I recently went through a major shift in my life, which made me decide to fully embrace minimalism. My short-term goal was to dramatically reduce the number of my physical possessions, to the point where I could comfortably fit everything into a car.
I’m declaring it a failure.
I reevaluated what I consider important. Owning lots of cool stuff not only seemed unimportant, it suddenly felt suffocating. It has to be stored and maintained and moved. I spent so much time and energy spent on these things which did nothing to improve my life.
I resolved two things:
Minimalism is hard. Step one is incredibly hard. As humans, we find significance in all sorts of insignificant things. Nearly anything we come into possession to is imbued with this near-mystic emotional value. Maybe the thing itself isn’t important, but it reminds you of the time you got it, or who you got it from. I tried to turn a critical eye, but the proportion of things I got rid of to the things I didn’t was completely backwards.
Fortunately, I found the second goal easy. It has much value; it’s a minimalist preemptive strike. You don’t have to discard that which you don’t acquire.
I think there are multiple reasons why I failed, but the primary one is simply that I wasn’t minimal in my approach to minimalism. I saw minimalism as an end, but my chosen means was to boil the ocean.
While I consider this attempt a failure, I’m not giving up. It’s hard to reverse the trend of a few decades, but even a small step towards minimalism is a step in the right direction. So I’ll strive for it, and try to be more pragmatic in my decisions.