Live data from Hacker News

Extreme Minimalism: this guy owns just 15 things

andrewhy.de

131–140 of 197 posts

Re: Extreme Minimalism: this guy owns just 15 things

#131

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…

OP here. I don't see your point but feel all your anger. Not sure if I'm just catching it from another project, but it is odd to me that you default from a guy owning a few shirts to causing major economic injustices. I don't own much physically. I spend my days volunteering and traveling living a pretty simple life. I write posts and sometimes people like and share them. This post was written in May of last year and…

tl;dr -- Parent said, essentially "I could own 15 things too if I were allowed to go shopping once a week (because of a vast, costly infrastructure in place to support that)", and that this is not Minimalism but merely shifting the impact of your demand. You responded to none of that.

The parent comment made some really good points. You papered over them with a straw man argument about the "immigrant army," then you shrugged your shoulders and said "meh", and there's also a hint of New Age silliness in there (Questioning a person's sense of "what is possible" is a silly way to claim the moral high ground. It's the New Age way to say "oh, you must not understand art".)

The original comment was that you are able to maintain a footprint of the same magnitude as you had before by simply living life "on demand" as it were, instead of storing stuff. If you really want to tout this lifestyle as minimalist, post your credit card statement so someone can fairly consider the actual cost of living this way.

In fact, parent alluded to another point that I would enunciate here: from the definition of Minimalism that says you actually have to reduce your impact -- a person who owns all of those things you don't, but doesn't eat meat, is more of a Minimalist than what you've laid out here.

Sorry to be harsh, I often don't take the time to clean up my comments after I've written them, to filter the wrath.

Re: Extreme Minimalism: this guy owns just 15 things

#132

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 infrastruc…

Mr. ERE got a job as a finance quant recently. He's still financially independent.

http://earlyretirementextreme.com/so-long-and-thanks-for-all...

Re: Extreme Minimalism: this guy owns just 15 things

#133

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.

As the OP more-or-less says, the best part of getting rid of things is eliminating your emotional attachment to the things, not eliminating the things themselves.

Having only fifteen things is, indeed, a pain unless you're a backpacker or a gypsy. But having an emotional attachment to a very limited number of things is an excellent goal. Then the other N thousand objects in your life are free to be acquired and discarded dispassionately, as your needs and goals dictate.

Re: Extreme Minimalism: this guy owns just 15 things

#134
post #60

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 in…

A portable monitor, keyboard and battery for that monitor will take about as much space and weight as an ultrabook anyway. You'll probably shave off a pound & half an inch and get similar battery life at most. The closest thing I can think of that would be as portable as a phone would be something like a laser keyboard and a mini projector built into one.

Re: Extreme Minimalism: this guy owns just 15 things

#135
OP here. I've updated the items I own list (now 39!) and written a bit more about it here. http://andrewhy.de/minimalism-project-update-39-things/

The linked post up top is from May. Lots has changed since then.

Great discussion here. Always interesting how people look at the project.

Re: Extreme Minimalism: this guy owns just 15 things

#136

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…

I think you read an awful lot that wasn't written there.

Re: Extreme Minimalism: this guy owns just 15 things

#137

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…

What's really interesting to me is the _deliberateness_ of the choices that Andrew is making: not whether those choices match some (given the debate over the term here) arbitrary definition of minimalism.

He's experimenting with a different lifestyle and what might come about by imposing artificial constraints upon himself which I think is really admirable.

Re: Extreme Minimalism: this guy owns just 15 things

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OP here. I don't see your point but feel all your anger. Not sure if I'm just catching it from another project, but it is odd to me that you default from a guy owning a few shirts to causing major economic injustices. I don't own much physically. I spend my days volunteering and traveling living a pretty simple life. I write posts and sometimes people like and share them. This post was written in May of last year and…

tl;dr -- Parent said, essentially "I could own 15 things too if I were allowed to go shopping once a week (because of a vast, costly infrastructure in place to support that)", and that this is not Minimalism but merely shifting the impact of your demand. You responded to none of that. The parent comment made some really good points. You papered over them with a straw man argument about the "immigrant army," then you…

To be fair, the parent commenter is the one who introduced the "[reliance] on an army of [poor, brown] immigrant workers" straw-man argument.

Re: Extreme Minimalism: this guy owns just 15 things

#139

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…

OP here. I don't see your point but feel all your anger. Not sure if I'm just catching it from another project, but it is odd to me that you default from a guy owning a few shirts to causing major economic injustices. I don't own much physically. I spend my days volunteering and traveling living a pretty simple life. I write posts and sometimes people like and share them. This post was written in May of last year and…

Tom Brown claimed (I'm not sure of it's validity, but let's say it's true) that he walked into a forest one day with nothing but clothes on and a Knife and walked out several years later feeling fine. THAT is minimalism.

Anyway, I don't think that this commenter is 'angry', he just doesn't feel like what your doing is really all that minimalist because you don't kill/grow your own food. Of course I'm not really sure I agree with him. You are minimalist in some ways and not others. I don't really see what's wrong with that.

Re: Extreme Minimalism: this guy owns just 15 things

#140

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…

I think you read an awful lot that wasn't written there.

Yeah... How exactly does he infer that the guy eats meat? And what does it have to do with only carrying a backpack's worth of stuff?
Post reply on HN