Life

What Is Minimalism?

Many of us are more familiar with minimalism in the art context – design, architecture, and fashion. Black and white sleek design, edgy style and white walls.

While in the context of lifestyle, minimalism has started to get a place in the mainstream world too. It is being discussed on TV and radio shows as well as written in many books and lifestyle blogs – my blog is one of them.

You can say it’s a global trend now. In my perspective, it’s like the world awakening to a better way of living after drowning in materialism and consumerism for so long.

We all know that minimalism is not something new. In fact, most of the early spiritual’s figures are said to have lived a simple life – Prophet Muhammad, Gautama Buddha, Mahatma Gandhi, and St. Benedict. Many successful people also live a simpler life than average people so they can focus more on their creative and innovative work.

People always ask me what minimalism really is?

In essence, it’s about living more with less.

A lifestyle

Minimalism is a tool to rid yourself of life’s excess in favor of focusing on what’s important (TheMinimalists.com)

It’s a lifestyle of living with a minimum number of things, to our maximum. We might not have too many in our life, but all of them give big and meaningful value to us. This applies to material possessions, online accounts and activities, commitments, and generally to how we perform our daily life.

Is it a problem to have things in our life?

No, it’s not.

Minimalism is not against owning material possessions. It’s not about owning only a certain number of things (88 items, 100 items, or living in a backpack).

We need certain things to be able to live and function. For example, we need clothes to cover our body, and perhaps washing machine to wash that clothing. We need a place to live in and sleep comfortably.

Things become our problem when we tend to assign a bigger value to them until we cast aside our health, our relationships, our passions, and personal growth. They become our problems when what is important to us become foggy until we cannot make good decisions for ourselves.

Minimalism is a mindset 

Being aware of things that we own so nothing sits with us, in our life, without a purpose.

It’s knowing the why of everything we own so we can strip off all the excess and simply allows us to make decisions around our material possessions more consciously, and more deliberately.

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