And since I'm posting again...

[amycooper]

 

When the Gospel of Minimalism Collides With Daily Life

Some of you of you might remember my great ongoing downsizing/minimizing project.  And while I do think minimizing has value, it only does to a point.  Just like having too much stuff and buying just to buy is one extreme in the wrong direction, I feel like a lot of the minimizing blogs out there take it to the other, equally impractical or even harmful extreme.

"Throw out all your pens and keep only one!"  Yeah, but that's really wasteful and assumes you're in the financial situation that you could go out and buy yourself one pen every time you run out of ink. 

"Get rid of all your kid's toys!  They're have more fun playing with wooden spoons and thinks you have around the house." Trust me, they won't.  Plus randomly throwing away all a kid's possessions is more than a little traumatic (and you can explain minimalism all you want, from the kid's pov it's random).

Like most things, it's a balance.  Amelia had a birthday party recently (can you believe she's 2?) and got a shitload of toys.  This was followed by me donating a large bag full of toys she seldom or never plays with anymore.  I need to do the same for Finn soon (especially with his birthday coming up).  In general we do own too many things and I do want to downsize what we own, but to a sane level.  Because the truth is, this is awfully hard to live in:

Comments

[superbadgirl]

That doesn't even look fun to live in. How sterile!

[amycooper]

No it does not.

[rahirah]

Minimalism seems like a very high-maintenance lifestyle. The amount of cleaning it takes to keep a room like that looking pristine is... a lot.

[amycooper]

I know that in theory it shouldn't. The less you have, the less you need to clean around. But I think like all things it becomes problematic when taken to far in extreme-as in paint everything white and getting all white furniture. Minimalism seems to come with a white-on-white aesthetic that seems counter-intuitive to me.