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

Re: Extreme Minimalism: this guy owns just 15 things

#181

Post by tylee78 » Mon, Jan 16, 2012, 11:00 PM UTC

mechanical_fish wrote: post #122

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 al…

try Buddhist monk, esp. of the species of "forest dweller".

Re: Extreme Minimalism: this guy owns just 15 things

#182

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jan 16, 2012, 11:03 PM UTC

jdietrich wrote: post #152

andrewhyde wrote: post #120

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…

> I don't own much physically. I spend my days volunteering and traveling living a pretty simple life. That's the nub - you don't live a simple life, you live a very complicated life where the "stuff" in your life has been abstracted out of sight. To define ownership by physical possession is utterly facile. The economic decisions you make result in great mountains of "stuff" being made and used and consumed. You hav…

[deleted]

Re: Extreme Minimalism: this guy owns just 15 things

#183

Post by lnanek » Mon, Jan 16, 2012, 11:24 PM UTC

njharman wrote: post #174

It's really really weird to me that someone who wants to own as few things as possible (i.e. be unmaterialistic) is so focused on brands. (which to me is the height of materialism owning/valuing/recognizing something for it's label rather than substance). Seems like it's just a gimmick, something to fill blog posts with.

Brands are often a nice shortcut to find a quality item. I was researching a coat for a woman the other day and was looking at a fancy brand one vs. a knockoff. After reading all the reviews it turned out the brand one was much more fitted (shows off your form, not a shapeless box) and had a better closure mechanism (a series of snaps at the bottom below the zipper for closing it up when you are waiting at a bus or something). The brand one isn't competing on razor thin margins to be the cheapest version on the block, so they can spend more money on materials and design and the like. If you don't know clothes very well, it can be a shortcut to an actual, in person, feature by feature comparison in detail. This might mean being able to buy online, or only after visiting one store, instead of visiting a couple. At many income levels, it can make sense to spend money to save time.

Re: Extreme Minimalism: this guy owns just 15 things

#184

Post by jff » Mon, Jan 16, 2012, 11:32 PM UTC

wollw wrote: post #165

jff wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The money they are given probably helps buy food, since not even the magical Buddhist monks can survive without at least a little rice.

Actually, according to the Buddhist monastic code they aren't allowed to have money. I know a very large number (probably the majority) of monks these days do accept money but I know of and have lived with those that don't. In the communities that respect the Vinaya[1] there are 227 rules that fully ordained monks are supposed to follow. Novices have ten rules[2] and one of them is not to handle money. [1] http://www…

Well I guess that's what I get for jumping to the conclusion that alms = money.

Re: Extreme Minimalism: this guy owns just 15 things

#185

Post by teyc » Tue, Jan 17, 2012, 12:02 AM UTC

run4yourlives wrote: post #172

andrewhyde wrote: post #120

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…

What's the point of minimalism if not to reduce one's impact on the world? Am I understanding this "movement" incorrectly? From one perspective, reducing your greater impact on the world by some amount seems to at least be routed in a desire to improve things - to make a nobel idea a reality as much as possible. Whether or not the overall impact is measurable is countered by the nobel gesture of the person at least.…

    What's the point of minimalism if not
    to reduce one's impact on the world? Am
    I understanding this "movement" incorrectly?

It is very similar to agile. Don't optimize prematurely. "You aren't going to need it"

Re: Extreme Minimalism: this guy owns just 15 things

#186

Post by GeorgeSBurgess » Tue, Jan 17, 2012, 12:13 AM UTC

j4kzejfd wrote: post #140

damoncali wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The linked article says he ate a cheesestake and the author in the comments described how he didn't want to eat the bread so he got the meat on a piece of paper on top on the bread.

Re: Extreme Minimalism: this guy owns just 15 things

#187

Post by mechanical_fish » Tue, Jan 17, 2012, 2:05 AM UTC

reinhardt wrote: post #161

mechanical_fish wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

By this definition an "item" is "one emotional connection to an object", not merely an object itself. This would be a pretty odd definition of an "item". Going with this definition though, I (and suspect quite a few others) don't have more than 1-2 "items", or even any at all. I can't think of a single (physical) object I have emotional connection to, as long as I am reimbursed so that I can replace it it's business…

That's probably a good thing. Lots of people are not like you, however.

