Writer of things that go bump in the night

Sorting through the Clutter:  How “The Girl Before” Misrepresents Minimalism

The Girl Before depicts minimalism as an obsessive-compulsive symptom of emotional instability, in contrast with what I can attest it to be from years of committed practice:  a versatile set of tools/techniques to promote emotional balance—that is, to attain not merely a clutter-free home, but a clutter-free head.


In the BBC One/HBO Max thriller The Girl Before, created by JP Delaney (based on his novel), brilliant-but-troubled architect Edward Monkford (David Oyelowo)—ah, “brilliant but troubled,” Hollywood’s favorite compound adjective; it’s right up there with “grounded and elevated”—is designer and owner of a postmodern, polished-concrete, minimalist home in suburban London, One Folgate Street, which he rents out, with extreme selectivity, at an affordable rate to “people who live [t]here the way he intended.”  Prospective tenants are required to submit to an uncomfortably aloof interview with Edward, whose otherwise inscrutable mien lapses into occasional expressions of condescending disapproval, and then fill out an interminable questionnaire, which includes itemizing every personal possession the candidate considers “essential.”

The rarified few who meet with Edward’s approval must consent to the 200-odd rules that come with living in the house (no pictures; no ornaments; no carpets/rugs; no books; no children; no planting in the garden), enforced through contractual onsite inspections of the premises.  Meanwhile, One Folgate Street is openly monitored 24/7 by an AI automation system that tracks movements, polices violations of maximum-occupancy restrictions, regulates usage of water and electricity, sets time limits on tooth-brushing, and preselects “mood playlists”—just for that personal touch.  All of this is a reflection of Edward’s catholic minimalist philosophy:  “When you relentlessly eradicate everything unnecessary or imperfect, it’s surprising how little is left.”

“The Girl Before,” starring David Oyelowo, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, and Jessica Plummer

The Girl Before—and I’ve only seen the miniseries, not read the book—intercuts between two time periods, set three years apart, dramatizing the experiences of the current tenant, Jane Cavendish (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), grief-stricken over a recent stillbirth at 39 weeks, and the home’s previous occupant, Emma Matthews (Jessica Plummer), victim of a sexual assault during a home invasion at her flat.  (Emma, we soon learn, has since died at One Folgate Street under ambiguous circumstances that may or may not have something to do with Edward…?)  Edward’s minimalist dogma appeals to both women for the “blank slate” it offers—the opportunity to quite literally shed unwanted baggage.

This being a psychological thriller, it isn’t incidental that both Jane and Emma bear not merely uncanny physical resemblance to one another, but also to Edward’s late wife, who herself died at One Folgate Street along with their child, casualties of an accident that occurred during the construction of the home originally intended for the site before Edward scrapped those plans and went psychoneurotically minimalistic.  Everyone in The Girl Before is traumatized, and it is the imposition of or submission to minimalist living that provides an unhealthy coping mechanism for Edward, Jane, and Emma, each in their own way:

In this novel, [Delaney] wanted to explore the “weird and deeply obsessive” psychology of minimalism, evident in the fad for [Marie] Kondo and her KonMari system of organizing.  “On the face of it,” he wrote, “the KonMari trend is baffling—all that focus on folding and possessions.  But I think it speaks to something that runs deep in all of us:  the desire to live a more perfect, beautiful life, and the belief that a method, or a place, or even a diet, is going to help us achieve that.  I understand that impulse.  But my book is about what happens when people follow it too far.  As one of my characters says, you can tidy all you like, but you can’t run away from the mess in your own head.”

Gregory Cowles, “Behind the Best Sellers:  ‘Girl Before’ Author JP Delaney on Pseudonyms and the Limits of Marie Kondo,” New York Times, February 3, 2017

Indeed.  And if only The Girl Before had been a good-faith exploration of what minimalism, the psychology and practice of it, actually is.

Winter Clearance Event

I am a practitioner of minimalism.  I was introduced to the concept by my wife, who’d initially broached the subject with me in 2013, long before I was ready to truly understand it, let alone embrace it.  She tried again over New Year’s of 2018 into ’19, and for reasons I myself don’t fully understand—perhaps the aspirational possibilities of the season, to say nothing of a conscious effort I’d been making that past year to espouse radical shifts in perspective/behavior—I committed to the experiment on the spot.

During the months that followed, we dedicated four hours every Saturday to cleaning out our two-bedroom apartment of eighteen years—one drawer at a time, one cabinet at a time, one closet at a time, one room at a time.  When a given session’s allotted interval was up, we stopped—even if we were on a roll.  The key to running a marathon, after all, is to pace oneself.  And when you’re high on purging—a very real and powerful sensation—it can be hard as hell to call it a day.

But that’s the trick:  When the timer stops, we stop.  Therein lies the discipline.  (It’s one of many reasons why minimalizing is far more manageable when done with the reciprocal support of a partner.)  We then reward ourselves by pausing mindfully to appraise the heaping box of stuff we’ve gathered to jettison and saying aloud, “I just reclaimed that much space in my home, and in my life.”  We are no longer the custodians of those materials anymore; we take a moment, accordingly, to appreciate that.  Then it’s off to Goodwill.

Over a period of four months, my wife and I sold, donated, or threw out an estimated 80% of our possessions.  I don’t miss a single cast-off.  Quite a bit of it was surprisingly easy to get rid of, like—Christ help me—the Burger King Lord of the Rings light-up goblets we’d stored and forgotten about in that high cabinet above the microwave too inconvenient to ever open.  There was quite a bit of that sort of sundry paraphernalia tucked out of sight and out of mind.  Those are the items that elicit an immediate and resolute “No, I don’t want this anymore.”  Easy.

The rest of the stuff—clothes, cookware, media, tchotchkes, photos, gifts, mementoes—then falls into one of two categories:  “Yes, I want this” or “Maybe…”  The former tends to be a relatively small pile, whereas the latter is substantial—probably the lion’s share of one’s possessions.  “Maybe…” is an emotional and logistical minefield that tests the prospective minimalist.  It’s the “Maybe…” items that almost always conjure a brew of anxiety in the pit of my stomach.  And anxiety is a motivation-killer; it’s why so many well-intentioned attempts at minimalizing cease in the immediate wake of the comparatively easier “No, I don’t want this” phase.  With the onset of anxiety, we say, “I’ll do this later,” only to never return to the project.

But anxiety, I’m here to tell you, is a minimalist’s “Spidey-sense.”  Anxiety is the emotion we experience when we no longer want something yet feel obligated, for myriad reasons, to hold onto it.  What I discovered sifting through my possessions was that, despite my frequent hedging, I actually wanted to get rid of most of them—precious few of which I used, the rest I’d come to consider a crushing burden—I just needed “permission,” silly though that may seem, to let them go.  So, as I’d be debating the fate of this-or-that object—something that was useful, valuable, and/or meaningful to me once upon a time, but no longer—my wife would gently offer the “permission” I sought to free myself of it.  Often, her encouragement was all I needed to let it go on the spot.

