I realize it’s a joke but actually one of issues with aggressive minimalism is that it’s actually very nessisary to be decently wealthy to pull off. If you can not afford to treat tools and materials as effectively single use items that are frequently expunged from your spaces then it can actually be fairly wasteful and expensive. Extensive lending resources like tool libraries in cities being available makes it more tenable but otherwise yeah… Minimalism is kind of for the rich.
That requires you to be able to afford higher quality tools that are built to last. If you can’t afford the higher upfront cost, you’ll end up spending more over time, and it creates a vicious cycle.
It’s like the organic food trend - it costs a lot more to eat healthy.
The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
This was the Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socioeconomic unfairness.
Cost and quality are very detached things in this day and age.
Expensive can be far worse build quality than cheap.
And eating healthy is a perfect example of this, its cheaper to cook your own food and use lots of veggies, that’s healthy. You dont need the latest and greatest ”superfood” to be healthy.
I’m not talking about “superfoods” or whatever, I’m talking about being able to buy something more expensive than a $5 meal from McDonalds for dinner.
You can save money by cooking yourself, but that requires you to have access to that stuff in the first place. Many people in the US live in “food deserts” and only have access to whatever they can get on their bimonthly trip to the supermarket on the edge of town. And with stores getting rid of generic versions of foods, prices are increasing dramatically on everyday basics. You can save money and get fresh vegetables by starting a garden, but that expects you to be able to afford to start one, whether you’re talking about land or time or tools, even if that garden is just a pot in the window.
And price and quality have always been sort of detached from one another, that’s nothing new, but we live in the age of planned obsolescence, and the price doesn’t matter anyways if anything other than the cheapest is unaffordable to you.
You’re thinking of the more nebulous “decluttered lifestyle”. Minimalism is an aesthetic design choice. Think of those houses where like there’s no shelves, no storage tucked out of the way.
Not to mention the "aesthetic"of being organized and living “clean” that is basically just a tiktok Instagram scam to sell super overpriced luxury items
But minimalism isn’t about just having the least amount of stuff and purging literally everything you’re not using that minute. It wouldn’t encourage buying and purging the same tools over again. Rather, encourage you to think deeply on weather you need X tool, or maybe Y tool you already have could manage the job, or if you can borrow X tool. If you cannot substitute for X tool in any way, you would still buy it—but you still would want to be mindful of what version of X you buy, whether you need to super fancy one with lots of bells and whistles or if a basic version will keep you in working order.
Minimalism primary is an aesthetic not simply a “decluttered lifestyle”. It’s a fashion. There isn’t a bunch of stuff tucked carefully in boxes perfectly Marie Kondoed out of the way. With minimalism if you end up with spares of anything you get rid of the spares because the idea is that you are removing psychological noise for a clean look. Things that are infrequently used are looked at as the enemy of the aesthetic.
What you are thinking of is not the aesthetic movement it is the idea of having slightly less stuff. Low or Zero-waste lifestyles are a very optional part of minimalism and arguably more of a separate sustainable eco movement …but it is really hard to do those lifestyles in isolation because while you might not bring new single use things it does mean finding them elsewhere which requires someone else to have stuff or outside resources.
You do need to be living in a highly interconnected and “just-in-time” society to pull off the extreme version of minimalism.
Any disruption of your perfect delivery schedule means that you’ve gone from aesthetic minimalism to lacking necessities in an instant.
Having said that, I don’t personally know anyone pulling off the extreme minimalism lifestyle.
In my experience, hoarding is much more common. I know a lot of people that have multiple cubic meters of stuff (their children’s old clothes, toys, nice boxes, magazines etc) they will never use (they don’t even know what they have) that they refuse to sell or throw away. That also seems very unhealthy.
It is more of a rich trendy thing. I have seen it particularly in mansions and high end apartments and things that I have been given access to via my work but I don’t think I have ever seen anybody who is strictly working class pull it off.
Hoarding is more common but with hoarding there’s more of a psychological element where they are anxious about removing objects from their places. Sometimes it’s from a place of having experienced traumatic scarcity but it seems to me more often it’s more about believing there is a larger connection between memory and stuff than actually exists. Like "I can’t throw out this half melted kettle or I might forget the day it boiled dry on the stove and everybody laughed about it! " - there is a lack of trust that they will remember it without the item or that all memories are worth clinging to to the extent of impacting their physical space. The Archive of memory hoarder is also the worst to try and help because after the fact if they ever feel the need to revisit something they let go for any reason they will blame the people who tried to help them with their total consent to cut down on their stuff and some of them never get over that resentment.
So I walked into the Minimalist Store and said “Give me nothing you’ve got”, and the lady replied “A fine choice, sir, feel free to look around, we have plenty of that for you not to choose, I’ll be right here if you have no questions”.
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