Frugality, Minimalism, and Aligning Values

I’ve always been a minimalist – even as a teenager I had no interest in having lots of clothes, shoes, or other trappings of high school life in the 80s. That pull toward minimalism was reinforced during the 2 years I spent teaching English in Japan after college. No dedicated bedroom that sits empty and unused all day? My bed folds up and is stored in the closet? A tiny fridge forcing me to buy fresh fruit and vegetables every other day? Fantastic public transportation so I didn’t need to own a car? I was in heaven.

I’ve read with interest recent articles and comments about frugality – what it means to be frugal, examples of frugality, and what motivates people to adopt a frugal lifestyle. It got me thinking about my own spending habits, and their intersection with my minimalist lifestyle. I realized that while I certainly fit the definition of frugal, my spending, or lack thereof, is not motivated by a drive to save money. Rather, it’s closely tied to my desire to tread lightly through the world; I want to minimize my footprint (i.e. reduce how much of the world’s resources I appropriate for my use) and not be weighed down by ‘stuff’.

For me, minimizing my footprint means embracing habits like buying items used when possible, putting on sweaters when it’s cold, rather than cranking the thermostat, and taking public transportation when possible (sadly, that’s not too often in this country). While those habits save me money, other footprint-minimizing habits, like buying local and avoiding Amazon, Target, Walmart, and other big box stores, do not.

Not owning much ‘stuff’ checks both boxes: it reduces my footprint and doesn’t weigh me down with things I don’t need. I love the freedom this brings me. My partner and I left the Bay Area a few years ago and have been semi-nomadic ever since. Everything we own in the world fits comfortably in a 5x5 storage unit (that was the smallest size available) – I think of it as renting a closet! When we travel, we each bring a 22L day pack as our luggage, and even on a 3-month trip to Europe, we had room to spare.

I love that the concepts of frugality and minimalism both encourage a person to be thoughtful and intentional about how they are living. So many of the messages we are bombarded with daily are about consumption of ‘stuff’ that advertisers convince us we can’t live without. I think Wordsworth had it right when he said. “The world is too much with us; late and soon, / Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;”.

I know from reading this forum over the past few years that in answering the question of how best to spend our time and resources, we’d all come up with wildly different answers; there’s a reason Baskin-Robbins has 31 flavors of ice cream! The beauty of taking the time to reflect and to make conscious choices, is that we can be more confident that our spending – of time and energy, not just money! – aligns with our values.

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