Goodbye, Things: The New Japanese Minimalism

by Fumio Sasaki

We think that the more we have, the happier we will be. We never know what tomorrow might bring, so we collect and save as much as we can.

Unnecessary material objects suck up our time, our energy, and our freedom. I think minimalists are starting to realize that.

With our desire to have more, we find ourselves spending more and more time and energy to manage and maintain everything we have. We try so hard to do this that the things that were supposed to help us end up ruling us. Tyler Durden said it best in the film Fight Club: “The things you own end up owning you.”

According to 2014 data,* 306 hours of video content are uploaded to YouTube, 433,000 Tweets are posted on Twitter, and 50,000 apps are downloaded from the App Store every minute. The information at our fingertips is increasing at an astounding rate. I heard somewhere that the amount of information that a person living in Japan receives in a single day is equivalent to what someone who lived during the Edo period received in a year, if not over the course of their entire life.

I never realized before that I already had everything I needed to live a decent life. I kept wanting more and never felt satisfied. Often we think that our reality is so far removed from our ideal lifestyle that we must have suffered some misfortune along the way. But all that does is make us unhappy.

We all know the answer to that question. We eventually get used to the new state where our wishes have been fulfilled. We start taking those things for granted, and there comes a time when we start getting tired of what we have.

Tal Ben-Shahar, a popular Harvard lecturer in positive psychology, became Israeli national squash champion at the age of sixteen. His five years of six-hour daily practices paid off. But once he got home after the victory ceremony, he realized that the joy had worn off and he was left with a feeling of emptiness. He told people that the happiness lasted for only three hours.

Only a handful of people get to experience the monumental joy of big achievements like these. And yet, even those few people quickly get used to such feelings of contentment.

While there are no limits to the prices that come attached to objects, there are limits to our emotions, for sure.

I think the answer to that might be because we use the present as the basis for predicting our future emotions. While we may be the only form of life that has the ability to imagine the future, our predictions are far from accurate.

Instead of relying on organization techniques, you should first focus on decreasing the amount of things you have to put away. Once you do that, your space will naturally become less cluttered; the cycle will be broken. I have so few items in my apartment, it simply doesn’t get cluttered. The concept of clutter itself has left me!

But of course that isn’t the end of it. We often put up a pole from one wall to another, place hangers and hooks onto it, and rejoice in the ingenious storage space that we’ve created. But this is actually a step away from downsizing, from living in comfort. Once we have extra storage space, we inevitably start to store extra things. The items on that pole will eventually start to overflow.

memories are wonderful, but you won’t have room to develop if your attachment to the past is too strong. It’s better to cut some of those ties so you can focus on what’s important today.

Author Daisuke Yosumi writes that we should consider stores as our personal warehouses. All those stores out there pay good sums of money to secure space so they can stock all sorts of goods for us, and they manage their items with care. Convenience stores welcome us around the clock. Yosumi suggests we should not think of these places as shops where we buy goods, but instead as our warehouses where we go to get something when we need it.

By getting rid of our extra possessions, we’ll start to remember the important things from our past without being distracted by all that excessive memorabilia.

Things tend to bring in more things.

Our homes aren’t museums; they don’t need collections.

We sometimes don’t know when to stop, and we end up wasting too much money and time. Watch out for things that can lead to the Concorde fallacy.

When we ask ourselves, “Should I get rid of this?” we can turn that around: “If it’s not a ‘hell, no!’ it’s a ‘yes.’ ” It’ll help us discard everything except the things we absolutely can’t part with. And we’ll be able to manage just fine.

The number of possessions you have has no relevance to the level of satisfaction that you’ll get from them.

To be acutely aware of a small group of cherished possessions, rather than having a haphazard awareness of a large pile of adequate possessions, can double or triple the satisfaction we get from our things.

For a minimalist, the objective isn’t to reduce, it’s to eliminate distractions so they can focus on the things that are truly important. Minimalism is just the beginning. It’s a tool. Once you’ve gone ahead and minimized, it’s time to find out what those important things are.

Listen, life is short. It’s a shame to waste it because of some material object.

The qualities I look for in the things I buy are (1) the item has a minimalist type of shape, and is easy to clean; (2) its color isn’t too loud; (3) I’ll be able to use it for a long time; (4) it has a simple structure; (5) it’s lightweight and compact; and (6) it has multiple uses.

Minimalism naturally narrows down your choices so you can arrive at quick decisions.