Mind the Beginner

A long time ago I wrote about the 100 items challenge and as you might know it’s one of the things on my “Freedom list 2010″.

In a nutshell it’s about getting rid of all your personal possessions save 100 items. Not only does this offer great potential to minimise clutter, it also lets you re-evaluate what really is important enough to keep. But there are some issues to deal with along the way. I’m going to take a closer look at the problems and options you have because I’m experiencing first hand all the problems of taking this challenge.

The problem

It sounds so simple, just take a piece of paper and write down the 100 things you want to keep. Get rid of everything else. But that’s just theory and as you know:

In theory practice and theory are the same, in practice however, they are not.

It’s not the actual selection of things to keep that is hard -well, actually it’s very hard, but that’s a different blogpost- it’s the getting rid of all the others things. How do you get rid of them, especially if they represent a significant value? You could sell them via Internet which is the obvious choice. But doing so will leave you waiting for buyers. Alternatively you could just toss them, but that’s like throwing away money and would be stupid. You end up with stuff you want to get rid of but are waiting for people to buy from you.

That’s exactly the situation I’m in right now, I have a lot of items that can just go, but almost everything represents some value. A problem that can be solved in four ways:

Choose your solution

1. Trash it
2. Sell it
3. Give it away
4. Keep it

Trash it

Not always the best option of course. But there comes a time when you have to realize that nobody is going to buy (or even want) your old bookcase or that collection of Christmas sweaters. You can keep it though but I’ll get to that option in a few lines. If all other options fail this is what you will have to do. It’s tough but when you finally get over this hurdle it’s one of the best feelings in the world. Your possessions no longer own you.  But let’s consider the alternatives first.

Sell it

The best option of all of course. Converting all those items you no longer need to cash so you can spend it on more stuff you don’t need, Oh wait, that wasn’t what we were trying to do. What can you do with the cash? Keep in mind that you don’t want more stuff, you want quality. A clear pitfall here is that you start buying better things all the time to replace the few items you keep. And then you;re stuck with the old thing you can’t find a buyer for. Your buyer wants one of two things: What you have to sell, but dirt-cheap or he wants what you want, the best of the best. And you are selling an older model because you upgraded. If you find a buyer, you’re lucky, but don’t forget: The value is not determined by what you’re asking, it’s what people are actually willing to pay, disregarding catalogue values and whatnot.

Give it away

Giving your stuff away is very liberating and grateful. It’s a great way to be frugal as well. In stead of buying a new gift you can give away what was once yours. The obvious pitfall here is that you give something that the receiver gave to you in the first place. A very painful mistake. Also you might want to check if what you are giving either seems new, or make it very clear that the gift is pre-owned   but still very usable. If it’s not as a gift, you don’t have to bother to much with these things however. Just make it clear why you’re giving it away.

Keep it

This is exactly what happens with most things we want to get rid of. Broken things we plan on mending, once useful things that we haven’t used in years like the spare spare spare bicycle in the shed. (I’m Dutch, there are 18 million bikes here, and one 16 million inhabitants.) Old clothing we will never wear again and why are you keeping those old magazines you’ll never read again? Keeping things you’ll never use again is clutter. If you can’t sell it or give it away you have one last choice to make:

• Will I keep this item that I will never use;
• or should I just trash it.

That’s all you can do. As I already said, things have no value other than what people will actually pay you to buy them. Nobody wants your clutter.

The other approach

I started this blogpost with the idea of writing down everything you want to keep. Let’s turn it around a bit, it just might help. Select 100 things you want to get rid of. Decide how long you will give yourself to actually achieve this and for every item determine if you’re going to trash it, sell it or give it away. Don’t make keeping it an option if you can’t sell it or give it away. You wanted to get rid of it so you know what to do!

After those 100, select a further 100 and keep at it until you have reached your goal. The 100 items challenge actually doesn’t have “keeping 100 items” as goal, it’s all about “getting rid of everything but..”. It’s a huge difference in state of mind. If you don’t feel like getting rid of things but want the minimalists life, you’re going at it the wrong way round. Wanting to get rid of things and living the minimalists lifestyle as a result is the way to go.

A quick edit: I stumbled across a blogseries over at simpleorganizedlife.com with a version on my blogpost. It’s called the 10 Things Challenge and David has been at it for weeks on end. Selecting 10 items each week and getting rid of them, A real inspiration there!

