Joshua Becker's Blog, page 72

Inspiring Simplicity. Weekend Reads.

Never underestimate the importance of removing stuff you don’t need.

Encouragement provides us with motivation to persevere. It invites us to dream dreams of significance for our lives. And it begs us to work diligently with optimism and promise.

Overcoming the pull of consumerism is a difficult challenge regardless of our stage in life. Simplicity requires encouragement. To that end, I hope you will find motivation in these articles below.

Each post was intentionally chosen to inspire simplicity in your life. For maximum effect, find a quiet moment this weekend and enjoy them with a fresh cup of coffee or tea.

Make Your Needs Your Wants, and Your Needs Few | No Sidebar by Cheryl Smith. Is it possible to make a complete mental transition from being obsessed with what we want to being content with the simplicity of what we actually need?

Focus as an Antidote for Wanting to Do Everything | Zen Habits by Leo Babauta. Focus is a form of simplicity. It’s letting go of everything that you might possibly want, to give complete focus on one important thing.

The Dos and Don’ts of Decluttering, According to an Expert | Good Housekeeping UK by Megan Sutton. What not to do when it comes to organizing your home.

How Decluttering Your Space Can Bring You a Happier Life | Click on Detroit by Frank McGeorge. Experts say decluttering can make people feel better emotionally.

America’s Dopamine-Fueled Shopping Addiction | The Atlantic on YouTube Consumerism in the U.S. has reached an all-time high.

Why Experiences are Better Than Things | Joshua Becker on YouTube.

Why Men Need Minimalism

Note: This is a guest post from Jay Harrington of Life and Whim.

In 1899, Teddy Roosevelt delivered a speech in Chicago in which he extolled the virtues of what he called “the strenuous life.” He described it as:

“[T]he
life of toil and effort, of labor and strife; to preach that highest form of
success which comes, not to the man who desires mere easy peace, but to the man
who does not shrink from danger, from hardship, or from bitter toil, and who
out of these wins the splendid ultimate triumph.”

Roosevelt, the quintessential “man in the
arena,” lived a strenuous life full of risk taking, rugged self-reliance, and
commitment to core values. His lifelong adventure culminated in the presidency
of the United States.

Today, too many men live the modern version of
“the strenuous life,” which is more aptly termed “the stressful life.” Instead
of adventure, it’s one marked by overwhelm. Men are strapped to their desks,
tethered to their smartphones, a beep or chime away from their next dose of
anxiety. They get consumed by careers they dislike to buy things they don’t
need for the purpose of impressing people they don’t care about (or even know).
And they’re suffering the consequences.

More than six million men suffer from depression each year. Suicide among men has risen dramatically since the year 2000, and in the year 2017 men died by suicide 3.5 times more often than women. Approximately one in five men develop alcohol dependency during their lives. Mental health trends among men continue to trend in the wrong direction.

Exhausted, pressured, restless, searching—what else can one feel while running in the rat race? How do I know? For years, I was sprinting to keep up with the pack. From a top law school to a top law firm, which led to a too-big house and too-little time for much of anything, something had to give.

What changed? The weight of it all nearly crushed me. But I feel like I’m one of the lucky ones. When you approach rock bottom, you are afforded a clear view of the fate awaiting you. By falling, as opposed to remaining afloat on auto-pilot, I had the chance to correct course before it was too late.

My safety net? I found minimalism, which
allowed me to find the space and time necessary to strive for things—and by
“things,” I mean experiences, relationships, beliefs, and values—that are
necessary to cultivate a content and fulfilling life.

A
Stubborn Journey Toward Minimalism

The truth is, however, I didn’t find minimalism. My wife did, then introduced it to me… again and again before it stuck. Along with my tendency toward chasing shiny new objects, I’m pretty stubborn. Over time, my ego and self-worth got wrapped up in what I had—not who I was. My wife perceived this, and saw minimalism as an escape hatch, but I resisted.

Minimalism seemed like a quirky idea propagated by people who resigned themselves to a Spartan, white-space existence. It appeared devoid of the color and excitement that pop culture, marketing, and social media herald as essential elements of the modern good life.

And, if I’m being totally honest, as reflected by the Facebook pages, groups, and comment threads associated with members of the minimalism movement, it seemed that far more women than men were on board with the minimal life.

As much as the promises and principles of
minimalism resonated with me I did not embrace it, in large part because my
identity as a husband, father, and working professional felt threatened by its
implications. Why settle for less when everything in society suggested that I
should be striving for more?

Yes, these feelings are rooted in vestiges of
gender norms of the past. They’re admittedly old fashioned, and not even
relevant to my circumstances, given that my wife is every bit my equal partner
(and then some) in all aspects of our marriage, including our respective
financial contributions to the household.

