Every Monday I post Real Life Minimalists, a profile of one of my readers in their own words. If you’d like to participate, click here for details.
This week, we have a wonderful contribution from Rine, who writes about the benefits of minimizing consumption, from a personal to a global scale. Please visit her blog to read more of her writing.
Rine writes:
I started practicing minimalism about seven years ago when my partner and I were newlyweds. A variety of factors led to my desire to simplify our way of life. When my partner and I moved into our first apartment, we were lucky to have the generous support of our family and friends who—with a free hand—bought us everything we needed from our wedding registry and even sorted through their dusty attics and dingy basements to give us their spare furniture and appliances. Unfortunately, after my partner and I merged our belongings and organized our gifts, we suddenly found ourselves surrounded by copious amounts of stuff, including duplicates and even triplicates of things—we had three televisions, two CD players, two crock pots, too many lamps, furniture with nowhere to put it, et cetera.
At that time, I was also deeply enmeshed in international human rights theory, which I was studying in graduate school. Initially, I mostly focused on human rights issues overall, but as time went by, I became more and more interested in how political, economic, and societal systems and norms lead to things like inequality and poverty. I began to focus my studies on political economic theory and the effects of globalization on both economics and culture in order to better understand why over half the world’s population lives on less than $2.50 per day. The fact that we haven’t found a solution to these problems in our modern times really baffled me and still does even now. I also focused on how consumerism and over-consumption negatively affect not only people, but also the environment, and I began looking into alternative economic systems, as well as more personal changes that I could make in my own life that could reduce my so-called “carbon footprint” and any other affects my consumption might have on the world. Some of the books that helped me to work through these issues and that I highly recommend reading were Mindfulness in the Marketplace: Compassionate Responses to Consumerism edited by Allan Hunt Badiner, Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered by E. F. Schumacher, and Status Anxiety by Alain de Botton.
Fortunately, both my partner and I decided to minimize our lifestyle and so we slowly began the process. First, I went on Craigslist to sell our two televisions, two CD players, multiple pieces of furniture, and old bicycles. I sold clothing, board games, video game consoles, and other gaming paraphernalia on Ebay, and I used Amazon to sell books, CDs, and DVDs. Eventually, I sold our third television, and my partner and I turned our desktop computer into our primary entertainment center. We stopped buying things like books, movies, and games throughout the year and designated Christmastime as the only time we could purchase something new. We adopted a “one in, one out” policy for new purchases, and any purchase of something that wasn’t a necessity had to fit within our very limited monthly budget. We gave our car, which we were actually borrowing from our family, to one of our brothers, and we started walking, cycling, and taking public transportation to wherever we needed to go. We ended up buying a Honda Metropolitan scooter for quick trips around town, like to the grocery store or for places that were inaccessible by public transportation or cycling, and luckily, the Honda was a very good investment—it got 90 miles to the gallon, and we drove it for almost 10,000 miles.
By limiting our consumption, my partner and I were able to pay off his student loan debt and save money. This enabled us to do a number of things over the last couple of years, including living abroad in two different countries. We still have a lot of minimal and simple living goals to reach, including paying off my student loan debt, as well as continuing to minimize the amount of stuff we own. In the coming years, I think our focus will be on the quality of what we own rather than the quantity. My own personal beliefs regarding my relationship with stuff has come full circle since becoming a minimalist. I think that some minimalists like to believe that objects are not important, and I think that I felt similarly in the beginning; however, as a trained anthropologist and archaeologist, I recognize the importance of material culture to humankind—creating and using material objects is part of being human. For me, the objects we own and use in our daily life should be respected and valued for their utility and aesthetic nature rather than simply for the status they may supposedly endow us with.
{If you’d like to learn more about minimalist living, please consider reading my book, The Joy of Less, A Minimalist Living Guide, or subscribing to my RSS feed.}
Wow, this story really inspires me!
start building life so essential to survival, food, shelter, mobility, grooming, is very different to consume status or fashion, or desire, to impoverish, materially and spiritually. I see you tried to get him into a trap, in a prison and managed to escape, that’s true intelligence.
Thank you for detailing your steps towards moving to minimalism and including some book titles. I look forward to some future reading! Lots of great information.
https://awellstockedlife.wordpress.com/2015/02/16/ten-steps-to-begin-taking-back-your-financial-freedom/
Thank you, Francine, for sharing my story with your readers! I always visit your website on Monday to read about other real life minimalists. And I had a great time writing a little bit about my own story. There’s so much more I could say about our journey to minimalism, so if anyone has any questions, please feel free to ask. Also, if anyone has anymore book or blog recommendations, please send them my way too. I’m always on the lookout for new things to read to help me to understand how small actions, like minimizing consumption, can help on a global scale.