And then I would return the favor, granting her the “permission” she on occasion needed.  Or sometimes she would say, “I no longer want this, but can’t bring myself to physically put it in the Dumpster.  Will you please do it for me?”  And I would.  And then she’d do the same for me.  Such is why, as previously indicated, minimalizing is made so much easier with a supportive teammate.  But it doesn’t require a partner, merely a willingness to heed one’s Spidey-sense:  Whenever hesitation is triggered or anxiety surfaces, relieve yourself of the item in question permanently.  Trust me:  You’ll never look back.

Despite our comprehensive home cleanout, which my wife and I agree was one of the most positive, life-altering exercises we’ve ever undertaken—choosing to no longer be the custodians of copious material clutter—one specific area of the apartment was left dauntingly untouched:  the guestroom closet.

We had enviably ample storage in our L.A. apartment, and I possess a preternatural talent for maximizing the use of space—I can pack into the trunk of a small sedan what most people need a U-Haul van for—and so the walk-in closet of our second bedroom had thusly become the archival repository for a staggering amount of (mostly my) shit:  thousands of comic books; banker’s boxes crammed with old script drafts and research materials; Christmas decorations; the cardboard packaging our big-ticket electronics had come in (just in case…); collectables; and zillions—no fewer than zillions—of little cards, handwritten notes, journals, and memorabilia.

The job of cleaning all of that out, which mostly fell on me owed to the fact that it was mainly my stuff, would be one that would take as many months, I estimated, as had dealing with the entire rest of the apartment!  It was not only a lot of stuff—a good deal of which I would later sell on eBay, a time-consuming (if surprisingly lucrative) endeavor—but it was also the most sentimental belongings, ephemera dating back to our college years and even earlier.  (Among the endless reams of paperwork was a receipt from a B&B in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where we stayed on our first vacation together—in 1997!)  Despite all we had accomplished and as good as I felt about it, I knew what a monster that closet was going to be, so I put it off…

… and put it off…

… and put it off.  But I nonetheless took great pride in having otherwise minimalized our home and our lives.  I considered myself a minimalist, despite having skipped the “final exam,” as it were.  And that closet notwithstanding, we continued to practice minimalism with applied regularity, routinely paring down our possessions—always reexamining what we owned and whether it was still actively useful—and steadfastly refusing to bring anything new into our home that didn’t have an identifiable and immediate purpose.  Not after all the physically and emotionally trying work we’d done!

We could go on vacation now without returning home with souvenirs, save our shared memories of the experience.  Our regular outings at Dodger Stadium persisted, but we were no longer coming back from them with yet another T-shirt.  We permanently ceased giving one another gifts and greeting cards, even for birthdays and Christmas, which has had the added benefit of alleviating the unwelcome pressure associated with that institutionalized custom.  And we have, by extension, relieved our friends and relatives from that same social obligation; we’ve explained our commitment to minimalism, and have asked them to respect that.

“Minimalism?” most of them asked out of genuine intellectual curiosity, seldom if ever in judgment.  “That’s like Marie Kondo, right?  Cleaning out like crazy and getting your shit organized?”

That’s what I thought it was, too—“extreme spring-cleaning.”  A one-time event.  Such is how I understood it when it was first explained to me, and that’s what I figured we were doing during those first few months of 2019.  But in the years since, I’ve come to understand it much differently—and much more deeply.  I’ve discovered applications for minimalism in every facet of my life.

All That You Can’t Leave Behind

Minimalism is a worldview—and a philosophical toolbox, articulated by the Minimalists in their documentaries/podcasts and the conceptual basis for much of what I’m about to convey—through which we learn to appreciate that everything we invite into our lives costs us in at least one of three ways (and usually two, very often all three):  it costs us in money; it costs us in time; it costs us in our attention.

This is true of every material good we purchase (and subsequently store in our homes), every gift we receive, every relationship we maintain, every event we attend, every hobby we pursue, every habit we cultivate, every pet we adopt, every TV show we watch, every blog we follow, every text message to which we choose to respond.  That’s what all those things cost us, to one degree or another:  money, time, and/or attention—the only three assets we have.  We trade them in return for things that—ostensibly—add value to our lives.

When we accept that truth—when we acknowledge, understand, and internalize the open-ended price of assimilating new things and maintaining them—we learn to become extremely prejudicial about what we bring into our lives, and what we keep in our lives moving forward.  Everything gets evaluated through that lens:  Does this (still) add value to my life commensurate with the money, time, and/or attention I am required to (re)invest in it?

If the answer is an honest yes, then keep the thing in question, whatever it may be, without further self-justification.  Absolutely!  But if it doesn’t—if it triggers our “Spidey-sense,” even just momentarily—then we grant ourselves permission to let it go, with gratitude in our heart for what it once meant to us, and without a scintilla of self-recrimination for either discarding it or having kept to so long in the first place.  We honor that item by turning it over to an individual or charity that can actively use it, and will be grateful to have it—and if that isn’t possible, then we recycle or discard it.

Garbage truck required; spandex costume optional

I did not fully appreciate that minimalism is a lifestyle philosophy—how practicing it hadn’t simply decluttered my apartment, but had in fact quietly retrained my brain—until the autumn of 2020, when my wife and I were presented with an unexpected opportunity to purchase our first home, which would necessitate a cross-country move in the middle of a pandemic.

In the wake of what was essentially an overnight decision, and handshake deal, to buy our new place, it immediately became apparent what an enormous advantage we’d inadvertently given ourselves by minimalizing our possessions the year prior; we not only wouldn’t have to weed through all that stuff, we didn’t have to deal with the headache of trying to find charities that would take it, as Goodwill and the Los Angeles Public Library, et al., were not accepting donations given the ongoing public-health crisis.

Still, there was the matter of that theretofore neglected guestroom closet.  That had to be dealt with, but at least it was the only space in our apartment that would require special attention.  Much of the contents of the closet had come with me from New York, and had been left largely untouched for two decades; I certainly had no desire or intention to haul that stuff back to New York.  I refused to bring a single item into our new home “just because”; it all had to be intentional.  Which meant I finally had to face the “final exam”:  I had to clean out, under deadline, that jam-packed closet.

Once I’d dismantled it, it took me “merely” two full days to sift through what was in there—a remarkably abbreviated duration in light of the sheer amount of stuff, which is a testament to just how prejudicial I had become in the intervening year.  All manner of sentimental items—and there were a lifetime’s worth in there—were summarily reviewed, paid their final respects, and permanently retired.  Stuff I’d spent my life holding on to—all the things I thought I could never part with, because they somehow “defined” me—were either sold, donated, recycled, or junked.  Two days.

With that, I’d officially graduated to full-fledged minimalist!  It was emotionally fatiguing going through all that stuff—I knew it would be, hence the reason I’d avoided it for so long—but it was surprisingly easy to let it all go.  Somewhere along the way, all the practice I’d had at letting go became second nature.  And I had, both consciously and unconsciously, taken those tools and techniques and started applying them to other areas of my life, as well.

