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Extreme Minimalism: this guy owns just 15 things

andrewhy.de

141–150 of 197 posts

Re: Extreme Minimalism: this guy owns just 15 things

#141

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…

If you seek only comments to agree with the post, go to Reddit. If you seek only comments that disagree with the post, go to Hacker News.

Frankly, both have been a HUGE turnoff for me lately.

Re: Extreme Minimalism: this guy owns just 15 things

#142

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 does eating meat and flying in planes have to do with limiting the number of items he carries with him? And how exactly do you infer that he relies on an poor, brown immigrant army to clean and cook for him?

Re: Extreme Minimalism: this guy owns just 15 things

#143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No. The straw man is not the claim that OP is reliant on such people. The straw man is the response, which distorts the argument from one of

There are certain people upon whom you rely and are not acknowledging

to

You must have an army of personal slaves

so that he can conveniently dismiss it with a laugh.

Re: Extreme Minimalism: this guy owns just 15 things

#144
post #96

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's 'minimalism' is sustained by a reliance upon huge amounts of infrastructure, most of it environmentally unsustainable. That's true. On the other hand it's there. All that infrastructure wasn't installed for his use exclusively. So, yes, I agree he's just moving the ownership from personal to distributed corporate/community. It's somewhat comparable to playing lose with accounting rules and moving money into off…

Yes, OP is not responsible for the existence of the machine. But no, there is no real meaning to "minimalism" if you do not stop pulling on the machine's demand lever. Parent comment is questioning whether OP has actually done that, or if he's not simply made his demand less visible (consumer vanity).

Re: Extreme Minimalism: this guy owns just 15 things

#146
To move out of my rented flat without having anywhere to go - besides hotels, I mean - I gave away most of my belongings and it amazed me watching how many items I owned which were sitting there consuming space.

Then, after leaving my country with just hand luggage, I've been living minimalistic for the last two months. Yes, it can be done, but it's either time-consuming or expensive, depending on how much you are going to outsource. I have to wash my laundry by hand each other day instead of once a week, and lacking many kitchen items means I spend more time preparing my meals.

There is a trade-off to be made between space and time. When you see someone who's consuming little space, it may be that they are consuming either a lot of time or a lot of money.

EDIT: Thus, don't feel uncomfortable about owning a lot of things. If you feel so inclined, feel uncomfortable about owning things you don't use. For those who haven't read PG's essay about this issue, which played a part in making me superfluous-aware: http://www.paulgraham.com/stuff.html

Re: Extreme Minimalism: this guy owns just 15 things

#147
post #78
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.

I think you're reading this as "I am trying to do away with material things and spend less money." But, really, I think this example is "I live out of my backpack because I have money in the bank and it affords me great flexibility in my lifestyle."

> I am trying to do away with material things and spend less money.

Point being, these two things are orthogonal to one another.

Re: Extreme Minimalism: this guy owns just 15 things

#148
"Headline: guy owns 15 things ... read article, guy owns more than 15 things."

Haha exactly how I felt when I read it. This is a good blog post of gear for this kinda travel or lifestyle http://tynan.com/2010gear.

The 14 things I own and the cost of each item. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AsFrsoFjrGmgdFB...

Re: Extreme Minimalism: this guy owns just 15 things

#149
"Headline: guy owns 15 things ... read article, guy owns more than 15 things."

Haha exactly how I felt when I read it. This is a good blog post of gear for this kinda travel or lifestyle http://tynan.com/2010gear.

The 14 things I own and the cost of each item. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AsFrsoFjrGmgdFB...

Re: Extreme Minimalism: this guy owns just 15 things

#150

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…

Real minimalists take less than their fair share, not more.

Are you defining "fair share" as "median"? or as "takes less than what he produces, as defined by how much value others think he provides in terms of how much money they give him for his work"?

Much as you may dislike capitalism, and whatever flaws it has, it's the best system we have for identifying the value of some product or service: a thing is worth what someone else is willing to give for it. Expanding thereon, note that that thing (product or service) is probably worth _more_ because one can usually turn around and acquire/generate even more wealth with it.

OP writes a blog post. He acquires enough income somehow from it to pay for a seat on a cross-country flight. What he pays for that seat in turn nets not just enough to cover costs, but to turn a profit on that flight. That profit in turn allows employees & shareholders to buy [insert warm fuzzy life-enhancing goods/services here]. During said flight, he writes another post which will net an income enough to cover the next such cycle. Upshot? he buys a red-eye flight instead of paying for a bed (divided by however many nights he would own, but perhaps not use, said bed), "minimalizing" that bit of his life, and the world is better for it.

You may think it's "not fair" somehow, but you're not willing to put up the value-representing money to trump it. What's your "footprint"? and how might that be criticized? (say, by the "strip mining" of forest land for carrot farms.)

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