Nice to see a fellow academic on here.
I rarely engage in self-promotion, and I cringe at doing so now. But I do keep a running, lengthy, annotated bibliography online – it’s the only content on my blog anymore. You might be interested in the “simple living/consumerism/critiques thereof” category, although you may not always agree with my notes!
Hey CountryMouse – just had a look at your site, quite interesting!
Loved your review of Dave Bruno’s 100 thing challenge, ha ha.
Why thank you, MBOL.
People counting items is something of a pet peeve – so many justify their varied and highly subjective methods in so very many ways, lumping objects together or deciding they really belong to someone else, all in order to drive their personal number down. For a couple years there, it was quite trendy and highly competitive online.
And you know what? I’ve worked with hoarders in the past, and the hyper-counters strike me as practicing reverse hoarding: loss for the sake of loss (stuff for the sake of stuff), creative accounting for the sake of ever lower numbers (denial of the real volume of the hoard), and the same absolute fixation on material belongings (do I have enough of X? I bet I could find more X on sale. I could fit more X in here). The results are strikingly different but the fixation on material surroundings is eerily similar.
My opinion, of course. I see the extremists as the two ends of the same stuff spectrum. Personally, if you’re going to live with a robe, a bowl, and a prayer book, my hat is off to you and I bow respectfully before your presumably monk-like asceticism. But when you keep everything else but claim your spouse is the technical owner, just so you can crow about how great you are at being materially humble, well, you’ve lost my respect and my interest.
When you realize some people don’t have a change of clothes or have to carry what they own on their backs, it makes you more mindful of what you have. Teaching a young friend how to turn his worn shirts into a quilt, by cutting off cuffs and collars and button plackets. The unworn parts of his dress pants will be the back of the quilt. A worn blanket will be the batting. Sweaters too ratty to give away will be felted.
What a great read — learned so much just from your story. I think it’s the best so far on this website. Congrats for figuring it out and doing something about it. I’m a minimalist but now as extreme as some people (and I use exremely nicely) — I still have issues with some of the things that I have and trying to analyze my fear of letting them go. It’s a continual process and I’m enjoying it thoroughly.
There is an argument for quality over quantity I believe. Choose well, and keep for ever is a good principle to live by and makes for a more peaceful life I find.
It’s inspiring you were able to pay off student loan debt, that’s awesome. And yes, seeing people with nothing really helps set things straight. I ditched most of my stuff at 40, and now am in Goa, India from the U.S. You get to see how really poor people live. Currently, I live in a hut, again shows how little we can own.
You sold several TV’s as well, which helps free up time to actually live, plus removes all the persuasive advertising…
Best Real Life Minimalist post that I’ve read in a long time.
Great post. Very thoughtful. You articulated many of my own intentions and efforts along these lines:
“I also focused on how consumerism and over-consumption negatively affect not only people, but also the environment. . . . and I began looking into personal changes that I could make in my own life that could reduce my so-called “carbon footprint” and any other affects my consumption might have on the world.”
My first inspiration/revelation was “Material World: A Global Family Portrait,” by Peter Menzel, Sierra Club Books (1994) Peace.
I really learned a lot from “Material World: A Global Family Portrait” as well. The visual proof was all there to see, and there was something beautiful about the simplicity of the homes where there was not much. I don’t mean to minimize the suffering those families might experience from lack of education or healthcare, but certainly the lack of random stuff was inspiring.
Wonderful post Rine. I too am motivated by environmental concerns.
I really enjoyed this post. I will never be a count your things minimalist. I keep finding things to give away and except for earrings, I seldom buy anything new. My kids buy us movie passes or gift cards for restaurants.
We keep passing things around. My older son had sport coats to give away, they didn’t fit his brother, but they fit his sister’s boyfriend. My daughter gave me a shirt and a jacket she didn’t want. My husband gave me a nice sweater and my older son gave me a shirt and 2 pairs of jeans. I am wearing an old sweater of my sister in law’s as I write this. It fits perfectly and it is keeping me warm.
We have been living in this condo since 2001. We have never turned on the heat. Even in Chicago, a south facing window, and neighbors on the other 5 sides keep us warm. We own one car and find that layering clothing works very well. Knowing what I do, unless I had lots of little kids, I would always choose apartment living.