Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're talking about memories
Only if you believe that you are solely the sum of your memories.
Sorry, that was an indirect reference to Philip K. Dick
Meet the minimalists living out of a hard drive
11–20 of 110 posts
Re: Meet the minimalists living out of a hard drive
#12An illusion. You're as attached to your digital possessions as you were to your physical ones. You just have different preferences.
That's fine, you just don't need to pay for space for stuff. Space is very, very expensive monetarily and psychologically.
So is the psychological cost of never knowing where you will sleep.
Re: Meet the minimalists living out of a hard drive
#13As well as being a bad-ass programmer, Steve Dekorte is also a great example of this neavu-minimalism. His blog and Io show how deeply he has taken this "philosophy" ( http://dekorte.com and http://www.iolanguage.com ). I also don't want to sound too creepy but he has a awesome apartment: http://twitter.com/stevedekorte/status/10954098266 and http://twitter.com/stevedekorte/status/10901308299
Reminds me of another Steve, circa 1982:
Re: Meet the minimalists living out of a hard drive
#14Slightly off topic...anyone know what kind of keyboard that is he had? Looks super useful being so small. Is it a Korg? This on: http://www.korg.com/nanoseries ? Confirmation?
Re: Meet the minimalists living out of a hard drive
#15Since almost 4 years now I do not have any other possession than what fits into my two suitcases. Wherever my 30 inch monitor is, I call home. I am very comfortable with the fact that I don't need to manage my possessions. And Dropbox, Google Apps and alike even made my fears of data loss a thing of the past.
I enjoy moving to a different country almost every year, thanks to being a digital vagabond.
I am taking a wild guess; The past 400.000 years of evolution in which our bodies and minds adapted to a nomadic lifestyle may still resonate in our genes. Only since a few thousand years were a majority of my ancestors bound to one place and this short period is unlikely to have had any genetic impact. A lack of constricting possessions is surprisingly rewarding (constricting in terms of hard to move). I suspect that this reward is universal to humans which would imply some kind of genetically predetermined preference. But it is just a wild guess.
Yet I feel with my son's first birthday approaching this lifestyle will be hard to maintain.
Re: Meet the minimalists living out of a hard drive
#16The DJ has now substituted his bed for friends' couches How does this scale when no-one has free crash space to give...? It's like those TV shows where a family give up the corporate rat race and go and run a B&B or a vineyard in the country, who are their customers apart from corporate workers? It's not a revolution if only a small percentage of the population can ever do it.
It doesn't scale, it's not intended to scale. If millions of people were vagabonding, we could look at an array of possible options, the most obvious being an AirBnB-style approach to renting rooms for days or weeks at a time. If you're happy to share a house, it's already cheaper to spend a month each in Paris, Amsterdam, London, Berlin, Edinburgh and Barcelona than it would be to stay in Paris, including airfare.
Housing is currently relatively illiquid because the demand for liquid housing is minimal. There's a big gap between "the place you live for years at a time" and "the place you vacation for a week or two" because that's what the market demands. The backbackers hostel only came into existence when airfares became affordable and young people started travelling internationally. Same with Spanish resorts and the package holiday, same with seaside B&Bs and the railway. If technology allows it and people demand it, we'll see it appear quite quickly.
Your second point is the same faulty logic that presumes "we'll always need people to actually make things/sweep the roads/other menial labour". Mechanisation and automation supplants the need for most of those workers, freeing them up to do work better suited to humans - usually in the service industry. The majority of westerners work in the service industry already, it only stands to reason that they will become more skilled and more specialised. There is absolutely no reason why we can't have a huge number of people running small B&Bs or vineyards or boutiques or cafés. The trends behind this article make it clear that we can't expect to continue running an economy on selling 'stuff', the future economy is clearly based on cultural and social experiences.
Re: Meet the minimalists living out of a hard drive
#17An illusion. You're as attached to your digital possessions as you were to your physical ones. You just have different preferences.
besides which, two digital reading devices in addition to a laptop (and presumably a smartphone) isn't exactly minimalism...
Re: Meet the minimalists living out of a hard drive
#18Since almost 4 years now I do not have any other possession than what fits into my two suitcases. Wherever my 30 inch monitor is, I call home. I am very comfortable with the fact that I don't need to manage my possessions. And Dropbox, Google Apps and alike even made my fears of data loss a thing of the past. I enjoy moving to a different country almost every year, thanks to being a digital vagabond. I am taking a wi…
Are you self-employed or do you work freelance or who do you work for and what do you do?
I only ask because this is something I'm very much interested in doing myself, but I'm very apprehensive about making a big change like this due to job/money concerns.
Re: Meet the minimalists living out of a hard drive
#19Slightly off topic...anyone know what kind of keyboard that is he had? Looks super useful being so small. Is it a Korg? This on: http://www.korg.com/nanoseries ? Confirmation?
looks like an akai LPK25. The nanoSERIES keyboard is really hard to play - not very sensitive, keys are more like buttons. Used LPK25's are going for about $40 USD on ebay. Hoping to get one soon.
Re: Meet the minimalists living out of a hard drive
#20Try that while raising a couple of children.