Nonetheless, these feelings (irrational as
they may be) are real, so I don’t see the point in pretending otherwise. I have
always prided myself on my ability to simply outwork any challenge, and I
foolishly believed that embracing minimalism put my identity at risk by
signaling vulnerability to the world. And vulnerability, at least in the
pre-Brené Brown era, was not something I felt comfortable showing.

It took time, study, and reflection, but,
ultimately, I overcame the resistance, scaled back, and began to realize the
benefits of a life with less. I became a better husband, father, and
professional—a better man—in the process. By no means am I perfect (far from
it) but I’m far more present, aware, and happy than I was when caught up in the
rat race.

As a result of my transformation, I’ve come to
believe that more men need minimalism.

The
Dangers of the Hedonic Flywheel

Too many of us are chasing rainbows that we’ll never reach. We strive and grasp for more but regardless of how far we get, it doesn’t lead to happiness. Each new level of achievement becomes the new baseline.

We believe that a material possession—be it a house, car, or new set of golf clubs—will lead to contentment, but save for a fleeting rush, it ends with remorse every time. We think “only if I get that promotion…” or “when I meet the person of my dreams…”—but our happy future doesn’t materialize the way we expected. Author Tal Ben-Shahar calls this the “arrival fallacy,” which is the belief (almost always false) that when you arrive at a certain destination, you’ll be happy.

In short, we keep sprinting on the “hedonic treadmill” and never get anywhere. We merely adapt to our new circumstances and keep searching for more. However, the “treadmill” as a metaphor doesn’t convey the whole story. If you’re on a treadmill you can simply step off.

Getting trapped in the rat race is better
described as being strapped to a “hedonic flywheel.” A flywheel is a heavy,
mounted wheel that takes a great deal of effort to push. As you keep pushing,
the flywheel gains speed and eventually it generates its own momentum and goes
faster and faster. It takes a tremendous amount of effort to stop.

A life animated by the pursuit of more money, possessions, and social status is a dizzying life on the flywheel. It’s one that goes round and round, faster and faster, but never gets any closer to happiness and contentment. (tweet that)

Through living a more minimal life, I was able
to stop and take stock. What I found was that I still wanted “more”—just of a
different variety. I didn’t know it at the time, but a British philosopher
prescribed exactly what I was looking for nearly 100 years ago.

A Life
Full of “Zest”

Bertrand Russell was one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th Century. He grew up in a wealthy household in the United Kingdom, but was deeply depressed—even suicidal—as a teenager.

He navigated his way into adulthood despite his depression. As he made his way through the world, he was struck by his observation, which seemed counterintuitive to him at the time, that many of the wealthiest people he met also seemed to be the unhappiest. This confused him and he set out to find an explanation. In 1930, he revealed his findings to the world in his classic book, The Conquest of Happiness, which was Russell’s attempt at explaining the root causes of both happiness and unhappiness in life.

In particular, Russell found that “zest” was
the common mark of a happy person. “Zest,” by definition, means “enthusiasm,
eagerness, energy and interest.” For Russell, having zest for life meant living
with vigor, taking interest in the world around you, seeking out adventure, and
living with a sense of enthusiasm. According to Russell, “What hunger is in
relation to food, zest is in relation to life.”

I didn’t have a word for it at the time, but
looking back, zest was the very ingredient that was missing from my life when
it felt at its most monotonous. The days dragged by while the years seemed to
fly past. I spent more time living through a screen than appreciating the
wonders of the real world. Ambition and consumption blurred my vision to other
possibilities.

By adopting a more minimalist lifestyle, I began to see what I was missing.

As a family, we cut back our possessions and financial obligations. We pared down our businesses, ditched our physical office space, and transitioned to a virtual working environment. This created space and time, which allowed me to pursue more outdoor activities that I love, and in the process rediscover a passion for life. I began to live with more zest and never looked back.

I know I’m not alone in my struggle with these
issues. There are countless men who feel overworked, overstressed, and are
drifting through their days. They feel sluggish from the weight of the expectations
that society has foisted upon them. They see minimalism as a way out, but can’t
muster the fortitude to make the changes necessary to transform their lives.

Obviously, women grapple with these issues,
too, and I hope they can draw some lessons from my missteps. However, if my own
hard-headedness is any indication, and given the staggering increase in mental
health conditions among males, a message targeted more directly toward men is
needed.

Transformation is not easy. I know this from experience. But I can say with certainty that there’s only one way off the hedonic flywheel, and it’s by taking a leap of faith into a more minimalist lifestyle. Once you regain your footing, you’ll come to realize that everything you were chasing was never going to make you happy.

You’ll see clearly, perhaps for the first time, that zest and passion for life come from its simplest pleasures.

***

Jay Harrington is a “reformed lawyer” turned author and entrepreneur, and blogs at Life and Whim where he helps people find purpose and live big through small moments. You can also find him on Facebook.

