What happens when possessions own you?
Two minimalist bloggers explain why having less makes you happier
We’re hard-wired to hoard resources. That way, when the famine comes, we won’t starve — or so our inner caveman tells us. But in modern-day world, when so many people have so much stuff, how beneficial is a deeply ingrained urge to accumulate?
Hence the Great Unloading, a recent era ushered in by millennials, who refuse to take their parents’ knick-knacks and keepsakes, and Japanese super-organizer Marie Kondo, who taught the world to mercilessly interrogate their socks and CD collections by asking them: Do you spark joy in my life?
Then there are the popular online personalities the Minimalists, two guys in their mid-30s who got rid of everything society told them they were supposed to want. (Well, except for the hair dryer and the snowboarding equipment.)
In 2010, childhood friends Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus started a blog devoted to disburdening. It now gets about five million readers a year, and the guys have diversified, launching a podcast and filming the recently released movie Minimalism: A Documentary About the Important Things. The movie, directed by Matt D’Avella, features neuroscientists and people living in microhomes, psychologists and a slew of authors, whose books have titles like You Can Buy Happiness (and It’s Cheap): How One Woman Radically Simplified Her Life and How You Can Too (Amazon Digital Services), and Living in the Land of Enough (Amazon Digital Services).
Millburn discovered minimalism during a personal low, in 2009, when his mother died of lung cancer around the same time he was getting divorced. Faced with the daunting task of finding a place for his mom’s belongings, he ordered a U-Haul and rented a storage unit. His mother hadn’t been a hoarder — “not in the sense of the TV show,” he said recently while visiting Washington — but she had 65 years’ worth of accumulation.
“She had 14 winter coats in her closet,” Millburn said, then paused for effect to deliver the punchline: “She lived in St. Pete Beach, Florida.”
Somewhere between the discovery of boxes upon boxes of his elementary school paperwork and answering questions about whether he wanted a climate-controlled storage unit, Millburn had a change of heart.
He realized his mother was keeping a lot of worthless items to hang onto a piece of him. Yet, “those boxes had been sealed for more than two decades,” he said. “That made me realize something really important for the first time: Our memories aren’t in our things.”
So he cancelled the U-Haul and tossed, donated or sold his mother’s personal effects.
Then he turned his attention to his own things. At the time, Millburn had a big job, which facilitated a big house, which was filled to the brim.
Over the course of eight months, he got rid of roughly 90 per cent of his possessions.
Then he started letting go of other things: the stressful, high-paying job as a director of operations for 150 retail stores, which he hated, plus his big American dream-calibre house and 80 pounds of excess weight.
Nicodemus hopped on board after noticing the positive changes in his friend. Getting rid of things made Millburn ask himself questions he’d never thought to pose before. Namely: What’s important to me?
Echoes Nicodemus: “I was able to find out what my values and beliefs were. If you were to ask me at the time ‘What are your priorities?’ I would have said my health is really important, yet I’m eating fast food on a regular basis, because it’s easy.”
Or he would have said his relationships, yet he only saw his mother on holidays, even though she lived 30 minutes away.
“Our priorities aren’t what we say we do, they’re what we actually do,” he said.
And while both men were in the red at the time, they kept buying things, partly for self-soothing purposes. “And on top of that I was pacifying myself with bad habits, whether it was indulging in a ton of TV or going out to the bar and racking up a $300 bar tab,” Nicodemus said.
“And those pacifiers stopped working.”
And, in case you’re wondering, the answer is no, neither Nicodemus nor Millburn regrets any of the possessions they’ve given away.
“I have one big regret in my adult life, which is that I didn’t spend more time with my mom when she was dying,” Millburn said.
“Because you can’t get that back.”
I have one big regret in my adult life, which is that I didn’t spend more time with my mom when she was dying.