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Extreme Minimalism: this guy owns just 15 things

andrewhy.de

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Re: Extreme Minimalism: this guy owns just 15 things

#121

Post by wahnfrieden »

fady wrote: post #90
jdietrich wrote: post #80

This isn't minimalism in any sense of the word, it's just a consumerist vanity. OP's 'minimalism' is sustained by a reliance upon huge amounts of infrastructure, most of it environmentally unsustainable. He doesn't carry stuff with him, but uses money to access what he needs. It's like claiming to be a minimalist because you own a second house where you keep all your stuff. OP outsources the burden of sustaining his…

wow. way to put that in perspective. when you really think about it, it makes sense. i'm a raw vegan and feel like i am more of a minimalist than the OP and i own 100+ things. at first when reading this article, i was imagining my life with only 15 items. then after reading jdietrich post, it made me think a little more.. i would say, i'm very eco-friendly and very aware of my actions. i would not say i'm a minimalis…

How much of that stuff is locally produced? Your post is admirable but reminds me of someone I know who buys disposable bamboo plates instead of paper plates to be eco-friendly, discounting that they're produced and shipped from halfway across the earth.

Re: Extreme Minimalism: this guy owns just 15 things

#122

Post by mechanical_fish »

jdietrich wrote: post #80

This isn't minimalism in any sense of the word, it's just a consumerist vanity. OP's 'minimalism' is sustained by a reliance upon huge amounts of infrastructure, most of it environmentally unsustainable. He doesn't carry stuff with him, but uses money to access what he needs. It's like claiming to be a minimalist because you own a second house where you keep all your stuff. OP outsources the burden of sustaining his…

Minimalism, like most words describing styles, is a very flexible word. If I write a composition in which a single person plays a pair of water glasses with one drumstick, that's "minimalism". And if I employ a very expensive sound studio to record a famous pop song consisting of the simplest possible drum track, a sparse guitar riff, a one-note vocal part with occasional distortion, and a toy Casio organ, that's also "minimalism":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNYcviXK4rg&feature=relat...

And, of course, I can be a "minimalist composer" even while writing complex works for entire orchestras:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Coolidge_Adams

None of these forms of minimalism is more "real" than the others.

Meanwhile, I'm afraid I don't understand your point. At least the OP has provided a living example of his style of minimalism. Can you give us a living example of yours? Even poor people "use money to access what they need", eat meat, travel by bus, use shared public infrastructure, and hire immigrant workers. Even subsistence farmers do these things. Even ascetic Buddhist monks do these things. (They don't subsist entirely on oxygen, after all: They're supported by donations. Or, if you insist, they "outsource the burden of sustaining their lifestyle".)

So when you say the words "real minimalist", who am I supposed to see in my mind's eye? Could it be someone I've ever actually met?

Re: Extreme Minimalism: this guy owns just 15 things

#123

Post by kevinpet »

This guy is clearly a professional attention whore. It's good to contrast him with "early retirement extreme" who lives in the RV in the East Bay who gets posted from time to time.

"15 things" isn't sustainable. It's fake minimalism. It's like saying you're a minimalist after your house burns down and you escape with nothing but your cell phone and credit card. He imposes a significantly higher load on the infrastructure around him (whether he pays for it, or just the kindness of friends letting hin crash on the couch).

In contrast, "East Bay RV" really has whittled down his life to just the things he needs.

Re: Extreme Minimalism: this guy owns just 15 things

#125

Post by fady »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #121
fady wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

wow. way to put that in perspective. when you really think about it, it makes sense. i'm a raw vegan and feel like i am more of a minimalist than the OP and i own 100+ things. at first when reading this article, i was imagining my life with only 15 items. then after reading jdietrich post, it made me think a little more.. i would say, i'm very eco-friendly and very aware of my actions. i would not say i'm a minimalis…

How much of that stuff is locally produced? Your post is admirable but reminds me of someone I know who buys disposable bamboo plates instead of paper plates to be eco-friendly, discounting that they're produced and shipped from halfway across the earth.

hahah. good question. i live in san francisco, so i'm very lucky to have access to local organic farmer markets almost everyday. to answer your question: almost all of it...hopefully. besides the superfoods ( spirulina, cacao, maca powder, etc.)

i shop at rainbow grocery for produce, which most of what they have is local. it's more expensive, but worth it. i support local first.

not to rant: but coming from a lebanese culture and giving up food i love (meat, dairy) to be more eco, and of course, have optimum nutrition has been the best decision i've ever made in my life. no joke. i think/hope one day, more people will start to convert to plant based diets, as they will see the the truth in the data.