Get Uncluttered this Spring

“I have significantly less stress in my life and more self-control. Most importantly, I’m becoming more like the mom and wife I want to be.” — Caryn Seney

Uncluttered

Uncluttered is a 12-week online course designed intentionally to help you own less, live more, and discover the life you’ve always wanted.

If you are already living a minimalist life, it is not a course I would recommend. However, if you are drawn to the idea of owning less, but need some extra help getting there, this course is perfect for you.

Uncluttered will provide the motivation, community, and accountability you need to declutter your home and start living a better life. By the end, you will have decluttered every major living area in your home and begun changing your spending habits.

We offer the course only four times each year. We are launching the Spring Edition today. But registration ends on Sunday, April 14 at 11:59pm.

Our Spring Edition is always one of the biggest we do each year. If you want this to be the Spring you finally declutter your home, own less, and get ahead financially, this is the right program for you.

The course includes…

Videos with step-by-step instructions
Interviews with thought leaders in productivity and minimalism
Live webinars tackling specific tough-clutter topics
Live Q&As for members to ask questions
Weekly challenges
And perhaps best of all: accountability and encouragement from a super-engaged community.

Every Monday, you will receive a video from me, an exclusive interview with one of the brightest minds in the simplicity movement, and/or written content prepared exclusively for the course. You will receive a weekly challenge to complete. And opportunities to engage with the community in a private Facebook group and with me during live webinars and live question and answer opportunities.

The course offers everything a book or blog post cannot: community, accountability, and opportunity to ask questions. And, in my opinion, it is one of the reasons the course has been helpful for so many.

The Uncluttered plan will help you celebrate your progress as it provides helpful answers on where to start and how to stay motivated.

To find more information about the content and the subjects covered, click here.

Extra Tools to Get Your Family On Board

We’ve created special material for those of you with families.

Because a lot of parents register for the course, we have included some “family-specific” bonuses with tips and strategies for getting your family and kids onboard with the process. The bonuses includes a family-specific webinar to answer your questions, a free Children’s ebook to read with your kids, and a Couple’s Discussion Guide to spark conversation with your spouse or partner.

We want you to find the most success during the 12-week course and we are confident these resources will help you do that.

A Brand-New Expert Co-Host!

Zoë Kim is the author of Minimalism for Families. She is a minimalist mom of four, and the voice behind Raising Simple, a website that encourages and shares solutions to embrace simplicity and minimalism. She partners with individuals and families to tackle the challenges of a cluttered home and life. Zoë believes in developing a minimalist lifestyle through positive perspective changes and practical solutions.

She will be adding her expertise to this upcoming edition of the course helping to answer your questions on Facebook and through live videos. As the course has continued to grow in popularity and reach, another voice offering insights and accountability will make the course even more beneficial.

You will benefit greatly from her experience and approach to adopting minimalist principles at home with a family.

The Results

Over 30,000 people, from all over the world, have gone through the course and used it to declutter their home and life. Here are just a few of the responses:

The term life-changing gets thrown around a lot, but this course really is. I went into it with a lot of shame and anxiety. Joshua gently guided us in a way that made lasting change seem possible. My home is much improved, but my mindset is also clearer. —Kathryn Wagner, Los Angeles, CA

The power of this shared experience is hard to explain to people, it is so overwhelmingly positive. It not only provides the incentive to keep going, but reminds you there are good people out there. You find yourself rooting for complete strangers. Together, there is a momentum that drives you through the course. It was completely unexpected and so overwhelmingly helpful. —Tanya S, Webster, NY

I am a better mother, a better wife, a better housekeeper, a better budgeter, a better teacher, a better neighbor and a better friend. I’m still a work in progress, but it feels good to be where I am at. —Pam L.

My credit card statement came today. $1,000.00 under my typical monthly balance! Thank you Uncluttered community. I’ve been at this for years; however, it’s clear I truly needed this group to get to that next level. —Cheyanne Morris, St. Paul, MN

The Details

We offer the course four times each year.

The Spring Edition begins on Tuesday, April 16. Registration is open now, but only for the next 7 days. You must register by April 14.

The cost is $89. But you can find a 25% off discount code in the back of The More of Less: Finding the Life You Want Under Everything You Own or The Minimalist Home. The book is not required—but the course is based on it. And it’s cheaper to buy the book and use the discount code than it is to pay full price—the option is yours.

I am personally involved in every aspect of the course. Helping people live more by owning less is what I am passionate about. I created the videos and the content. I host the webinars. I answer questions in the Facebook group. And I host live video chats over the course of the 12 weeks. My goal is to help and cheer you along. I have come to understand how essential community, accountability, and ongoing encouragement is for people. And I work hard to craft that culture for the Uncluttered Course. 

