of pants and 5 similar shirts. They are hanging my closet like Granimals and when I'm going somewhere I just grab the next one in the line and put it on.

I go through my closet periodically and I look at every hanger in there and what's on it and I decide if I need it and if I use it and if I don't it goes in the donation pile.

As for my guns, my goal is to have the smallest number of guns that I can and still cover the bases that I want to cover. I want to keep my caliber footprint as small as I can. And I want my guns to be as compatible as possible. I really don't ever want to have to stock more than five different types of magazines.

I have a couple of guns that were dead ends that I wish I could get rid of but I would take more of a loss on them then I'm willing to so I'm keeping them for now

On the other hand we're also very careful about what we bring into the house. We own probably 600 CDs and listen to 20 of them. So we don't buy music.

We rarely buy movies and never brand new. I made a joke on another thread the other day that Tombstone was probably 20 years old before I saw it.

I think at this stage in my life the only things I'm really comfortable accumulating are books, ammunition and Glock magazines.

[Drang]

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