Extreme Minimalism: this guy owns just 15 things • Hacker News Board

Re: Extreme Minimalism: this guy owns just 15 things

#51

Post by arethuza » Mon, Jan 16, 2012, 2:03 PM UTC

kahawe wrote: post #49

rkudeshi wrote: post #45

If you happen to be interested in more "minimalist porn", I too made a list of the things I was living with at one point last year. http://raviudeshi.com/2011/02/75-things With hindsight, I can say it's not at all about the number, but more the mentality. I don't know about this guy, but so long as you find a hostel/apartment/friend with some basic cooking utensils and Internet, it's not too hard to keep your costs v…

> but so long as you find a hostel/apartment/friend with some basic cooking utensils and Internet, it's not too hard to keep your costs very low. Sorry to be nitpicking here, that "minimalism porn" thing is a completely new curiosity for me, but technically you just shift ownership and costs (by mooching) but you still take advantage of those things or services - which really isn't all that minimalistic at all.

If the 15 things were meant to keep you alive in a wilderness area for a couple of months then I'd find the whole thing a lot more interesting - living "minimally" in an urban environment with a healthy bank balance doesn't seem that much of a challenge.

Re: Extreme Minimalism: this guy owns just 15 things

#52

Post by dimitar » Mon, Jan 16, 2012, 2:07 PM UTC

Minimalism - asceticism for rich people?

Did I get it?

Re: Extreme Minimalism: this guy owns just 15 things

#53

Post by gbog » Mon, Jan 16, 2012, 2:08 PM UTC

This guy still owns too much. When I was in Nepal with a friend studying migration, we saw many guys wlaking to India with:

Their clothes (2 pieces)

Their plastic slippers

A cloth bag with, inside:

One toothbrush

A few rupies.

Re: Extreme Minimalism: this guy owns just 15 things

#54

Post by kahawe » Mon, Jan 16, 2012, 2:11 PM UTC

Alexx wrote: post #27

Minimalism and 'getting rid of your possessions' has been one of those hot internet topics for as long as I can remember. The trend I notice is that the articles preaching the extreme end of this are almost always written by 20-something bloggers who are so much happier now they're couch surfing the world care free rather than 'working 9-5 to pay for that TV'. Obviously, there is a large truth in there. We all take o…

Also, in 10 years you are 10 years behind on working experience and have a big hole on your CV with nothing much to show for but a couple of blog entries and tons of pictures. And I couldn't agree more with your last paragraph.

Re: Extreme Minimalism: this guy owns just 15 things

#55

Post by RodgerTheGreat » Mon, Jan 16, 2012, 2:14 PM UTC

kahawe wrote: post #47

giddas wrote: post #43

Amazing how offended some people seem to be by him omitting a few thing - who really cares

> Amazing how offended some people seem to be by him omitting a few thing - who really cares If I promise to give you 50 bucks for some software you wrote and then I only give you 10, you wouldn't be offended or complain, right?

Perhaps a closer analogy would be "If I was playing golf with you and I took 6 strokes for a hole, would you be offended if I called that a hole-in-one?"

Re: Extreme Minimalism: this guy owns just 15 things

#56

Post by powertower » Mon, Jan 16, 2012, 2:15 PM UTC

This reminds me of an old joke:

What do you call a man with no material possessions?

A man without a girlfriend.

Re: Extreme Minimalism: this guy owns just 15 things

#57

Post by gbog » Mon, Jan 16, 2012, 2:18 PM UTC

gizmo wrote: post #16

jister wrote: post #5

Balance. An extreme of "something" is not good...

I consider it a good thing when a person is extremely reasonable. Or extremely thoughtful. Or extremely honest. Or extremely patient. Or extremely gracious. We don't need balance in all things. A rocket only makes it safely to the moon if the engineers are extremely cautious. Bill Gates is extremely charitable. Einstein was extremely intelligent. The idea that "extreme X for any X" is bad is some sort of pseudo-wisdo…

On the other hand, it is wise to be moderately moderate.

Re: Extreme Minimalism: this guy owns just 15 things

#58

Post by paisible » Mon, Jan 16, 2012, 2:25 PM UTC

arethuza wrote: post #46

waitwhat wrote: post #34

There is also the hipster version of this: http://theburninghouse.com/ "If your house was burning, what would you take with you? It's a conflict between what's practical, valuable and sentimental."

If our home was burning the only things I'd be bothered about getting to safety would by my wife and son, then our cats. Nothing else matters in that context.

how right you are !

Re: Extreme Minimalism: this guy owns just 15 things

#59

Post by mgkimsal » Mon, Jan 16, 2012, 2:27 PM UTC

DanBC wrote: post #21

Curious that he doesn't mention "big bank balance" which makes life a lot more comfortable for him. He needs food? He buys food. He needs emergency accommodation? (Because his friend's house burns down or some such) He can buy that accommodation for the nights he needs it. Having just become homeless[1] myself (not through choice) I've whittled down my possessions to something that's easy to carry. Following his rule…

... to the 420k image of a 306k document. Firebug shows it as 1.1m, but headers say 420k. Oh, and the image is 'no-cache' so it'll reload on every page request from a server apparently running on a 64k ISDN line.

Yes, that's a pretty bad site. :/

Re: Extreme Minimalism: this guy owns just 15 things

#60

Post by bane » Mon, Jan 16, 2012, 2:33 PM UTC

My wife and I were were struck by something recently while standing at the checkout line at a Nike store, looking at a display case full of specialized, expensive, pedometers.

Not a one was a useful as the jogging app I have on my phone.

And when we're out jogging, I listen to music, or streaming radio...on my phone. And oh yeah, if it's late and I'm going through the local woods, my phone has an app that turns it into a flashlight.

And now suddenly a bit of enlightenment hit us. A modern smartphone replaces a great many discrete devices that we used to have to carry around, or at least store someplace:

Common uses for our phones:

1) A portable phone

2) A small portable computer

3) An address book (yes, I used to carry one around with my old non-smart phone)

4) A map book

5) A GPS

6) An mp3/music player

7) A radio (fm tuner, but more importantly streaming radio, flipping through global stations on my phone reminded my of being 9 with a shortwave receiver and picking up broadcasts of Voice of America going into Europe)

8) A flashlight

9) A pedometer

10) A portable book (actually a library)

11) A thumb drive

12) A portable translator

13) A portable gaming device

14) A camera

15) A videocamera

16) Alarm clock

17) Portable calculator

18) Barcode scanner

19) A wifi signal scanner

20) Portable movie player

21) Starbucks card

And a few others...

And suddenly all that junk is in one device, a backpack full of stuff.

Coming up this year they're going to be useful as credit cards, business cards, some have projectors on them, better optics and I can junk my binoculars, a decent way to hook up a keyboard and monitor (it can already act as it's own trackpad, oh I forgot to mention that, I can use it as a trackpad on my computer) and I can junk my laptop for 85% of what I do.

These aren't phones, these are some kind of sci-fi multi-tool. We're ending up in a measure of minimalism de facto just by having more versatile stuff.

So yeah, looking around my house, I could probably ditch a ton of stuff (I mean literally, I have several full bookshelves I could potentially replace) and not miss it.