I’ve long maintained that while I share some of its philosophies, I’m not really minimalist, at least according to any popular understanding of the term.
First, I admire less and less the minimalism of aesthetic today’s world has been worshiping more and more. Whitespace can be lovely, in moderation, but I like a little texture. A little detail. A little noise. The commercialized minimalist aesthetic feels… empty. A void. A canvas someone forgot to paint on.
Maybe that’s why people like me plaster laptop lids and water bottles in stickers. Minimalism shouldn’t hinder the expression of identity—rather, it is an outlet for that expression.
One of the first applications of “minimalism” I remember is of people trying to own only the essentials—sometimes limiting themselves to an arbitrary number of belongings.
I appreciate the sentiment behind this, and done with the right intentions it can become a practice I admire. Many times when visiting relatives I notice the sheer amount of belongings they own, many of which they never use or don’t really need. There is a genuine problem that this philosophy pushes back against, but I think reducing the solution to “you may own only this many items” can cause problems itself.
For one, I think it points people toward all-in-one tools rather than single-purpose ones. A multitool can be extremely handy—I have one for my bicycle which has been incredible for me—but it’s not going to beat single-purpose tools that are honed to a specific use case, especially for things you need to use regularly. This general principle applies to software, too—many programs are designed to do everything you could possibly need in an area, when you’d be better served by many smaller programs for dedicated tasks that you can swap out as needed.
Really, though, the reason I haven’t seen this philosophy as being one I follow is that I have many things I don’t strictly need, even if you ignore all my fountain pen inks, notebooks, physical books, and so on. I own many of what I like to call “artifacts”—small items of sentimental value from different stages in my life.
To give you an idea of my artifacts, here are a few:
- a small carved wooden pillar from India
- a little whale made from clay (from a play I attended which inspired me)
- a vinyl record of The Manhattan Transfer’s first album
- a feather with a sloth painted on it, from Costa Rica
You probably get the idea. These are not items that I need by any conceivable standard, but they have enormous sentimental value to me. More than that, with the number of times I’ve moved to different homes in different nations, it’s these artifacts that really give me a sense of home. Home, to me, isn’t a single place—it’s all these memories in physical form that I’ve been collecting my entire life.
So, with all these different philosophies I’ve seen calling themselves “minimalism” that I didn’t fit into, I long assumed I must not be minimalist. I knew I admired the principles of minimalism, but also that many implementations of it were offputting to me for some reason.
Recently, though, I’ve been rethinking that. I remember telling people that, partly due to growing up in many nations, if I were told today that I needed to move across the world to a different country, by tomorrow I could have everything I needed to take packed up into two suitcases and my backpack.
If that’s not minimalist in some form, I don’t know what is. I have a very deep understanding of which things I own are essential to me and which are replaceable and can separate them out at a moment’s notice.
Everything I own was selected with extreme intention and care. Not all of it is strictly “needed”, but it’s all loved and helps my mental health and happiness.
And, also, when it comes to the software I use and code myself, I tend toward minimalism. I pick what features belong, what don’t, and will create small single-purpose tools that perform exactly the function I need and nothing more.
This is what minimalism means to me, at its core. Maybe, after all, I am minimalist.
I’m not by any means saying that people who do practice those other philosophies don’t have the right to call themselves “minimalists”—why should I police that? I’m simply saying that the lack of overlap between my own praxis and philosophy with these conceptions of the term made me think that the word doesn’t describe me. “I can’t be a minimalist,” I reasoned, “because look—that’s minimalism and it’s definitely not me.”
Maybe it’s a failure of terminology—perhaps we’re trying to describe too many ideas with this one word. Maybe, instead of making the problem worse, I should actually come up with a term for this philosophy I practice.
My first thought was on the functional nature of most things I own. My mechanical keyboard, fountain pens and nice notebooks, and so on. All of them perform a function and do it very, very well. As I’ve said to people I’ve met—I find that when I have nice tools, I want to use them, which motivates me to do good work. So, perhaps, this philosophy should be “functionalism”?
Well, no—first, that’s already a thing and it means something else. Second, what about my artifacts? They play a mental health role in helping me feel at home, but they’re not really “functional”. They just sit on a shelf where I can see them every day.
After much more thought, I’ve settled on “intentionalism”, highlighting the intention and care I make decisions with. That’s really the central idea of minimalism that I most admire: the intention in evaluating the core purposes of the things around you and making choices according to that.
I don’t often buy things just for the fun of it or because they’re interesting. Everything I own was obtained to serve a very specific purpose, usually one I’d been seeing as a need to fill already. Even entertainment, like books and games, I have planned out and budgeted to try and get the most value I can. “Impulse buying” isn’t really a thing for me anymore, with very rare exceptions.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on everything here. I admit that the ideas in this piece are still rough and not fully-developed—I didn’t have a plan or structure going into writing this the way I usually do. I may have missed a lot. But, to me, in this moment, it seems right.