If you want to understand your fellow humans better, take a glimpse into the opposite extreme with this book on compulsive hoarding:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/25/books/review/Kramer-t.html

You may find it quite alien, or perhaps hilarious, or both, but I've met quite a few people on the hoarding spectrum, and it is decidedly not fun.

And I'd venture to say that most people have something with significant emotional resonance that they'd be loath to lose it. A wedding ring. Objects inherited from one's late grandparents. A few pieces of custom-built tools, furniture, or clothing that fit you perfectly.

Re: Extreme Minimalism: this guy owns just 15 things

#188

Post by jdietrich » Tue, Jan 17, 2012, 2:50 AM UTC

mechanical_fish wrote: post #122

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 al…

>So when you say the words "real minimalist", who am I supposed to see in my mind's eye?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dieter_Rams#Rams.27_ten_princip...

Hidden complexity isn't minimalism. True minimalism demands fundamental simplicity. Minimalism makes the truth of a product, a process or a place more obvious, rather than obfuscating it behind white melamine. The actuality of less.

Minimalist lifestyle choices are those that positively simplify, that meaningfully reduce the total impact of our lives. Eating soy rather than beef, eating local strawberries in June rather than air-freighted strawberries in December. Insulation over of heating, two wheels over four. Measuring the size of your lifestyle in kilowatt-hours and hectares and litres.

If you're looking for the living embodiment, see Jason Rohrer. http://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/jason-rohrer/simpleLife.ht...

Re: Extreme Minimalism: this guy owns just 15 things

#189

Post by mechanical_fish » Tue, Jan 17, 2012, 3:46 AM UTC

Radix wrote: post #164

mechanical_fish wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 al…

I think you're right about words describing styles being flexible but wrong given the amount of flexibility you expect and the examples you've given. Minimalism, in every example I can think of, has a context. What you've described is a minimalist percussion exhibition and a minimalist recording. If you asked some people to describe those two things I expect you would get some similar thoughts. The focus is on the re…

Did you actually mean to say that traveling the world on an airplane with a backpack is not minimalist, but driving around the country in a classic VW Bug - a fossil-fueled vehicle which is considerably less efficient per passenger-mile than a passenger jet - is minimalist? That driving around on a publicly-funded, continuously-maintained network of asphalt doesn't constitute "pushing consumption off onto others"?

One eventually realizes that minimalism of any kind is a trick of the mind. Nothing is really simple, even things that aren't alive, and nothing really exists in isolation. A thing can be minimal only relative to something else, and only along a limited axis, and only so long as you don't think too deeply.

(Did I just say that Trio's classic "Da Da Da" has only one note? Oops, I lied, I didn't look deeply enough: The chorus has a background singer, and though she - it sounds like a she - is designed to be a minimalist background singer she does sing multiple notes, adding vital depth and texture and helping to make the chorus sound so awesome: It's a joke of a chorus, but it's so much more musically rich than the verse that it sounds like heaven when it arrives.)

Re: Extreme Minimalism: this guy owns just 15 things

#190

Post by goo » Tue, Jan 17, 2012, 3:49 AM UTC

nodata wrote: post #2

I'd like to know how many things he has on that Macbook air.

You might be surprised -- a minimalist mindset can extend toward computer habits as well. Also, just as he relies on society to provide him with essentials like food, so too could he rely on cloud providers like Google Docs to take care of his document storage -- though of course he would still own his Google account.

It's no stretch to compare Mimimalism to a thin-client computing design -- it is made possible by the existence of an excellent network of other person-nodes, and it reduces the emotional and physical "computational" overhead of owning things.

Also, in response to come other comments in this thread: to argue that he is parasitic requires the moral stance that using things you do not own is parasitic, regardless of the other contributions you make to society (including paying for the temporary use of those things!). Which is bollocks.