Re: Extreme Minimalism: this guy owns just 15 things

#126

Post by mechanical_fish »

Avshalom wrote: post #111
TomAnthony wrote: post #40

There are a bunch of comments that this guy actually owns more than 15 things, and that others cope with less, and he isn't in the 3rd world etc. All true; his system isn't as extreme as the headline would have you believe. However, I see the takeaway is that he gets by with a lot less stuff than the average person in his demographic, and I think that is something to be applauded. I know I wouldn't relish doing it li…

That he doesn't actually seem to get by with less is people's problem. He's essentially just renting everything, very inefficiently at that. It's ridiculous to applaud the idea -of buying coffee at a restaurant every day instead of owning a coffee maker- as "doing with less"

Not ridiculous at all, in context. It's all about marginal costs.

If owning something would require you to rent a room that you might otherwise not have to rent, its marginal cost could be hundreds of dollars per month.

There are portable coffeemakers for backpackers, but there's no such thing as lightweight portable coffee beans, and buying coffee beans in one-cup units on an as-needed basis is pretty expensive, in time if nothing else.

As for whether traveling constantly and renting all your stuff is "inefficient": Well, sure. But to be alive is to be inefficient. Dead people are maximally efficient. But they also aren't having any fun.

There's no prize for having lots of leftover money when you're dead. As they say, you can't take it with you.

Re: Extreme Minimalism: this guy owns just 15 things

#127

Post by Alexx »

georgieporgie wrote: post #100
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…

I suspect if you came back in 10 years you'll see a different picture. If you want to think about having children or living a generally western lifestyle as opposed to a '3rd world' or really homeless lifestyle then there's a sensible balance point. There's no reason he couldn't continue to live a substantially minimalist lifestyle while adding a family. He could migrate into living on a sailboat, RV, or in a home co…

And therein is the moderation ;)

Re: Extreme Minimalism: this guy owns just 15 things

#128

Post by Jayasimhan »

Though Andrew is not a perfect minimalist, there are things that we can learn from him. He has a angle on using minimal stuff and they are pretty much valid. Shopping for fun is a plague in US and increasingly so in the rest of the world too.

Here in the bay area, we were given free BART tickets [at the BART stations!] to shop during the holiday season. The kind of minimalism that Andrew has written about needs to be approached from that angle. Of course there is travel, non vegetarian food, use-n-throw things and so on that we need to fix. But this is a step in the right direction.

Btw,

Why do we need to be hyper critics here on HN? The blog was posted on his own site. Not directly on HN. There is no attention seeking in it. I learn a lot from the comments of each post in HN. The information is great and often eye-opening. I just hope the tone of a comment doesn't fend off its readers.

Re: Extreme Minimalism: this guy owns just 15 things

#129

Post by mechanical_fish »

engblaze wrote: post #83
keiferski wrote: post #71

Having been a "minimalism-addict", I've come to the conclusion that the best part is the act of getting rid of things , not the act of having few things . Getting rid of junk is liberating; living with 15 things is just a pain in the ass.

Absolutely... the spirit of reducing waste and consumerism is admirable, but this guy is being ridiculous by claiming that he only owns "15 things". Not only is he missing the point, but his hyperbole is out of control. A toiletry kit is 1 item? Right. Bike Snob NYC has a hilarious post on Hyde if you haven't seen it: http://bikesnobnyc.blogspot.com/2011/05/paring-down-and-pair...

Actually, the OP provides a fairly insightful definition of "item":

I count my things as resellable items I would be pissed if someone took.

By this definition an "item" is "one emotional connection to an object", not merely an object itself.

Yes, this means that the guy carries around many more physical objects than he counts as "items". This seems emotionally healthy, though, if one can afford it. And affording it is easier than ever: This is not the 18th century, and underwear is so cheap that, were a pair to be stolen, you're out the cost of a cup of coffee.

(By his own definition, I wonder whether the OP really "owns" a toiletry kit. Even a moderately fancy toiletry kit is worth maybe twenty bucks and can be replaced in ten minutes at any drugstore. And they're certainly not resellable. So I tend to suspect the OP's toiletry kit appears in this list mainly for branding purposes: He doesn't want to give readers the impression that his style of minimalism involves never taking a bath. ;) And he doesn't want to get into a lengthy debate over underwear and soap: As he makes clear in the rest of the post, his goal in life is not to ever think or worry about underwear or soap.)

Re: Extreme Minimalism: this guy owns just 15 things

#130

Post by mikeash »

readme wrote: post #67
ck2 wrote: post #32

When you go to starbucks each morning, spending $100 a month there instead of owning your own coffeemaker - it's not minimalism. It's consumerism. Trying living with just what he has in a 3rd world country and it's minimalism.

Starbucks does add up, but I would say that it is minimalism (Especially if you are using it as an office) From an individual's perspective, it is not minimalist, because now you will need to have an entire coffee shop in your life to obtain coffee. However, from a societal viewpoint, it is very minimalist, because now each person can share the means to produce coffee, thus consuming less: electricity, water (assumin…

Surely "very minimalist" would entail foregoing coffee altogether. It's a luxury, not a requirement, and not having coffee means that nobody needs the means to produce coffee at all.

If you prefer to buy your coffee pre-made, that's fine by me, but describing it as "minimalist" makes no sense to me at all.

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