When you join Uncluttered, you’ll receive lifetime access to the course. That means you can take it as many times as you want (or need). I know life can be busy, and the unexpected can happen at any time. But we’re here to help you succeed. If you ever want to do the course again, or just enjoy a decluttering refresher, you’ll be welcomed back.

—

Uncluttered is a 12-week online program with videos, interviews, webinars, articles, weekly challenges, accountability, and community. It is strategically packaged for one purpose: To help you unclutter your home, own less stuff, and find space to live the life you want.

Visit My Becoming Minimalist to register.

Make this the year you discover the home and life you’ve always wanted. Don’t just spring-clean, spring-minimize!

Inspiring Simplicity. Weekend Reads.

F ill your life with stories to tell, not stuff to show.

The simplicity/minimalism movement is a beautiful community. And I enjoy any opportunity to promote writing that encourages people to live more by owning less.

So fix yourself a nice warm cup of coffee or tea. Find a quiet moment this weekend. And enjoy some encouraging words to inspire more simplicity in your life today.

The Gurus of Tidiness: If You Like Marie Kondo … | The New York Times by Ronda Kaysen. The Japanese organizer may be the star of the moment, but others have equally appealing theories and strategies for decluttering your home.

Busy is Not the Point | Seth’s Blog by Seth Godin. No points for busy.

Declutter Your Way to Happiness With These 7 Golden Rules | Good Housekeeping by Gretchen Rubin. On the face of it, decluttering is about making a space tidier and therefore more pleasant and easy to be in, but thinking beyond that, does it actually make us happier?

How Decluttering Her Home Changed This Young Mother’s Entire Life | Forbes by Joshua Becker. Can decluttering your house really bring about meaningful change in your life? Absolutely! Consider Erin’s story.

8 Ways Minimalism Saves Money | Joshua Becker on YouTube.

Uncluttered: Own less, live more, and discover the life you always wanted. Registration for the Spring Edition of the course is now open.

21 Life-Giving Benefits of Owning Less

Minimalist living is counter-cultural. It stands contrary to the life pursued by most people in the consumer-driven society within which we live.

But there is more joy to be found owning less than can be found pursuing more. Consider just some of the benefits of living with fewer possessions:

1. Spend Less  | Choosing to accumulate only the essential often results in financial freedom.

2. Less Stress | A minimalist home is significantly less stressful.

3. Easier to Clean | The fewer things in our home, the easier they are to clean.

4. More Freedom | The sense of freedom that comes from minimalism is truly refreshing.

5. Good for the Environment | The less we consume, the less damage we do to the environment.

6. Be More Productive | Our possessions consume our time more than we realize.

7. Example for my Kids | These are valuable life lessons they will never learn in the media.

8. Support Other Causes | Money is only as valuable as what we choose to spend it on.

9. Own Higher Quality Things | More is not better… better is better.

10. Less Work for Someone Else | Create a less stressful life today and lessen the burden on someone else too.

11. Be Happier | Owning fewer possessions makes you happier.

12. Do Work You Love | Own less stuff. Choose work you love.

13. Freedom From the Comparison Game | Our culture begs us to own more.

14. Time for Things that Matter Most | The more stuff you own, the more your stuff owns you.

15. Visually Appealing | Make your home more appealing.

16. Not Tied to the Past | Release the past to create a better tomorrow.

17. Less Places for Your Heart | Invest your heart into meaningful things.

18. More Opportunity for Rest | Take a deep breath.

19. Find Things Easier | Own less clutter. Find stuff quicker.

20. Live in a Smaller Space | For most families, a house is the costliest investment they’ll ever make.

21. Display What You Value Most | Communicate what is most important.

Six Steps for Decluttering Your Kitchen . . . and Reclaiming the Heart of Your Home

Picture your dream kitchen. I bet it’s not filled with clutter.

There is something refreshing and life giving about a clean, uncluttered kitchen. It sets the tone and culture for the home. It communicates calm and order. It promotes opportunity and possibility. It saves time and ensures cleanliness. The kitchen truly is the heart of your home.

But it is definitely one of the more difficult places in the home to keep uncluttered. There are several reasons for this:

The kitchen is usually located in a high-traffic area of the home.The purpose of the room almost requires messes to be made during its use.The kitchen is often used as a collection area for odds and ends (such as mail).

When you think about your own kitchen, what kinds of clutter
come to mind? Are you seduced by shiny gadgets or specialized tools that aren’t
really necessary? Do you have several duplicates from when you got married and
merged your kitchen supplies with your spouse’s? Have you accumulated an
extensive cookbook collection even though you use only one or two favorite
cookbooks regularly?

If your kitchen is anything like most people’s, you can get
rid of a lot there.

Set Your Kitchen
Goals

Start by thinking about what you want your kitchen to
accomplish. Is it to enable you to cook tasty, healthy meals for your family
without too much fuss? Is it to be easy to keep clean so it offers you a sense
of peace and doesn’t waste your time? Is it to serve as a comfortable space for
family or friends to keep you company as you cook?