Before you read this take a look around…

Did you have a quick look around the room, your desk area and perhaps even your desktop? Is it cluttered? Are there things there that you haven’t used in 2009? Things collecting dust that somehow just keep put but have no actual use?

Seriously, is there anything there you just spotted that you didn’t use for a whole year? The obvious question to ask as soon as you spot something like that is “Why is it still here?”

At least, that’s what the minimalist would ask himself. Always striving to make things less cluttered and as an added bonus easier to keep clean and tidy. I did that very thing this weekend and it resulted in the removal of two bookcases from my room, books included. That’s 2/3 of my shelf space and of course a drastic reduction of things to dust.

To keep things from looking to empty I rearranged what was left and added a two-seat sofa. Although I live in a single room at least now I have proper seating which means that the bed (which was also my sofa) can now be used exclusively for what it’s meant. The TV is no longer easily visible when sitting at my desk and it’s impossible to watch from the bed.

What happened here is something that might seem very insignificant but actually is nothing of the sort. We humans tend to combine just about anything we do and most of the time it’s not very productive at all or at least we aren’t mindful of what we are doing:

• Eating and watching TV
• Trying to fall asleep and watching TV
• Studying behind a PC…. with Internet (social media etc.)
• Studying with the TV on
• Working and playing

Now all of those save one are things you actually don’t want to be doing to often. Very soon you’ll have the habit of eating while watching TV and don’t notice you’re emptying a whole bag of crisps. It’s just suddenly empty. I’m sure you’ve had that happen at least once. The same goes for trying to fall asleep with the TV on. Your retina keeps getting bombarded with light. A great way not to get restful asleep. Sure, most people claim they can’t sleep without the TV to “help them”. But that’s because they have a different problem: The bed is not the exclusive domain of sleep.

The Pavlovian Bed

Humans are creatures of habit and as such we associate things with one another. We get Pavlovian reactions to things. When I was young my parents didn’t allow me to have a TV in my bedroom. A very wise choice when I think back, of course at the time I couldn’t disagree more. You see, my bedroom was used for but a few things and my bed for only one. So as soon as I went to bed my body knew it was supposed to go t sleep and so triggered all the necessary responses. My eyes closed and I was asleep within 20 minutes or less. Reading wasn’t part of the sleeping ritual, or rather it was but not while having my body in a horizontal or half-seated position. Bed = sleep and nothing else.

In later years I got that TV I wanted, now I could watch TV from the comforts of my bed. How wonderful. My body disagreed of course because now it got it’s signals mixed up. Was the bed for sleeping or for watching TV? Or should it do both things at the same time, and not doing a very mindful job of either. The bed was no longer the exclusive domain of sleep.

Distractionless Internet

The same goes for your workspace, your desktop, your sofa. Is a sofa meant to be used for a quick nap? Why not use the bed for that one, at least you won’t fall asleep during the movie because sleep isn’t triggered by the sofa. Homework/studying and your RSS reader or Internet browser? Though far more subtle preferably these two shouldn’t mix either, unless you need the Internet to study. And be honest here (talking to myself) do you really need social media, IRC, music and the TV on to study? Nope, most of the time all you need is your textbook, a piece of paper to make notes, previous notes and in some cases a computer to write something. (or in my case, write code). There are but few reasons to keep connected to the Internet while studying and all of them have an inherent danger of distraction. Wikipedia for instance is a great resource to help clarify things, but it’s all to easy to become distracted and before you know it you’ll be reading about the history of bonsai trees. IRC is a great way to keep in touch with fellow students and ask questions when you are stuck. If you can use it exclusively for that purpose, brilliant. If you get sucked in to idle chatter and random uselessness, better examine what it is you had planned and if what you are doing is part of that plan.

It’s hard to keep things separated, to have a clear idea about what something is for. Is your bed the place to sleep? If your desk the place to work and your sofa the place to watch TV? Or is eating at your desk, sleeping on the sofa and watching TV from the bed the way things go.

Books and Dust Bunnies

So what do the bookcases I mentioned have to do with it? Well, the bookcases were not only holding books, there was other stuff in there too. And everything in there hadn’t been used for at least the whole of 2009 and I had the dust bunnies to prove it. Getting rid of the bookcases made room for proper seating and relocation of the TV. Now watching TV is a major time suck mind you. So what better way to notice that than to make it impossible to watch from anywhere but the designated seating.