Minimalism conditions us to let go of anything:  bad habits, toxic relationships, old grudges, media franchises we follow out of “subscriber obligation” but haven’t actually enjoyed in years, and—yes—sentimental keepsakes and family heirlooms, too.  When we learn to ask ourselves if we really want to carry those things with us into the future—if they’re worth any more of our money, time, and attention, or whether our resources would be better allocated for interests that provide a current and appreciable ROI—we empower ourselves to let go of them… just like that.

Listen to your Spidey-sense:  Any possession or obligation or relationship that produces a sense of anxiety is one that has outlived its purpose, so we let it go.  Not in the spirit of good riddance, merely goodbye.

Minimalism in 200 Easy Steps!

Apologies if it sounds like I’m proselytizing.  Because minimalism isn’t a religion.  It isn’t a dogma.  It isn’t a codified set of hard-and-fast rules:  do this; don’t do that.  Minimalism isn’t like veganism, which establishes behavioral criteria that must be observed in order to properly qualify.  Don’t expect any of the deputized agents from Minimalism HQ to surprise-audit your home.  “Two salad bowls?  Really?  You consider both of them absolutely necessary, hmmmm?”

Nuh-uh.  Bullshit.  No one intends for you to feel bad about your stuff, or even that you own stuff.  I own stuff!  But my wife and I try—not always seamlessly or successfully—to avoid being the indefinite custodians of things that don’t have an identifiable application and a demonstrably measurable value.

And an object’s value needn’t be rigidly utilitarian; value can indeed be aesthetic in nature—we have pictures on our walls and selective ornamentals here and there—but if we don’t have a current and articulable use for something, it gets donated or recycled.  No longer do things get stowed on that high shelf in the closet “just in case.”  Other than luggage and holiday ornaments, which are at least used annually (and even those have been judiciously curated), we aim to keep nothing in storage.  But you would in no way walk into our home and mistake it for a Buddhist temple.  We simply aim to be able to justify everything we own… but only to ourselves.

Because minimalism is about carrying with you as much as you want, based on what’s right for you—and only you.  In that sense, minimalism is akin to creativity:  how you practice it and what you want from it are exclusively up to the individual.  There are no prerequisites, no obligations, no rules, no fees, no interviews, no questionnaires, no inspections, no inventories, no report cards.  That’s all clutter—which is the very antithesis of what minimalism is all about.

Not that you’d know from The Girl Before.

Minimalism Goes Hollywood

Minimalism has admittedly become culturally trendy over the past few years, which means it’s something people are aware of, if only peripherally, even if they don’t know the particulars.  Accordingly, when a minimalist is prominently featured in an HBO Max thriller, that can exert tremendous influence on public perception.  And I don’t want Edward Monkford to be the poster boy for the movement, such as it is.  (More of a mindset than a movement, but you get the gist.)

Because by placing a purity test on minimalism, as Edward does, by imposing his conception of it on others, he creates a barrier to entry, and ultimately gives the lifestyle a bad name.  The takeaway becomes:  “Oh, I get it—minimalists are a bunch of fucked-up control freaks overcompensating through material ascetism for the psychic clutter they’ve repressed.”

Only, minimalism isn’t about control.  It isn’t about, as Delaney mischaracterizes it, “the desire to live a more perfect, beautiful life.”  Nor is it about “running away from the mess in your own head.”  The KonMari method—“tidying up,” “getting organized,” sorting your stuff on the basis of what “sparks joy” and what doesn’t—and comparable programs offered by the organizing–industrial complex, for whatever they may be worth, have absolutely nothing to do with “the ‘weird and deeply obsessive’ psychology of minimalism” the author/screenwriter set out to “explore.”

Had Delaney used The Girl Before to investigate his chosen subject rather than premeditatively execrate it, he may’ve well drawn the conclusion, or at least opened his mind to the possibility, that minimalism is in fact about confronting the mess in our heads—making the choice, and taking practical steps, to no longer allow the “monsters in the attic” to continue to live up there rent-free.  Minimalism is not intended to be a means by which to corral and control those demons, but rather to let them go—once and for all time.  As such, learning to clear out our living space—tidying up, if you like—is merely the first step we take as minimalists, because it trains the muscles necessary to eventually do the same for our headspace.

Like yoga or mediation or therapy, minimalism isn’t a panacea—a one-time fix.  It is a mindful, ongoing practice through which we learn to see more clearly when we are investing our resources—be them financial, temporal, spatial, mental, emotional—in things that don’t add value to our lives… which, I submit, we’re made to do a lot more of than we realize in our neoliberal culture of automatic and accelerating behaviors.  I wish someone had taught me about minimalism when I was twenty.  Well, better late than never.  And I’m sure as hell glad I learned about it before Hollywood had a chance to color my impression.

Minimalizing Popular Entertainment

Commercial storytellers have a long and lamentable history of exploiting and vilifying things they don’t understand, from borderline personality disorder (Fatal Attraction; Single White Female) to transgenderism (Dressed to Kill; Ace Ventura:  Pet Detective; The Crying Game; Soapdish) to environmentalism (the ecoterrorists of Aquaman, Batman & Robin, and Godzilla:  King of the Monsters; the bureaucratic hostility of the EPA in Ghostbusters).  Minimalism’s current trendiness, alas, makes it a prime candidate for narrative exploitation under the disingenuous guise of “thematic exploration.”

We need storytellers with moral imagination to integrate minimalism, responsibly and artfully, into our popular fictions.  And that doesn’t have to mean—probably shouldn’t mean—telling stories about protagonists who actively evangelize decluttering.  Ever study the sets in the background of your average family sitcom, like Kenan or Home Economics?  Surfaces are littered with the day’s miscellanea, shelves stacked with nested housewares, consoles crammed with media, walls mosaicked with framed art.  Stars Hollow of Gilmore Girls used to be my happy place, but I get hives now each time the action cuts to Lorelai’s “cozy” abode.

Kelly Bishop (as Emily Gilmore) on the set of “Gilmore Girls”

Don’t get me wrong:  No one should be shamed for what they own.  Each of us gets to decide for ourselves what adds value to our life.  But TV series like those, especially ones that depict upper-income characters, unconsciously (and probably unintentionally) reinforce a neoliberal socioeconomic notion that stuff equals comfort.  What if, instead, those homes modeled minimalism—however a show’s writers/producers chose to define it—but without calling attention to it or featuring it as a plot point, either negatively or positively?

Popular entertainment—particularly but not exclusively television—could through unobtrusive example normalize minimalistic living, much the way it normalized, and continues to normalize, the unchallenged acquisition and custodianship of material goods, through its thematic messaging, its production design, its embedded product placements, and its sponsored advertisements.