Being clear about your kitchen goals is essential. Why? Because your goals become your guidelines. You use them every time you ask Do I really need this?

For example, if your goal is to cook meals without a lot of fuss, do you really need the Bluetooth-enabled food dehydrator, pasta maker with four attachments, and airbrush cake decorating kit? What about the salad scissors, banana slicer, or corn silk remover?

At this point, if you fancy yourself a chef, have spurts where cooking provides you with comfort, or just love good food, you may be nervous that minimizing your kitchen is going to ruin your workshop for culinary creation. Take heart!

Minimizing in the kitchen doesn’t take away from you—just the opposite. It is life-giving and home-enhancing.

Removing the possessions you don’t need will uncover what’s been obscured about the joy of cooking by removing the excess clutter and distractions from your kitchen work space.

But don’t take my word for it. Take it from professional chef Mark Bittman who decked out an entire kitchen for about $300, including every cooking utensil someone would need to cook like a pro. He summarized his kitchen utensil philosophy this way: “It needs only to be functional, not prestigious, lavish or expensive.”

Clear the Kitchen
Clutter

Pick a time—maybe start first thing in the morning—when you have at least a couple of hours for the project. That’s what I did—on a Saturday morning when I knew I had time to finish the project.

Make a cup of coffee or turn on some music to put yourself at ease. Clear space on the counters to set out items.

Follow this six-step process to reclaim the heart of your home:

1. Relocate Anything
That Does Not Belong in the Kitchen

Kitchens are notorious collection areas for odds and ends—mail,
kids’ homework, purses, keys, and all that stuff in the infamous junk drawer. Identify
a new “home” for each out-of-place item and move it there.

2. Notice Physical
Boundaries

There are physical boundaries all over your kitchen—drawers
and cabinets that provide defined, limited spaces for storage. Rather than shoving
as much as you can inside these spaces, use their limitations as helpful
guidelines on how much stuff to keep.

3. Remove Duplicates
and Little-Used Items

Evaluate all the items in your kitchen by asking yourself the right question. The right question is not, Might I conceivably use it at some time? The right question is, Do I need it? If you’ve rarely or never used a tool, bowl, or storage container, then it’s probably not really necessary to keep. Also, kitchens are notorious for duplicates (spatulas, coffee mugs, spoons, pots & pans, Tupperware). Remove unneeded duplicates, keep your favorites.

Here’s a pro tip: Keep one set of lidded plastic food containers that nest together and discard the others.

4. Give Every Item a
Proper Home

Designate drawers for silverware and utensils; cupboards for
plates, containers, pots and pans, and small appliances; and closets or shelves
for food and larger, less-used appliances.

5. Clear the Counters

If your counters are routinely cluttered, there’s a good chance you’re storing too many daily-use items there (toaster, coffee maker, teapot, can opener, spice rack, knife block, canister of wooden spoons, cutting board, and the like). You’ve probably reasoned that leaving such things on the counters makes them easier to grab when you need them.

This is where the convenience fallacy comes into play.

The reality is that these items spend far more time as
clutter than they do as needed instruments of food preparation. For example, if
you make toast for breakfast, it will take you roughly three minutes to toast
your bread. After that, the toaster will sit unused for the next twenty-three
hours and fifty-seven minutes.

Rather than allowing these appliances to take up counter space, find a home for them in an easily accessed part of the kitchen, such as inside a cabinet or on a shelf.

And don’t forget the kitchen sink. Put away any cleaning
supplies (soap, scrubber, and so on) that currently clutter up the sink area.

6. Purge the Pantry

The whole point of a kitchen is consuming food, so it makes sense that you’ve got a lot of consumables in cabinets or a pantry. But chances are that you’ve also got lots of things in there you can remove.

Pull out everything and group items by kind. Relocate whatever doesn’t belong in the pantry. Clean the pantry. Put old and expired food items in the trash or
compost. Put foods back into the pantry in logical
groupings. Note where you need to reduce certain foods by “eating through” your
supplies or by donating unopened packages to a local food pantry. Organize items with bins or transparent
containers so you can see at a glance what you’ve got.Consider how to handle grocery shopping
differently so you don’t have so much food sitting around in your pantry.

When you spend less time taking care of a cluttered kitchen,
you have more time to make nutritious, delicious meals for your family and
linger in conversation at the dinner table. When you make room for loved ones
in your kitchen, you prioritize relationships by expanding everyone’s
opportunities for giving and receiving love. That’s what makes the kitchen the
heart of the home. It’s where body and soul are fed simultaneously.

We Don’t Buy Things with Money, We Buy Them with Hours from our Life

We don’t buy things with money, we buy them with hours from our life.

Or, as Henry David Thoreau put it, “The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.”