Concluding I’d like you to have another look around for two things:

1. Are there things there that you didn’t use in 2009, if so ask yourself why they are still there.
2. Do you have designated (preferably exclusive) area’s for your most important your activities?

I challenge you: For this month, use your bed only for sleeping – if you’re not sleeping, don’t be in bed – and please do tell me about your experiences.

In English the quote below can with some imagination be interpreted as: “when you have two competing theories that make exactly the same predictions, the simpler one is usually the best”. Almost anyone who’s interested in math and/or logic has heard of Ockham’s razor. It’s a principle named after William Ockham (c. 1285–1349) , a student and later teacher of Theology at Oxford University (He never became professor, but that’s a different story which has to do something with Oxford’s chancellor John Lutterell). Although he wasn’t a sceptic he was a great critic and applied the principle later known as Ockham’s razor frequently and ruthlessly. An interesting combination with his Theocentric world view.

Although it’s origins trace back much further, all the way back to Aristotle (384–322 BC). According to Wikipedia the first time the principle was described as Ockhams Razor was back in  in 1852 in the works of Sir William Hamilton (1788–1856). It’s named after Ockham however because of the efficiency and frequency of use by him in his works.

Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate – William of Ockham

That’s a bit of background for you, now on the the goodness.

With a slight adaptation you could apply the Razor to anything in life although I don’t know if my teacher would agree with me on that one. (I know he’s a subscriber to my RSS so I’m sure I’ll get some feedback *grin* )

If we interpret things a little more casually we could say that “having two ways of doing something, the simpler is the better choice.” Okay, very casually… Minimalists are always searching for ways to make things simpler. The power of less indeed. Applying the Razor to what I just wrote we get “Simpler is better” or “Simplest is best”.

Having several ways of doing things is an often occurring event in every day life. We could brush our teeth with our dominant hand and our subordinate hand but we always choose the dominant hand. That is, unless you might be thinking of this blogpost when brushing your teeth and deciding to switch for once. This is a very clear example and of course not all examples are that clear to us. It’s exactly this reason why minimalism blogs seem to be flourishing on the Internet. We need others to tell us where we can simplify our lives, where we can apply that razor and cut away the uselessness.

Cutting away useless things actually is very liberating in life. It saves time, money, space, stress, frustration. All well known and documented theories on why minimalism is so attractive. In these times of abundance we’re looking for those things that really do matter in life and try to experience them to the fullest.

Do you have an experience in the liberation minimalism has brought you? Please do share it and inspire others to identify where they can make a cut with Ockham’s Razor.

As you might now I ride a rather old motorcycle that’s not very fuel efficient (Roughly 42 miles per gallon if I converted it correctly.  18 km/l). As I was riding on the highway last Saturday my fuel ran out, thankfully I have a reserve in the tank so I switched to that. An additional 3 liters of fuel (0.8 gallon) to get me home. More than enough range but as I rode off to uni today I was feeling a bit uneasy as to how much fuel was left, I didn’t fill up yet. Would I run out halfway and have to walk?

This wasn’t the case, but after class I walked back to my motorcycle wondering if I could make it to the gasstation. I can tell you, it’s very unpleasant riding like that. Anyone driving a car with the fuel light on can tell you that.

Well, now something interesting happened: I started holding back. Easing down on the throttle, trying to predict/time stoplights and even shutting down the engine entirely on a long stretch downhill, all in the name of fuel economy. This huge change in style got me thinking, how much effect can you have on your mileages if you change your driving style. I usually tend to gun it a bit.

A short internetsearch later I ended up with a frequently used term on the internet although I’ve only found it in combination with cars (and hybrids in particular) “hypermilers”. A phrase used to describe those people who try to squeeze every last inch out of every gallon while using street-legal production cars.