It’s not really surprising, alas, the first fictional minimalist of significance, at least to my knowledge, was conceived and created to be an emotionally distant, empathy-deficient, OCD-afflicted, psychologically maladjusted, uncompromisingly dogmatic creep.  It was the easy choice to make, after all—the lowest common literary denominator.  Edward Monkford is cut from the same cloth as narcissist-entrepreneurs Christian Grey (Fifty Shades of Grey) and Nathan Bateman (Ex Machina), who also believe, even if they don’t expressly self-identify as minimalists, that aesthetic restraint demonstrates taste, power, success, self-control, and—maybe above all—masculinity.

Instead, what if more fictional characters who unironically embody prosocial values and healthy masculinity—notably Ted Lasso, though he seems to be, rather hearteningly, inspiring a new wave of anti-antiheroes—were portrayed as practitioners of minimalism?  Ted Lasso, after all, singlehandedly made kindness, teamwork, and optimism cool again in the midst of an era of acute mean-spiritedness, pettiness, and cynicism.  I’d like to see shows that do the same for minimalism, featuring a greater sampling of male protagonists who have, for a change, a refreshingly balanced relationship with the material world.  We could certainly use more of those—a statement, as you might’ve guessed by now, never capriciously uttered by a minimalist.  Because, if I may paraphrase Edward Monkford, when we relentlessly eradicate male characters—specifically, those of the romanticized “brilliant-but-troubled” archetypal variety—from popular fiction, it’s surprising how few are left.

54 Comments

  1. J. Edward Ritchie

    Great blog! I’d be curious to hear a set designer and art director’s thoughts on minimalism. I feel like in TV/film they have been tasked with creating character based on all the little details they put in a scene, the “stuff” so to speak. Take that all away, and it’d be cool to see them rise to the challenge of expressing character without the reliance on what that character owns.

    • Sean P Carlin

      Great point, Jeff! Yes, production designers delight in “filling out the frame” with worldbuilding and character-specific background detail. A series like Gilmore Girls, set in an idyllic New England village of Victorian edifices and Americana ornamentations, must be a special joy for them, because they get to set-decorate those homes with endless furnishings and trinkets and antiques and throw pillows — conventionally “feminine” flourishes, at least as far as Hollywood standards go. Women are warm and fuzzy is the message we are meant to take from all the material things with which they surround themselves. (Material is only one letter off from maternal, after all.)

      It seems the only time production designers ever go “minimalistic” is when they are trying to reflect the refined tastes and remarkable wealth of a male character — typically a narcissist-entrepreneur like Christian Grey or Nathan Bateman. Consider Bruce Wayne’s penthouse in The Dark Knight. Or Tony Stark’s Malibu estate in Iron Man. Or Robert De Niro’s coastal beachhouse in Heat. Or Cameron’s father’s home in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, a character we never meet but who is (repeatedly) established as emotionally cold and conspicuously materialistic. (Or even the Park family’s pristine mansion in Parasite, in stark contrast with the squalid basement apartment where the Kims live on top of one another.) A spartan home reassures us that the (almost invariably alpha-male) character who lives there is of the brilliant-but-troubled variety.

      I recall a scene in the old buddy-cop comedy The Hard Way (1991) in which spoiled Hollywood star Michael J. Fox enters the New York apartment of short-tempered NYPD detective James Woods, and Fox is astounded to see how clean and orderly the home is. Woods says to him, “You think all cops live in filth just ’cause it’s that way in the movies?”

      That’s a (rare) example of the filmmakers intentionally flipping a genre cliché — and then calling attention to it — and I would love to see more of that, but what we really need is what you’re calling for: the adoption of a more minimalist mindset by Hollywood production designers — i.e., “expressing character without the reliance on what that character owns.” It’s actually a great opportunity to practice morally imaginative creativity! I definitely think we need to see more characters surrounded by less stuff — a phased reduction of background materialism.

      Hollywood has rehabilitated socially irresponsible representation before. Case in point: cigarette smoking. In Ghostbusters (1984), there is nary a scene in which Venkman, Stantz, and Winston don’t have a cigarette parked between their lips. But by Ghostbusters II (1989), all of them had miraculously and successfully kicked the habit off-camera. The filmmakers didn’t call attention to it; they just made an unobtrusive adjustment, modeling behavior not by something the characters were doing, but something they’d previously done yet were no longer doing.

      Same with Lethal Weapon (1987). In the first two films, Riggs smokes nonstop. In the final scene of Lethal Weapon 2 (1989), he tells Murtaugh to throw his cigarettes away. Then in Lethal 3 (1992), there’s a running gag about Riggs trying to sate his nicotine cravings with Milk-Bones, and by Lethal 4, there isn’t a cigarette to be seen. For that matter, look at all the smoking in Wall Street (1987) versus Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010). Or Weekend at Bernie’s (1989) versus Weekend at Bernie’s II (1993). I could go on. The point is, after decades of “normalizing” cigarettes, in just a few short years they phased smoking out of movies entirely — except in explicitly intentional situations and period pieces — and now that’s the new normal. We could do that again. We just need to summon the moral imagination required.

      Thanks for reading and commenting, Jeff. I appreciate your time and attention, my friend.

  2. Jacqui Murray

    I definitely like minimalism. I started it for about 2 hours a week and then forgot about it… Sigh. I never miss what is donated away. Loved reading this article, Sean.

    • Sean P Carlin

      Thanks, Jacqui! Yes, minimalism — at least to start — must be approached methodically/systematically, and with prescheduled regularity. Like I said: My wife and I reserved four hours each Saturday to minimalizing; after about four months, the entire apartment — save that one closet — had been completely pared down. It’s a commitment. And it’s very easy to quit, or to “skip a week”… only to never return to the task. It’s a draining exercise — both physically and emotionally. Maybe the most exhausting thing I’ve ever done (and I say that as someone who has written multiple novels!). I could not have minimalized my life without my wife’s support, and she has said over the years that she couldn’t have done it had I not gone “all in” with her. I needed a partner. But for anyone seeking encouragement, advice, or even a simple method to get started, I refer you to the resources tab on the Minimalists’ website. If nothing else, watch their Netflix feature Minimalism: A Documentary About the Important Things and get inspired!

      All that said, I can absolutely second your sentiment: We never miss the things we donate/discard. Never. I’ve never once experienced a pang of regret for getting rid of an item, because within a few days of a cleanout… I couldn’t even remember what I’d cleaned out! It really is surprising how much of our stuff we don’t use, need, or want, but we hold onto, anyway — for all sorts of reasons. Speaking as a recovering packrat, I want everyone to know how liberating and life-changing it is to let go. All those things we carry around on our backs… there’s nothing stopping us from putting them down and moving on without them. And we’re so much happier for it!

      Anyhow… I’ll stop proselytizing now! My gratitude, Jacqui, for your time and attention — both today and over the years. I do not take it for granted that you’ve spent precious resources in support of this blog, and I thank you.