This is a life-changing principle. When we begin to see our purchases through the lens of exchanging life, rather than dollar bills, we can better appreciate the weight of our purchases and understand their full cost.

For that reason, I thought it might be helpful to take a hard look at how much life some of our purchases actually cost us.

For the sake of conversation, let’s use the median US household income. In 2017, that number was $61,400. For simplicity sake, let’s round down to $60,000 annual income.

If your household income is $60,000, working a typical 40-hour workweek, here is how many hours of work are needed for the following purchases:

Grande Starbucks Cappuccino ($4.00) = 8 minutes of work

Pair of Wrangler Jeans ($24.99) = 50 minutes of work

Coach Brand Purse ($119.99) = 1/2 day of work

55″ FlatScreen TV ($711.00) = 3 days of work

256GB iPhone XS ($1,249) = 1 week + 2 hours of work

Dinner at a restaurant for your family of four ($80.00) = 1/3 day of work

Dinner at home for your family of four ($17.00) = 1/2 hour of work

New Living Room Furniture Set ($1,983.94) = 1 week + 3.5 days of work

2019 Ford Fusion SE Hybrid ($26,550) = 5 months + 10 days of work

2,500 square foot house (10% down payment, 30-year mortgage of monthly payments, $303,000 purchase price) = 11 years + 6 months of work

1,600 square foot house (15% down payment, 30-year mortgage of monthly payments, $196,000 purchase price) = 7 years + 2 months

Keep in mind, the amount of work needed for the items above is based on an annual salary of $60,000. If your annual salary is $30,000, the work time will be doubled. If you make $120,000/year, the measurements should be halved.

Of course, there are alternatives to exchanging our hours and lives for material possessions…

It takes just 10 minutes to tell your child a bedtime story.

45 minutes for an evening walk with your spouse.

60 minutes to help your son/daughter with homework.

Or 2 hours/month to volunteer at your local soup kitchen.

The money we earn is ours to keep and we can spend it as we wish. But it can be a helpful exercise to realize how many hours of our lives go into each purchase we make.

And it is always wise to remember we can spend our hours pursuing items of far greater value than material possessions.

Inspiring Simplicity. Weekend Reads.

There’s more to life than buying stuff.

There are many wonderful people pursuing and promoting simplicity. Fortunately, some of them are gifted in communication and choose to encourage and inspire us with their words. I enjoy reading their unique perspective. I’m sure you will too.

So fix yourself a cup of coffee or tea on this beautiful weekend. Find a quiet moment. And enjoy some encouraging words about finding more simplicity in your life today.

How I Got Away With Wearing Only 5 Pieces for One Month | The M Dash by Alexandra Johnson. I have better decisions to make than what to wear every day. I enjoy putting together outfits, but I was pleasantly surprised at how much I didn’t mind giving that up.

Midlife Minimalists | No Sidebar by Jennifer Tritt. The more you love your decisions, the less you need others to love them.

More Turning to the Bare Essentials of Life | China Daily by Pan Mengqi. The movement continues to grow… now in China.

Excess Toys May Cause Decision Fatigue in Childhood | Simple Families by Denaye Barahona. Research has shown us that having too many toys reduces creativity and negatively impacts a child’s ability to focus.

Stop Comparing Your Life. Start Living It. | Joshua Becker on YouTube.

5 Struggles of an Aspiring Minimalist

Note: This is a guest post from Craig Stephens of Retire Before Dad.

The fundamentals of minimalism resonate with me today because of a period of
my life when I lived well with few possessions.

In my 20’s, I left
my career to go backpacking in Asia and Latin America. During the 14
months of bumpy bus rides and cheap hostels, I could travel more freely with a
lightweight backpack.

After a few months into my trip, I had reduced my backpack to less than 40
pounds by eliminating all the items I wasn’t using or wearing.

The backpack carried everything I needed and nothing else.

This period was among the happiest of my life.

Now that I’m in my early 40’s, a bigger home, parenting, and the proceeds of
a successful career have led to the accumulation of more possessions than our
family needs.

I’ve struggled to declutter unwanted items and failed to fully convince my
family of the benefits of owning less.

I feel the burden
of material objects every time I walk through our basement.

My wife and I envision a life where we are free to travel or live abroad as we wish. But with our current home and the possessions inside, we’d be hard-pressed to pick up and leave on short notice.

Though we’ve changed our mindset and made some progress in reducing the number of items in our house, we still face hurdles every day.

I am telling my story here, not because I have everything figured out. Quite the opposite.

I am sharing my story to highlight the obstacles I continue to encounter on my journey toward minimalism—a life I desire, but struggle to embrace.

Here are five struggles of this aspiring minimalist:



Unnecessary Timelines

Our family uses unnecessary timelines to justify keeping stuff in our home.