Although not all tactics are usable on a motorcycle there is one main tactic that is more important than all others combined: stay calm and relaxed. This means no sudden changes in speed or direction, also described as “Foot control, hand-eye coordination, and anticipation”. One study found that jackrabbit starts and hard brake stops reduce travel time by only about 4 percent—that’s 75 seconds on a 30-minute trip. And we didn’t even factor in tire, engine and brake wear. A few tactics applicable to motorcyclists  are:

• Stay off the brakes
• Accelerate as slow as you can without causing problems for other road users
• Idling is zero miles per gallon…. stay moving if possible
• Stay out of puddles and grooves
• Uphill: gather momentum to take you over, you’ll slow down at the top. Time it so you barely roll over and start gaining momentum again on the downhill.
• Turning off the engine and rolling (Can be illegal, check local laws)
• Tailgating/slipstreaming (Again, can be illegal)
• Get your tuires up to proper pressure, perhaps even a bit harder
• Clean out the air filter
• Check and clean your oil regularly
• Keep the chain properly lubed and at the right tension
• Try to minimise drag
• Try to minimise weight

Try these tactics at your own risk of course, and please do put on a high-vis vest, you’re vulnerable as a motorcyclist even without doing these things. And of course, if you can do something on a bicycle or by walking, don’t use something with a combustion engine.

Now if you’re wondering why I would like to save gas, I have exactly one reason for it: Frugality. If I calculated this correctly I filled up my gastank today at the cost of $7.31 per gallon. (€1.32 per liter). Thankfully it’s a small country and my average trip is just over 40 miles but still, it’s no fun seeing all that money just evaporate so some frugality is in order. I’m not one for extreme green thinking, I wouldn’t mind solar panels on my roof and a windmill in the backyard but it’s not a must for me. Just by being a minimalist I find that I’m greener than most, no need to overdo it and build a composting loo as well. When the time comes for a “new” car I’ll go for a prius or some other hybrid but for now, it’s an old ratbike and doing everything I can to save money on gas.

Stay calm while riding and control your right hand, slow down and enjoy the view at the same time. It’s a true challenge to get as many miles as possible, treat it as a game and constantly try to get the new highscore.

Good luck and remember: relax, focus and have fun!

Everywhere you look there are commercials, influencing us and trying to convince us to buy the next best thing out there. Where this used to work on a massive scale it’s now getting more and more personal with even directly addressed ads showing up on your doormat and tons of spam in your mail.

Not a single day goes by without coming under this influence. But there is a consciousness developing all around. People start to become insensitive to ads.
Just today I discussed this with a few fellow students. The perfect example came up. A “pop-up” stating you are the gazillionth visitor to a site and you just need to click the ad to claim your prize.

But what is this was a real prize and not a scam? Would you see the difference? I sure wouldn’t. Those pop-ups are just to common. As a consumer we’re starting to become defective. The ads are loosing their grip.

The dream

Well, so far the fantasy. Fact is that ads still work and sucker people into buying all sorts of things they never knew they needed in the first place. We’re also lead to believe that buying certain things will make us popular and grant us superstar status. Dream on kids, super star status comes from eating your vegetables, it’s not about what you own. So eat up and become a superstar.

Although I present a weak case here it’s just as likely that you reach stardom through your stomach as reaching it through buying that latest thing. We just don’t realize that very often it seems. I’m fond of my veggies but don’t want to become a star, I’d rather stay relatively anonymous. Thankfully there is no guarantee I’ll reach stardom through vegetables.

In my last post I talked about a problem with humanity, we’re lazy and if we can find a way around thinking for ourselves we’ll take that path.

Actually all it takes for ads to loose their grip and rendering you defective as consumer is to think for yourself and not to believe everything you hear/read/see. Smoking won’t make you an attractive cowboy, rough around the edges. Buying that latest fitness thing won’t get you that flat stomach. Or in the extreme department, taking that pill won’t make certain body parts bigger overnight.

Ignorance is what ads thrive on. Stay awake and think about things, before you know it you’ll be defective and on your way to saving a lot of money on useless stuff.

Now remember to eat your veggies.

Not to long ago I got a mail from Jean asking me how I handled food and eating. She herself found that “a simple (mostly raw) seasonal consumption of food works best”

I have just one guideline I try to follow in all food:

Concerning food that I buy/prepare myself. If I can’t tell what’s in there I probably won’t eat it.

I try to stay clear from processed stuff, canned things and anything in a plastic bowl you need to nuke for a few minutes. Come to think of it, I have a disliking for nuked food in general. Yes it’s flaming hot, but it’s also limp, tasteless and most times if there is any flavor involved everything tastes the same. I don’t read labels a lot (the only time I do is because my girlfriend is a vegetarian and they put meat in the oddest things lately.