  3. DaveRhodyWriting

    Until I read your article, I would not have gone out of my way to find a show that explores a minimalist lifestyle. Obviously ‘The Girl Before’ is far more than that. You have my interest piqued.

    • Sean P Carlin

      Thanks, Dave! Alas, I don’t know that there are many shows — or any shows — other than The Girl Before that dramatize the lifestyle of minimalism. I would absolutely recommend, though, you make time to watch the feature-length documentary Minimalism: A Documentary About the Important Things on Netflix for a fuller picture of minimalism.

      Certainly my minimalism complements my environmental activism, our shared passion. (For those who don’t know, Dave and I are both Climate Reality Leaders, trained by former U.S. Vice President Al Gore.) As you know, it isn’t overpopulation in developing countries that is taxing the Earth’s natural resources — despite the irresponsible messaging of Avengers: Infinity War — but rather resource-intensivity right here in the Western world that’s the problem. Simply put: Americans use way more energy and water per capita than the planet is capable of regenerating in a year.

      Just as veganism encourages more mindful/intentional eating, minimalism encourages more mindful/intentional living. These are lifestyle philosophies that can help us curb profligate consumption — that can train us to live more fully with less stuff. Funny how all the practices that run counter to the messaging and agenda of extractive capitalism seem to leave us happier and healthier, huh? Who knew!

      Thanks for reading and commenting, Dave. I do appreciate your time and attention, sir.

  4. Erik

    I haven’t seen the show (nor, likely, will I). But I agree wholeheartedly with you that minimalism isn’t whatever that is.

    While I practice minimalism a bit differently from the way you do, the end game is the same: freedom. I don’t have credit card debt. I don’t have a car payment. Where possible, I even pay all of my typically monthly bills (e.g., electric, insurances, etc.) once, at the start of each year (guessing, where I don’t know exact amounts). I love the freedom of not having my brain space continually interrupted with bill-related communications, reminders or just my own head having to keep track of what’s due when.

    In my lifestyle, I choose to invest most of my extra money into experiences and people (often simultaneously) rather than things. And as you point out, those experiences and memories and deepened connections are worth more to me than another box of stuff.

    I am going to pose a counterpoint to something you said: “…everything we invite into our lives costs us in at least one of three ways (and usually two, very often all three): it costs us in money; it costs us in time; it costs us in our attention.

    I know many people (past-me included) who have packed a closet somewhere with collections of items that represent past moments. Some in my extended family are even full-blown hoarders. My grandparents were. And yet, using the latter as an example, their home was tidy and inviting at all times.

    I’ll give a concrete example of my own: a paper I wrote in third grade. It was in a box of things from the past, tucked in a closet somewhere, using space I didn’t need for other things in a way I never had to look at. The total space used might have been a few cubic feet. Writing the paper cost me nothing (i.e., no money). Keeping it cost little to no time. And tucked away as it was in a space I didn’t see or need for other things, it did not occupy my attention in any appreciable way.

    Just knowing that closet and those past-things were there, however, seemed to actually provide some level of peace. For me, they represented proof that I had existed at each of those times past. And that alleviated a certain kind of psychic stress, thereby freeing up my brain space and attentions to not think about them. I knew they were there if I ever needed the tangible reminder. And that was enough to let them stay there.

    Conversely, removing them forever seemed that it would cause much psychological friction, because once they were gone, so was that concrete proof of my past existence. Forever.

    Now, for me, letting go of such things became about why I felt I needed those tangible reminders in the first place and how many of such things would be “enough” (if any) to serve the perceived goal. But that’s not my point here. I’m simply pointing out that it does seem that holding onto things doesn’t always cost a person in money, time or attention. In fact, a case could be made, as above, that for some people, having them frees up attention, because those items represent a certain sense of groundedness to one’s existence.

    What think you?

    • Sean P Carlin

      Erik,

      Yours is a characteristically remarkable, thoughtful, and thought-provoking comment that could easily serve as the thesis for its own blog post! So, before I even get into a response, let me thank you — for adding value to this post!

      The notion of a “then-me” — or our “then-selves” — is one you introduced to me in the comments of “Different Stages” (October 31, 2017), and it’s something, on the matter of adding value to the ongoing project that is this blog, I’ve never forgotten. I even worked the concept into my (as-yet-unpublished) novella Spex, with the middle-aged narrator reflecting on his 12-year-old then-him. I suppose I was also getting at that same notion in the penultimate paragraph of “You Can’t Go Home Again” — the idea that the kid I was, the one who used to play in the streets of my new-old neighborhood, is a different person, from what seems like a different lifetime; he’s friendly spirit who “haunts” these streets and keeps me company, and reminds me how far I’ve come since then. The things, therefore, our then-selves owned or made or touched, you suggested, are the only extant proof that person ever existed: the skateboard I rode, the comics I bought and read, etc.

      I would describe myself as someone who, for most of his adult life, very much took comfort in knowing those artifacts of my past were securely “warehoused” in the closet. Getting organized was never my problem; like your grandparents, I had all my clutter exceptionally well-organized! That those things would probably never be looked at again was exactly the point, as you say. They were there; the past was accessible, if ever I needed to “go back.”

      And I’m not the only one who’s felt that way. Author and op-ed columnist Margaret Renkl published an essay last year in which she talked about how she’d grown up in a cluttered home, owed mostly to the fact that her mother refused to part with anything:

      As an adult, I had developed a different policy toward my possessions: If it didn’t fit, it couldn’t stay. When it was time to get rid of something, I didn’t agonize over it. I dropped it in the Goodwill box and never looked back.

      Then my mother died.

      – Margaret Renkl, “You Can’t Take It With You, but You Can Put It in Storage,” Opinion, New York Times, July 12, 2021

      Renkl then goes on to explain that the pain of losing her parents, coupled with the trauma of the coronavirus pandemic, made it impossible to part with her late mother’s possessions, so… she put them in storage:

      We might not be able to take it all with us, but we can sure keep it in climate-controlled safety, waiting for whatever we think we’re waiting for, even if what we’re waiting for is too elusive or too far out of reach to be named.

      In the age of Marie Kondo, it would be easy to see all this stuff as a moral failing, the sign of a fatally materialist worldview. In time I, too, may come to recognize our rented 10×10 storage unit, this receptacle for emotional need, as an exercise in self-delusion. But somehow I don’t think that will happen. I think I’ll always remember what it meant this year to try to save whatever I could save from a time when the world kept taking and taking and taking.

      I understand now why my mother brought everything with her when she left Alabama, the state where she had lived her entire life. She was bringing herself, her whole self: who she had once been, who she still was, who she hoped yet to become. She was bringing her ancestors with her, and she was bringing my father, too. She was piling up all the belongings of a full life into a shape she could still recognize: her own.

      ibid.