Each spring, our neighborhood organizes a yard sale. It’s a perfect
opportunity to sell unwanted items and teach our kids about money and household
decluttering. We encourage our kids to participate by selling toys they no
longer play with and they keep the money.

But we’ve become too reliant upon the event.

The neighborhood sale becomes a reason to build up clutter in our basement
and procrastinate removing it from our house. There’s always a pile waiting for
the yard sale in the spring. Unfortunately, its construction begins in the
summer.

One year, we were out of town the weekend of the sale. The pile sat
untouched for another twelve months. 

The same is true for a bi-annual children’s clothing consignment sale at a
local church. Stacks of plastic bins full of kids clothing are always
accumulating until the next sale. 

Overall, organized sales are great for eliminating clutter. But they should not be an excuse to delay the removal of unwanted items from the home.

The best day to remove unneeded items from your home is today.

Parting with Items of Value

Parting with items that have a known value can feel like throwing away
money.

For example, I kept two rare band t-shirts in my possession for 25 years
because they were worth about $30 each on eBay.

I never wore them and felt no sentimental attachment to them. Yet, I failed
to prioritize the time to sell the t-shirts online.

$30 wasn’t worth the time and effort to photograph, post, ship, and pay a
sales fee. But since I knew the shirts were worth money and they didn’t take up
much space, I kept them in my drawer crowding the t-shirts I wore. 

Most of the clutter in our homes used to be money.
The items we buy lose some or all their value the moment we purchase
them.  

Items that retain some value usually aren’t worth the effort to sell them.

Sometimes it’s best to let go and accept that the time it takes to extract value from something isn’t worth it. The donation may even become a lucky find for a teenager at a local thrift store.

That’s where my old t-shirts ended up. 

Household Agreement

My wife understands the concept of minimalism and is frugal by nature, but
she isn’t as eager to reduce our household items.

She grew up in a home where her parents kept everything and still do. In
comparison to both of our parents, we’re already minimalists. 

Our opinions on what is needed in our home differ.

This is especially true when considering the removal of items that might
be useful in the future.

If an item might be useful in the next three to five years, she’d prefer to keep it handy in a nearby drawer. But if it’s unlikely to be used frequently, I prefer to store it somewhere out of the way or maybe even get rid of it. Why get rid of something you’ve already acquired if you may need it in the future?

Certainly, many items such as high-quality tools or kitchen appliances should be kept for future use. But items that pile up and might never be used, such as our growing collection of rainbow unicorn birthday gift bags, are probably not worth keeping around.

There’s a balance.

Additionally, we communicate our differences and are slowly finding a balance in our household. But I’ve realized my preferred level of household simplicity may never overrule the will of the majority.

Prioritizing Time

Knowing that the task is large, I’m hesitant to get serious about eliminating
clutter from our house.

Closets, toy storage, and desk drawers are easy to clean and don’t take much
time. But once the low hanging fruit is gone, I avoid attacking the real
trouble spots.

I’d rather be at the pool with the kids, on a weekend family excursion, or
working on my side business.

The benefits of decluttering are well-known. But setting aside the time to achieve those benefits is a challenge.

It’s an upfront time investment that pays dividends over the long-term. But
I choose to do other things with my time. Without prioritizing enough time to
remove items from our house, more stuff accumulates. 

This goes beyond sorting through old boxes and separating items into
donation or trash piles.

Selling larger items via online classifieds takes a lot of time and effort.
Each piece needs to be photographed and posted. Then you need to monitor the
listing, field inquiries, and set a time to complete the final transaction.

Each step takes time, cutting into weekend leisure. So I often choose to begin the selling process another day.

Instead of delaying the task, I try to remind myself that time spent minimizing possessions frees more time in the future and immediately creates a better living space for our family.

Family Gifts

Our children love presents and our parents love to give gifts for birthdays
and holidays. 

My mother believes it is her right to spoil her grandchildren. When I’ve
approached her about cutting back on toys, she declares that watching the
excitement of her grandchildren opening gifts is among her greatest joys in
life.

It’s not the gifts that bother me, it’s the volume. 

We are grateful to have generous and loving parents who bring joy to our
children’s lives in many ways, gifts being just one of them. But the inflow is
a struggle despite our efforts to make room for the next wave of toys. 

Asking her to buy fewer gifts introduces friction in our relationship. Instead, we provide specific toy suggestions that are more likely to be enjoyed and come with fewer individual pieces. 

Still, it’s hard to stay ahead of the volume, especially during the holidays. Our kids, ages seven, five, and three, quickly grow out of clothes and lose interest in toys. Inevitably, outgrown clothing and tiresome toys end up in bins in the basement, waiting for the next community sale.

To cope with excess toys in our home, we’ve implemented toy rotations, asked the kids to consign toys to the yard and church sales, and donated unused toys to charity.