If someone else is cooking I generally don’t look to close, I’m not a fussy eater at all and will eat anything you put in front of me. If we ever meet face to face, just try me.

In general, I eat because my body needs it, either food because my stomach is growling or something protein rich after running. I hardly ever eat because I like to or as comfort food. Needless to say I have no obesity issues. A nice “benefit” is that if there is anything that’s the opposite of a sweet tooth, I have one. I drink a lot, a lot of water and tea, no soda’s for me… hardly any coffee. To make sure I don’t have to buy drinks while not at home I always have a 16 oz Nalgene bottle with me, filled with water. I top it up every chance I get. A simple but very effective way to save money and healthy too.

Well, that’s it in a nutshell for me. If you have more questions, please do ask them.

In the mean time I have a question for you: What is your take on food?

Yes, it takes just one step to transform your home into a minimalist living space. It’s huge actually and if you want to give it a go there are a lot of smaller steps to go through:

• Throw away everything you haven’t used in a year
• Get rid of paperwork/magazines
• Find a way to properly manage all the cable work
• “A place for everything and everything in it’s place”
• Stop yourself (and others!) from letting more stuff get into your home
• Get rid of anything with strong patterns (floral curtains….)
• …
• …

There are probably hundreds of tips you can find all over the net but in the end it comes down to my one step:

1. Keep every surface clear

Be it your desk, a wall, the floor, a table… Assign one (an only one) space in your home here you can “dump” stuff and don’t ever dump anything anywhere else. Everything has it’s own place and should be in that place and nowhere else. The simplest of examples that comes to mind right now is dirty laundry and the hamper. Dirty socks somehow have this tendency to land on the floor. Make it easier on yourself and undress in the vicinity of the hamper, or put the hamper closer to where you undress. The floor is a very popular storage place for all kinds of stuff. Just imagine the average dorm room, everything is all over the place and more often than not you can’t see the floor. The same goes for desks: stacks of paper, piles of books, (half)empty cups, maybe even your phone charger.

Take a look around your home and see all the surfaces, now imagine how they would look without anything on them. See the minimalism? It’s right there under all the clutter, just waiting for you to uncover it.

Why would you want to create a minimalist living area? Again, there are huge benefits. For ease of reading (and just because I can’t say it any better myself) I’ve copied a bit of a blogpost on Zenhabits

Benefits of a Minimalist Home
I could probably go on for awhile about this, but let me just list a few key benefits:

1. Less stressful. Clutter is a form of visual distraction, and everything in our vision pulls at our attention at least a little. The less clutter, the less visual stress we have. A minimalist home is calming.
2. More appealing. Think about photos of homes that are cluttered, and photos of minimalist homes. The ones with almost nothing in them except some beautiful furniture, some nice artwork, and a very few pretty decorations, are the ones that appeal to most of us. You can make your home more appealing by making it more minimalist.
3. Easier to clean. It’s hard to clean a whole bunch of objects, or to sweep or vacuum around a bunch of furniture. The more stuff you have, the more you have to keep clean, and the more complicated it is to clean around the stuff. Think about how easy it is to clean an empty room compared to one with 50 objects in it. That’s an extreme example, of course, as I wouldn’t recommend you have an empty room, but it’s just to illustrate the difference.

You don’t need modern furniture, a stainless kitchen and all those other fancy things to be a minimalist. It’s simply the byproduct of minimalist living: because minimalists don’t buy a lot of clutter they save huge amounts of money and can spend that on nice quality things. The few items they do buy tend to be highly functional and of a superior quality.

Go have some fun in your home, one room at a time clear all the surfaces and find a place for everything you want to keep. Good luck and above all, enjoy yourself and reward yourself at every step!

I just got back from a two week vacation. There were three of us and we had a car at our disposal. Although I consider myself a minimalist I still was packing a big weekend bag, a backpack (my laptopbag) and my mediation mat (even rolled up it’s still quite big). My in-line skates were thrown in the trunk as well as a jacket.

All in I had filed the trunk of the car for about 1/3

After everything was packed the three of us wanted to take along, not only the trunk was full, but the back seats were covered as well, leaving a niche for the backseat driver to fold in to.

Something went wrong there, don’t you think?!