      Though I think Renkl was going for a hopeful takeaway — an epiphany that perhaps what we own does somewhat define us, that its “permanence” should be treasured, and why should we treat perpetual custodianship of those objects as a “moral failing”? — I must say that when I read “You Can’t Take It With You, but You Can Put It in Storage,” I felt a kind of wistful compassion for her. (My wife and mother, independently, had the same reaction.) When I considered the time and attention — to say nothing of money — it must’ve cost her to indefinitely store a dead woman’s stuff, especially in light of the healthy perspective she’d previously had about material goods, and then compose a lengthy self-justification for all that in the New York Times(!), I wanted to give her permission — not that she was seeking any — to let all that stuff go.

      When I was a kid, there was one self-storage facility in my neighborhood — an enormous old U-Haul down along the border of Kingsbridge and Marble Hill. (It’s still there.) Since I’ve returned home, I can’t help but notice that Broadway, all up and down Upper Manhattan and the Bronx, is now lined with one sprawling self-storage facility after another (there’s even one up the road a ways in Yonkers literally called Clutter). And I thought to myself: What’s going on here? Why is the self-storage business booming?

      I don’t necessarily have the answer to that question, though the Renkl essay offers this insight: “‘Self-storage thrives when people experience change, and Covid disrupted norms across all generations.'” We do seem to draw comfort from the out-of-sight/out-of-mind stashing of stuff. That’s how Renkl ends her piece: acknowledging she’ll probably never again look at her mother’s possessions, and conceding that she one day might come around to recognizing her storage unit as a “receptacle for emotional need,” but more or less expecting that it’ll be there forever… until — and here’s the part she doesn’t address or concede — the day that emotional (and material) burden is passed on to her children.

      Is that fair? Holding onto that stuff may or may not be a “moral failing” — that’s a conversation for another day — but I think saddling her heirs with the problem certainly is. And that’s exactly what’s going to happen, because I’ve seen the same thing occur in families I know directly — quite recently, in fact.

      Now, as for your postulate — Can holding onto personal artifacts in fact free up attention, because those items represent a certain sense of groundedness to one’s existence? — there may very well be truth to that. God knows I felt that way for a long time — a sort of passive comfort in my archival repository. I suppose it’s benign enough, if you have the available storage space — as I did — and it’s not costing you in extra money, nor in time or attention. For me — and I can speak only for myself — what practicing minimalism has allowed me to do most crucially is let go of my then-me. I stopped yearning — on an open-ended basis, that is — for times gone by. And when I let go of him — my then-me — it wasn’t really that hard to let go of his stuff. What did I need it for?

      And in letting go of my then-me — all of them, from all the different seasons of my life — I have also let go of versions of me I am not particularly proud of. I try not to carry the shame of regrettable things I have done and said with me into the future — that gets let go of, too. And what I get in return for discarding that baggage is an unwritten future. A new chance every day to be a better, more fulfilled, more compassionate person. Letting go of the past — the good and the bad — has given me the gift of making the most of the present, and looking forward to the future. I was a man stuck in the good ol’ days — and the bad ol’ days — for many, many years of my adulthood. And by letting go of material reminders of those times, I’ve learned to let go of immaterial artifacts, too. Hard feelings. Old grudges. Nostalgic yearnings. Personal regrets. Through that I find emotional freedom, along with the financial freedom that comes from living within one’s means, as you describe.

      I am in no way suggesting I’ve got everything all figured out, Erik — far from it! I routinely have bad moments, days when I don’t live up to the standards I have set for myself. I experience regret, nostalgia, and occasional flashes of grievance. Sure. But I use the philosophical tools of minimalism — as you use the methods compiled in The Best Advice So Far — to keep me centered. I try to remember the Minimalists’ credo of Use things and love people, not the other way around. I try to attain groundedness in the people and places around me now, versus the materials and mementoes. It’s been successful for me — emphasis on for me.

      I don’t know — I think I responded to your question, though perhaps not directly or satisfactorily. I definitely concur with the premise: that we can “enchant” material possessions with feelings and/or memories (of the time and attention — the value — we once invested in them), then hide those items away like Horcruxes where they’re safe (and accessible, if needed). Perhaps there is a kind of value in that — for some people. I would definitely be interested to get a take from another reader — perhaps someone who hews closer to Renkl’s position on this subject. (I hope no one thinks I would judge them for what they own! I would not! That’s another quality minimalism helps us realize is not worth our time or attention: judgmentalism.)

      Let me think more on this, and perhaps talk it over with my wife. If I have new thoughts/insights, I’ll leave them in a new comment right here.

      Thanks, buddy — thanks for investing your time and attention in this post. I’m indebted. Happy Labor Day!

      SPC

      • Erik

        First, oh yeah… we’re at Labor Day weekend already. It seems to sneak up on me every year.

        I found just the snippet of Renkl’s thoughts that you posted here to be remarkable. I’m not sure exactly what it is I feel, but I do feel when I read that. I think what jumped out to me most wasn’t what she chose to hold onto, but the fact that she had gained empathy for her mother and her mother’s reasons, which it seems she had previously scorned or eschewed.

        My main point in my comment wasn’t to provide an answer or argue for any particular point, only to say that it seemed to me that keeping a thing need not actually cost one in terms of those three facets of money, time or attention. Now, might it cost in some other area? That’s an open question. As you’ve illustrated with your own experience in letting go of things, it was costing you in other ways, and there were gains to be had in letting your “clutter” go.

        I would hold the same to be true for me. Those areas just weren’t in the limited subset of three.

        I’m also appreciating more and more as I get older how different I am from most people, the way I think and process and perceive life from the way the majority of people seem to. In some regards, as hard as it was for me to work through letting go of certain unseen-things-in-hidden-boxes, I think it was still easier for me than many due to who I am, how my brain works, and the lifetime of self-work I’ve done. I don’t just write about advice to sell books; it’s all stuff I’ve tested time and again (and continue to test) under continually more circumstances spanning decades. So I’ve got an expansive toolbox for dealing with life which, even when things are at their hardest relative to me, I realize would be excruciatingly difficult for someone who didn’t get my type of mind or who doesn’t have that expansive toolbox of life skills.

        As one small example of what I mean there, I have a freakish memory. I can remember in detail things that happened at ages when one would like to say I was too young to remember. I dream vividly and remember those “lives” equally well. So in many ways, my memory of past-me (and of past-others) is clearer than a still picture glimpse of a moment in time or a paper written on a day. My memories feel crisp. They are accompanied by not only moving pictures but sounds, smells, tactile feelings and emotions. This kind of memory is a double-edged sword to be sure, one I’ve at times been tempted to wish I could put down for a while. But given the memory I have, I wonder—as hard as letting go of tokens can be for me, it seems it must be far easier for me than for others who don’t have such a keen memory.

        My aim always is to help myself and others move toward more freedom, knowing that none of us will ever be entirely free from our past-selves. So as you’ve made clear about yourself here, I too make sure that people know my path to freedom and what freedom looks like for me may very well be different from their path to freedom and what it might look like for them.