Many of our struggles are a byproduct of the season of life we are in. In the past eight years, we moved out of a small apartment into a single-family home and had three children. These events led to dramatic inflows and outflows of stuff.

Now that we’re likely through the baby years, we can remove an entire
category of items from our house. However, prioritizing the time to do so is
more challenging as the kids become engaged in activities. 

Though I’m nostalgic for the days when I lived out of a 40-pound backpack,
my life today is far better thanks to the people around me. Our family life
requires a lot more stuff than what a 26-year-old backpacker needs. But
removing clutter and spending less time cleaning and organizing gives us more
opportunities to enjoy each other’s company.

And just because there’s space, doesn’t mean it should be filled. As Francine Jay puts it, “You home is meant for living, not storage.” 

***

Craig Stephens blogs at Retire Before Dad to motivate both himself and others to be intentional with their finances. You can also find him on Facebook.

John Berger on Publicity (1972)

I am struck by the timelessness of simplicity and minimalism. It is not a new practice. Rejecting the empty promise of excess material possessions has been practiced (and promoted) by countless religious and thought leaders for centuries and centuries.

Many of whom communicated the danger and foolishness of excess physical possessions far better than me.

Recently, I found this quote from John Berger. It was originally recorded in 1972 on the show, “Ways of Seeing.” But I wanted to share it here.

First of all, I wanted to share it here because he describes the impact that advertising has on us in such brilliant terms, his argument equips us to better confront societal pressure and marketing. But secondly, because his warning was first issued 50 years ago, we are reminded that this temptation is not unique to us.

Note: He uses the word “publicity” in the original broadcast. I have changed the word to “advertising” to help it read in a more modern vernacular.

John Berger, 1972:

In the cities in which we live, all of us see hundreds of advertising images every day of our lives. No other kind of image confronts us so frequently. In no other form of society in history has there been such a concentration of images, such a density of visual messages.
 
One may remember or forget these messages but briefly one takes them in, and for a moment they stimulate the imagination by way of either memory or expectation. The advertising image belongs to the moment. We see it as we turn a page, as we turn a corner, as a vehicle passes us. Or we see it on a television screen while waiting for the commercial break to end. Advertising images also belong to the moment in the sense that they must be continually renewed and made up-to-date. Yet they never speak of the present. Often they refer to the past and always they speak of the future.
 
We are now so accustomed to being addressed by these images that we scarcely notice their total impact. […]
 
Within advertising, choices are offered between this cream and that cream, that car and this car, but advertising as a system only makes a single proposal.
 
Advertising proposes to each of us in a consumer society that we change ourselves or our lives by buying something more. This more, it proposes, will make us in some way richer, even though we will be poorer by having spent our money.
 
Advertising persuades us of this transformation by showing us people who have apparently been transformed and are, as a result, enviable. This state of being envied is what constitutes glamour, so advertising is the process of manufacturing glamour.
 
Advertising appeals to a way of life we aspire to, or think we aspire to, but have not yet achieved.

An advertising picture suggests that if we buy what it is offering, our life will be different from what it is. Scene after scene shows you this different life. Not only will our home be different, but all our relationships will become radiant because of our new possessions.

But we can only achieve such radiance if we have money. And so, advertising also works on our anxieties about money, urging each of us to scramble competitively to get more, making money appear as if it were itself magical.
 
Advertising works on the imagination but it does something else too. Because advertising pretends to interpret the world around us and to explain everything in its own terms, advertising adds up to a kind of philosophical system. The things which advertising sells are in themselves neutral, just objects and so they have to be made glamorous by being inserted into contexts which are exotic enough to be arresting but not close enough to us to offer a threat. Revolution can be wrapped around anything. In this way, advertising abuses the realities of public figures and events and struggles in other parts of the world. […]

Advertising is effective precisely because it feeds upon the real. Clothes, food, cars, cosmetics, baths, sunshine are real things to be enjoyed in themselves. Advertising begins by working on a natural appetite for pleasure. But it cannot offer the real object of pleasure and there is no convincing substitute for a pleasure in that pleasure’s own terms.

The more convincingly advertising conveys the pleasure of bathing in a warm, distant sea, the more the spectator-buyer will become aware that he is hundreds of miles away from that sea and the more remote the chance of bathing in it will seem to him. This is why advertising can never really afford to be about the product or opportunity it is proposing to the buyer who is not yet enjoying it. Advertising is never a celebration of a pleasure-in-itself. Advertising is always about the future buyer. It offers him an image of himself made glamorous by the product or opportunity it is trying to sell. The image then makes him envious of himself as he might be.
 
The words and pictures appear to be real and all belong to the same language. The text, the photographs, the editing, the layout, the printing. All are elements of the same culture, our culture. On pages like these, reality itself becomes unrecognizable.

—John Berger, Ways of Seeing Episode 4