Here I am, blogging (among other things) about minimalism and I need 1/3 of a car trunk to haul everything! That’s just wrong. Upon getting home I did what everything does when home: unpack. But I did it consciously. Not just stuffing everything back to where it belongs, but looking at it and asking myself “did I use this?” and in several cases following the answer with a second question “Then why the *bleep* did I bring it along?!”

Going through my bag this way took some time and served the dual purpose of being my meditation for the evening. Meditative unpacking, give it a try.

In the end I had a nice pile of stuff I actually didn’t use in the whole two weeks. Among them: a pair of shoes, two books, 2 shirts, 2 pairs of socks and a math book I’m supposed to be studying to get ready for University. Unlike Pareto’s law roughly 60% of the content of my bag got serious use, the rest was fluff. I used the skates, but only once. I used my meditation mat every evening and the jacket was used almost every day.

All in I could have packed a lot less and still be on vacation but I need to take this packing more seriously if I’m ever going to be truly location independent. After all, everything has to fit in a carry-on, even if the vacation lasts for  year.

If I dropped the skates AND found a portable solution for my meditation mat AND didn’t pack the fluff I think I could have gotten it all in a single bag.

Sorry for the rambling post but there is a message here, a lesson: Next time you unpack your bag after a vacation do it consciously. Ask yourself if you used it and if not why you brought it along. After a few passes I’m sure you’ll be packing far less next time.

Thanks everyone for the nice tweets and comments the past two weeks, I’ve been far less active than I was hoping to be but I’m back home now and read to start kicking again.

I’ve been looking into minimalist homes a lot lately and at how the Japanese tackle this challenge in particular. In my previous article on minimalist living I identified what it is exactly that we need to live somewhere, for convenience I’ll give the list again:

A bed

A desk/table and chair

A toilet

A shower

A kitchen

A place to store our 100 items

I still feel this list is all we need. We could simplify and make the bed a mattress on the floor and the kitchen a gas stove on the table but that would bemore like camping. Nobody said that minimalist living should be hardship right?
The Japanese have gotten this minimalistic living down to an art form. With the congestion of the urban area’s plots to build a home are getting smaller and smaller. They even have a name for it: kyosho jutaku (狭小住宅). If we let babelfish loose on that phrase we end up with the translation “narrow small residential” which does seem fitting. In proper English I’d like to stick with micro home or micro living.

These homes being so small don’t let you live a cluttered life. Anything out of place will become an obstruction somehow.

Now I was in the Ikea last Friday and they’re advertising with a 37 square meter home. To bad they had to stuff it with all kinds of “nifty storage solutions” which made it a tight fit. Storage was everywhere and everything had several functions it seemed. I never thought that in 37 square meters I could still feel like a sardine. You couldn’t swing a cat in there. I bet they never heard of the 100 items challenge.

These Japanese micro homes take living small to a new level. The Ikea apartment was 37 square meters. The plots the Japanese build these houses on are no bigger than 30 square meters. Granted they do get to add a few floors if they want but still. Some of these homes sacrifice a part of the plot to accommodate a parking space for their car as well.
To get an idea of pricing over there. The average-of-the-average Tokyo married couple may be looking to buy a brand-new 70 square meters apartment at a cost of ¥45,000,000 and above. (That’s over $456,000.- dollars). With those prices it’s not strange that micro living is so popular in cities like Tokyo and Kobe.
Although not all the homes in this list will fit in such a plot I found a few examples of minimalist homes that I’d really like to share with you.

The first one is Tadao Ando’s 4×4 house. A concrete tower rising 4 stories above ground and a basement below. It stands 13.4m tall. The “three cubes” that make up this house are roughly 4×4x4 meters in size. The top cube is offset one meter in both of the horizontal axis. Actually on this building the plot was exactly 5×5 meters. The total floor space is 117.19 m2
“Each floor of the house is used for a different activity: storage in the basement, access and service on the ground floor, bedroom on the first floor, study on the second, kitchen and dining room on the top floor. The spaces are almost completely enclosed on three sides, while they are open on the fourth facing towards the sea.”
The amount of light that comes in through the massive windows is staggering and the view is to die for. I can definitely see myself live in this house. More than enough room to store the 100 things. Park the motorcycle under the overhang of the top cube and enjoy sunsets over the sea with a good book and a glass of sake.