        Above all, I try to hold onto empathy. Letting go is perhaps the hardest things we as humans ever have to do.

        • Sean P Carlin

          Great perspective, Erik — one I had not considered: that by confronting her mother’s possessions, Renkl attained through those items a newfound (or possibly renewed) empathy for/emotional connection with/understanding of/psychological insight into her mother as a person. In that sense, Renkl was able to find value — emotional value — in her mother’s effects. That’s an objectively good thing.

          Had I been in the same position, though, here’s what I would have likely done at that point — what would have been right for me (and only me): I would have expressed appreciation for the value I was able to extract from those materials… and then let them go, with gratitude in my heart for what they provided. Once devoid of any further use or value, I would have honored those objects — and the memory of the previous owner — by handing them over to individuals or organizations or charities that would’ve then benefitted from them. I would not have placed them in indefinite storage for the passive comfort that might offer.

          Here’s why: It’s costing Renkl money to store those goods. Now, it’s her money, and her stuff, so if she wants to spend it on the storage of past-things she doesn’t need, that is 100% her prerogative. She has made a decision that the value she gets in return for her money — the “emotional need” (her words) that 10×10 storage unit fulfills — is worth it. She’s spending her money on those past-things very specifically to preserve the expenditure of time or (more importantly) attention on them; she’s trading one asset for another. Fine — that’s her capital, and how it is allocated is her choice.

          However

          By spending the one asset — money — to avoid the other costs of ownership — time and attention — she is merely passing those costs onto her heirs. Unless Renkl is planning on dealing with all the stuff in her lifetime — in which case she is merely deferring the payment of time and attention required — her children will one day be made to spend their time and attention on their grandmother’s effects. Somebody someday is going to have to spend time and attention on that stuff, all so Renkl could evade the anxiety that would’ve come with permanently parting with it herself, right now.

          So, by that logic, any empathy Renkl may’ve gained by sorting through the mother’s stuff in the first place is nullified by its indefinite storage, because the latter action demonstrates a decided lack of empathy for the people who will eventually have to confront what Renkl simply paid to “go away” — to put out of sight and out of mind. Unless, of course, Renkl indeed plans to deal with this stuff in her lifetime (and she implies in that article she has no expectation of ever revisiting the issue). But according to Wikipedia, she’s at least 60 years old; it would be irresponsible (at any age) to assume she’s got decades left to “come to recognize our rented 10×10 storage unit, this receptacle for emotional need, as an exercise in self-delusion.”

          My point is, in this particular instance, holding onto her mother’s stuff — an action she herself admits is driven by sentimentality and emotional insecurity — is absolutely costing her in money, time, and attention, she’s simply deferred payment of the latter two expenses. Because the phrase You can’t take it with you doesn’t merely mean you’re leaving this earth with exactly what you brought into it; it means that anything you leave behind will one day be someone else’s responsibility — be it welcome, unwelcome, or a combination of both. Many movies have been made about the heirs of a wealthy person fighting viciously (and comically) over his estate, but in real life, most of us just wind up inheriting a bunch of worthless crap we don’t want or know what to do with. (I’ve seen it happen — a lot.)

          So, I would argue we do have a moral responsibility to consciously recognize that storing sentimental belongings indefinitely — what you rightly describe as “unseen-things-in-hidden-boxes,” Erik — may indeed free up our attention, sure, but it’s important to bear in mind that by refusing to pay those things the attention they’re due, by refusing to confront the anxiety that deciding to get rid of them would produce in us, we are inevitably passing that cost on to someone else in the future. ‘Cause the stuff ain’t goin’ nowhere! Like the memorabilia we have tucked away, the burden of dealing with it that we pass along to our heirs is also out of sight and out of mind; it is an “unseen thing,” too — a denial of mortality, even (the primary thing we try to keep out of mind, ever and always). That’s what all those self-storage complexes I see here in the Bronx and Upper Manhattan represent to me: deferred costs, to be paid by people who had nothing to do with the storage of those materials in the first place.

          So, to my mind, in choosing to let those things go — to give them to people or charities that can/will use them — we’re not only buying freedom for ourselves, but for others, too — namely (but not exclusively) our heirs. That’s empathy!

          Great conversation, Erik! You’ve done what I always hope these after-post discussions will do: make me think more deeply about my own theses. Thank you.

          SPC

          • Erik

            Still thinking through this, though mostly esoterically, as I’m comfortable with how it all applies to my life and happiness currently.

            I find my mind’s eye looking at a picture wall in a friend’s home, one that includes photos of people they never knew dating back to the 1800s; or a cookbook that dates back to the 1700s in another friend’s home, which she opens every holiday to make the “family recipe” for this or that, even though she knows those recipes by heart.

            No matter which way I play out the debate here, there is no clear winner.

            Neither needs these things in the present, and these things do take up “attention” (e.g., an entire wall of space in a main traffic area of their home, space on a bookshelf). Should they let them go? Is their attachment merely emotional, and if so, is emotion not a viable reason to keep the wall of family pictures or the generations-old cookbook?

            Yet if it’s decided that emotion is of value in itself, we have to go back to the origins of these photographs and the cookbook—all of which someone current at the time held onto and passed to their kids, and their kids, etc., to the present.

            In other words, everything of historical value, whether in homes or in museums, is deemed valuable because someone held onto it past its arguable current personal usefulness and “burdened” someone else with preserving it.

          • Sean P Carlin

            Well spoke, Erik. It really all comes down to a matter of personal choice (a concept with which I know you are familiar!): We all must decide for ourselves what possessions (to say nothing of relationships and regular activities) add value to our lives, and are therefore a worthy investment of our attention (or our time, or our money). I can only answer that question for myself.

            I will say that I routinely encounter folks who seem to be holding onto things that don’t add value to their lives; people discuss these matters with me, especially once they know I am a minimalist. I sense them seeking the “permission” they desire to let them go. They seldom do, though. The leap required often seems a little too wide to make. I understand that.

            That is yet twice as true when it comes to heirlooms. I know many, many people who’ve inherited family “treasures” they simply didn’t want, but nonetheless have felt the need to keep — sometimes in self-storage at ongoing cost to them — on the premise that it has value to the family.

            Says who? If I’m the current custodian of that heirloom, and I decide it has no value to me, its value to the “family,” as it were, ends right there. Someone I know once inherited a set of china from her mother, which had previously belonged to a great aunt, and Christ-only-knows-who before that. Now, this person explicitly told her mother — while the mother was still alive — that she had no desire for the china, had no sentimental attachment to it, would not use it, and did not want it.

            Yet, despite this, and despite the fact that the mother had other heirs she could’ve willed it to, my friend inherited the set. And it has remained, untouched and unused, in her enclosed cabinet for over a quarter century, on the premise that her daughter may one day want it. (I have advised this person that if the daughter indeed wants it, she should take it now, and if she doesn’t, why not sell or donate the entire set?)

