What Is Minimalism?

How less stuff leads to more life

The world pressures us to be mindless consumers — get a corporate job, get a fancy house in suburbia, binge Netflix shows every night, binge drink every weekend, and fill the hole in your soul by buying more stuff like a fancier car, newer phone, bigger TV.

That’s what the “American dream” has become. Constant groping and slaving for money that we immediately spend on short-term material indulgences that we know don’t actually fulfill us. They just distract us well enough for us to bear the suffering of modern life.

What else is there, right?

I’m here to to tell you: there is a better way. We can free ourselves from materialist habits and replace them with what’s truly important to us, a life full of meaning instead of just things. We can take back control of our minds and our lives with minimalism.

Minimalism Is The Art of Becoming More By Doing And Desiring Less

In life, you get what you focus on. If you focus on complaining, distracting yourself, craving things you don’t need — that’s what you’ll get. But the glorious thing is: you can choose where you direct your focus.

If you focus on developing gratitude, working on fun and helpful projects, and pruning your desires so that they grow only towards your goals, then that’s what you’ll get — a meaningful life.

Minimalism is the art of defining what’s truly, deeply important to you in life, and then dumping everything else. All the power, mental, financial, etc, that was being dissipated into random things becomes freshly available for you to direct towards achieving the life you really want to live.

And the life you really want to live — is it a life of having a lot of stuff?

Minimalism Isn’t Against Stuff

Things are important. We need a toothbrush to keep our teeth clean. We need food to eat. We need money to buy food and keep the lights on at home. What we don’t need is excessive or mindless stuff.

Minimalism is about consciously defining what stuff is important versus what is not important. A toothbrush — necessity. A television — probably…