On to our second home, this one is bigger than the 30 square meter plot but I think it’s really to nice not to share:
The Garden and Sea House by Takao Shiotsuka
If white is not your color you’re in trouble with this one. Again, this house has a view of the sea. There is a lot of glass here, from floor to ceiling. Combined with a completely white “garden” this house has the feel of a sacred place. The total floor space is 237.14m2. Quite large actually, although it’s not living on a small footprint it definitely is a minimalist home.

The third home in our list is Satoshi Kurosaki’s Slit. A very thin house on a narrow and long plot squeezed in between two other plots. 85 m2 living area if I’m correct. Not much to say about this one. It was designed for a family of three who needed (job) to live in the city but on a tight budget. It’s simply amazing how much can be done with so little room.

I’d like to give you a bonus house toend this post: Ghost by Jin Otagiri. It’s white, it’s minimal, it’s empty. Either you love it or you hate it. No words, just a picture:

It seems minimalism is getting more popular every day. Now in my about page it states that I’m a minimalist, however I’m still working on the 100 items challenge I’ve written about all those weeks ago. It’s much harder than it would seem and I think this is going to take some more time.  But why do I want to go on with this challenge and succeed? It’s because I believe in it and in the power of minimalism.

A closer look

Let’s have another look at the basics of minimalism and it’s power. To me minimalism is having exactly those things you need in life and nothing more. The things you do have are of such quality that you don’t need redundancies and all those thing do exactly what they are supposed to, nothing more, nothing less.

Everything is designed with pure functionality in thought. Aesthetics come in second.

No I’m not saying that comfort and fun should be thrown out the window just because you want to be a minimalist, far from it! It’s inherent to minimalism as I understand it to have the best *whatever you need* you can find and can afford. Keep in mind however that up to a certain amount of money you are paying for function, after that it’s all about the looks, the name or whatever else is on there.

The minimalist’s Ferrari

Take a Ferrari for instance. Totally useless if you ask me. Sure, it’s a great car, but to me a car is a means of transportation. A car needs to get me from A to B safely and comfortably while having enough room in the trunk to haul whatever I need hauling. Preferably without costing me to much gas. A Toyota Prius could do all that, right? If I don’t have much stuff to haul (minimalists generally don’t have a lot of stuff) I could even choose to drive a Smart. What can a Ferrari do that a Smart can’t? It much much faster and it gets you noticed, it’s a status symbol…. it’s something little boys need to feel secure and feel like they are something. And that’s what you pay for, image.

Image isn’t functionality and so a Ferrari is useless. I’d rather spend the more than 100k I save by driving a Smart or Prius and do other fun things with all that money. (Maybe rent a Ferrari for a day.)

Is image everyhting or nothing?

This way of thinking applies to just about everything with a brand name on it. What can Nike shoes do for you that regular non-brand shoes can’t? Image. A Louis Vuitton bag? Again it’s image. Something you need to belong to a certain tribe.

Now it’s here that people who have this stuff start to protest, telling you that you probably don’t have the money to buy these things and that you are just jealous.

But let’s turn that one around. How would you feel about living a life where you need to wear certain brands, drive a certain type of car and have the latest gadgets just because they are the latest. I bet you it would feel totally fake. Not to mention the possible financial problems that come from it. I’ll let you in on a secret, most of the people who wear these brands don’t have the amount of money they try to fool other people into thinking they have. It’s part of the image they are trying to have. To them however, the image is so important that they spend all their money on it.

To cut things short: minimalism saves you a hell of a lot of money. You can easily live below your means. Living well below your means offers you one of two options:

1. You can reach Financial Independence within your lifetime.
2. You can afford not to work for months every year

Most people will respond to the idea of living below their means in one of two ways. Either they’ll say “I know, I know I should be saving more,” or they’ll scoff “how can I live below my means? I’m just scraping by already.” – Freepersuits.com

This quote shows exactly where things go wrong for “image” people: “I’m just scraping by already”. It’s probably because of all stuff the think they need to maintain the image.

I’ll stop the ranting now like I’m a poor little kid who hasn’t got the money it takes to join the tribe and so starts kicking against it and tell you what minimalism is in what I believe is the shortest possible definition. I already gave it away in the title of this post but here it is again in all it’s glory:

Minimalism = Simplicity = Freedom

Nothing more, nothing less

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