LESS is MORE
The Minimalists suggest focusing on things that add value to life
J OSHUA Fields Millburn recalls a woman telling him about a literal dumpster fire.
She attended one of his appearances as half of the Minimalists, a duo with a popular podcast about minimizing the amount of stuff in their lives in an effort to maximize time for experiential things that matter more to them.
The childhood friends have an audience in the millions now, who listen to their podcast, read their books and visit their website. One of their listeners, a woman in Philadelphia, said she rented a dumpster and she and her husband filled it with unwanted belongings. Then the dumpster caught fire. And the fire spread to the house.
“She thanked me,” Millburn says. “Because of minimalism, she said there was nothing in the house she even considered running inside to save. The kids were safe, the pet was out of the house. Everything else was replaceable.”
Millburn’s path to minimalism began in 2009. In the span of a month, his marriage ended and his mother died — both the sort of events that make one
pack and move stuff. He walked away from a well-paying job and, with Nicodemus, started a philosophical reboot about what matters in their lives.
They’ll visit House of Blues this Sunday on their Less Is Now Tour, visiting a town that two months ago had its own reckoning with regard to possessions, as Hurricane Harvey washed through thousands of homes.
“Tragedy can illuminate a new path,” Millburn says. “That was certainly the case with me. And I think you’re probably seeing a lot of that in Houston right now, too.”
Millburn talked about minimalism and some of the habits that run contrary to his work.
Q: My family is in the middle of a purge. Is that the best way to start?
A: There’s no bad way to start. But we do the 30-day Minimalism Game. I like getting momentum started with one item. The first 30 days, start simple. Get rid of one thing on the first day. As the month progresses, increase the number. Three things on Day 3. Fifteen things on Day 15. It starts easy but gets more difficult. And it changes your relationship with all the stuff.
Q: Do you find people struggle with the concept of minimalism? One of you is a snowboarder, and I know a listener asked how you could justify owning a lot of snowboarding gear. But it seems if you love something, you can justify keeping it.
A: I’m almost with you. Ryan’s the snowboarder. I’m not coordinated enough. But when you call yourself a minimalist, everything is blanketed by perception about what it must mean: poverty, silence, asceticism, desperation. Where I don’t quite agree with you is you talk about loving an item. I think the things you own should augment what you really love. I try to avoid loving things and attaching emotion to things. I try to find things that add value to my life.
Q: I always believed once I had three of something it became “a collection.” Those are tough to break up.
A: It’s interesting, yes, if you look at any sort of collection, I think you’ll see wellplanned hoarding. It’s alphabetized, so suddenly, it’s OK. We can justify anything. But you have to be honest with yourself. We pretend things have value. “Imaginary value,” I call it. But it requires honesty: Does it add value to my life or is it part of a momentary pacification. Another thing we do, “This is something I’m going to use one day.” That day is always in
some nonexistent future. “I’ll hold on … just in case.” “Just in case” are three dangerous words.
Q: That phrase gets used a lot when my family packs for a trip.
A: Six years ago, we came up with a rule we call the “just in case rule.” The reason we did it was on our first book tour, we started in St. Petersburg, Fla. I thought I owned very little. But the trunk of our car was full of stuff. Ryan had a suitcase, and I had a suitcase. We each had a garment bag for some reason. It was five or six days, that’s it. We felt like such hypocrites. “Swim trunks … just in case.” What was the suit for? An impromptu funeral? So we came up with a rule. If we said we were going to pack something “just in case” we didn’t pack it. These were things that could be replaced for less than $20 and in 20 minutes. And I carry that now into my regular life. And I don’t find myself constantly throwing down $20 bills. For me, most of those items are things I wouldn’t use anyway.
Q: You guys talk about your differences. You’re the introvert, and he’s the extrovert. Do you find those differences apply to possessions? That maybe an introvert keeps a stronger hand over his environment?
A: Maybe, maybe. I hadn’t thought about that. It is true, Ryan and I have radically different personalities. He’s an extreme extrovert, and I’m an extreme introvert. We have different religious beliefs, different political beliefs. We’re different people. But we do have some of the same values because we’ve seen benefits in simplifying. And the ways simplifying gets us to other shared values. It’s weird in a way, it was never our intention to be proselytizing or to convert anybody to a way of thinking. For me it was a change I made to put this in place of discontent and pain and these anxieties. After my mom died, I looked in the mirror and assessed my own life as a wellorganized hoarder. I had to go to the Container Store to get items to organize stuff that was in the way. It was a maze I had to get around. So the environment I created wasn’t working.
Q: Sometimes the stuff sneaks up on you.
A: Of course, we don’t accumulate or hoard overnight. The idea is killing Godzilla as a baby instead of when he’s stomping all over the town. But it can catch you. It’s a process that takes place over decades. My mom wasn’t a hoarder. But she had 65 years of accumulation in a tiny one-bedroom apartment. When I looked at the stuff she was holding onto … . She had 14 winter coats in a closet. She lived in Florida. Sure, we were from Dayton, Ohio, but you don’t need 14 coats, even in Alaska. I’ve lived in Montana the past five years, before moving to Los Angeles. But even there, I didn’t have more than one winter coat. Some of the things she had in her closet still had a price tag. I took her shopping a month before she died. She wanted a bathrobe, and I wasn’t going to begrudge that. But that robe was still there in the closet with the tag a month later.
Q: We seem especially inclined to make strong attachments to items from youth, either ours or our children’s.
A: Dealing with my mom’s stuff was that way. I had an epiphany the moment I boxed up a 26-foot U-Haul. I had to wait an extra day because I needed the biggest one they had, which was also the biggest one in all of Ohio. All this work, friends and movers to help. But I couldn’t commingle my mom’s stuff with mine. I found four boxes under her bed. It was my old elementary school paperwork. I was curious as to why she’d hold on to paperwork. But memories came rushing back, I wasn’t holding paperwork. I was holding the memories in those boxes. But then I thought, “Wait. She probably didn’t know those boxes were even there.” They’d been sealed for more than two decades. And in those two decades, she hadn’t been accessing those memories. And at that moment I realized our memories are not in our things. They’re inside us. She didn’t need to hold onto those boxes to hold on to me. I was never in those boxes.