            Perhaps the responsible thing for aging parents of adult children to do is to sit down with them at some point and have a frank conversation about those heirlooms. Find out if those are keepsakes your kids actually want. If they are, then bequeath them whenever you’re done using them, even if that’s before your death. And if those are things that are unwanted, the children should be given license, without judgment, to say so, and then other arrangements can be made for that stuff. Because I have seen one too many examples of adult children inheriting a bunch of shit they didn’t want but nevertheless feel emotionally obligated to keep; or, alternatively, if they don’t feel an obligation to keep it, they then have to go to the trouble — at the expense of their own money, time, and attention — of getting rid of it. Doesn’t seem fair to me to do that to someone.

            I do have a friend — an old childhood pal — who has thousands of comics in the garage of his suburban home, many of which date back to our years as schoolmates running around our Bronx neighborhood. Knowing that I’m a minimalist and that I’ve freed myself of my own “collections,” he texted me the following a few weeks ago:

            Dude…i have 10 long boxes of comics. I dont want them anymore. I want the space in my garage. I also don’t want to make them a burden to anyone else. I wonder if i can do what you did

            We talked it out by phone, and he basically said that he doesn’t even enjoy reading them anymore, and his kids aren’t going to want them, so why has he allowed them to take up so much real estate in his home for so long? I suggested a few ways he might unload them. Then he texted me the very next day:

            Bro I just sold my entire comic book collection

            Oh my god

            I called the local store and he came by

            He wound up selling the lot for a grand, even though he could’ve made more if he’d taken the long-term approach of selling individual issues to individual buyers. But when he asked himself, “What’s it worth it to me to be rid of these?”, he knew it was best to just rip off the Band-Aid:

            But like you said, I am so happy right now

            What a relief

            And I told him that he can rest easy knowing those comics will now go to someone who is glad to have them. They were valuable to him once upon a time… and now he has returned that value to the universe from whence it came. And he felt great! He wanted to get rid of that stuff, and he reached out for the encouragement — the “permission,” if you like — to do it. And I’m happy to do that for anyone who asks. But I never go into anyone’s home and presume to know which personal possessions are important to them and which are “needless clutter,” nor do I judge them for having “too much stuff.” I have merely found a system that affords me an appreciable degree of financial and mental freedom…

            And, accordingly, many friends have asked me about it, because they know how dedicated my wife and I are to the lifestyle, and this post is a structured distillation of what I tell them. I thought it was about time to formally publish my anti–sales pitch for minimalism! The Girl Before just gave me a good excuse to do it. (I’d actually watched The Girl Before many months ago, and had planned ever since to write a response to it here on the blog, I was just backlogged with other posts I’d had in the pipeline, like Young Indiana Jones Turns 30″ and Superman IV at 35.” I have more essays I want to write than I have time to write them, alas!)

  5. dellstories

    Whenever a movie or TV show is about something I like or something I do or something I am, I cringe

    I KNOW it’s going to be wrong, narrow-minded, judgmental, insulting, misinformed, condescending, stereotyped…

    • Sean P Carlin

      The age-old creative advice to Write what you know is vague as hell and frustratingly unhelpful — I myself have struggled with how to interpret and apply it my entire life — but I suppose the intention behind the adage was to encourage the creative exploration of cultures and professions and locations and socioeconomic experiences with which a writer already has a baseline familiarity. By already knowing something — one needn’t know everything — about your chosen subject when you sit down to use it to craft a fictional story, you’re able to “go deeper” into it, and get at previously unknown or unacknowledged truths. Because that’s what stories are concerned with: truth, not facts.

      It’s perfectly acceptable to get facts wrong — either knowingly or unknowingly — as long as those are sacrificed for truthfulness. And I think that when writers know something about the world or the people or the conditions that serve as the foundation for their stories, they bring credibility and authenticity to what they’re writing, and they also feel more comfortable exploring the more hidden and/or less flattering aspects of those experiences/cultures. In short: They are more comfortable exploring the world of their story, and therefore better able to tell those stories truthfully.

      But when we write about things altogether outside our scope of experience, and if we don’t then take the time to properly research and intimately understand those things — and few commercial authors or screenwriters do, beyond a cursory Wikipedia search — we more often than not end up exploiting those subjects, not exploring them. We use them to create drama, conflict, and excitement. And in doing so, we often do them a terrible disservice. So, if I’m an author of suspense fiction, in search of a new angle on say, a domestic thriller, and I’m seeing all these shows on Netflix about “getting your home organized,” I might very well think: Ooh — minimalism! That could make for an innovative new twist on a formulaic genre.

      As such, if I had been JP Delaney, I probably would’ve also jumped to the same initial conclusion: A thriller about minimalism should be about how “you can tidy all you like, but you can’t run away from the mess in your own head.” That’s the moral — boom!

      But what we used to do in my old writers group was this: Once we came up with the moral — the story’s thematic takeaway — we would then intellectually interrogate the idea. We’d explore it from all sorts of angles, and say “What about this…?” and “What about that…?” I brought many story ideas to my critique group with not merely the core narrative concept, but also a sense of what it was about thematically — what it was trying to say. And I was routinely challenged to think more fully through those ideas and assumptions, which always resulted in a more subtextually nuanced story.

      Delaney never did. Instead, he created a story to support his uninformed first assumptions, thereby “proving” them to be accurate. But if I knew nothing about minimalism, and thought there might be a genre story about it worth pursuing, I would immerse myself in the practice and psychology of it — maybe even live like a minimalist during the writing process, so I could speak to the experience with firsthand knowledge — as opposed to just assuming I already knew everything there was to know after watching a single episode of Tidying Up with Marie Kondo.

      But most commercial storytellers — bestselling authors and Hollywood screenwriters — don’t have the time for or interest in that sort of immersive research. Their job is to churn out mass-appeal entertainment — to exploit, not explore. And the next thing we know, we’re all howling as Ace Ventura pumps a toilet plunger to his face after realizing he kissed a transgender woman.

      I believe popular storytellers owe the culture responsible storytelling — i.e., stories told with moral imagination. That doesn’t have to mean passing a purity test, merely interrogating the values we may have unconsciously embedded in/reinforced through our fictions in pursuit of maximally effective entertainment. I consider it absolutely crucial to any creative-writing curriculum that, in addition to mythic structure and genre and characterization, students are trained to write with moral imagination.

      Thanks, as always, Dell, for your time and attention — for the value you contribute to this blog. Happy Labor Day, my friend!

      SPC

  6. D. Wallace Peach

    Would you believe that I have a hard time getting rid of stuff because of the zombie apocalypse? Well, not the zombies, but climate change, infrastructure failures, Republicans. I might need that sweater when we can’t get clothes anymore. My daughter might need it when she and her family moves in as refugees. Well, your post made me aware that this is all my spidey-sense telling me to let it go. And I love how you related minimalism to more than belongings, Sean, but to choices about how we use our time, money, and attention. Thank you!

    • Erik

      Being a person of empathy… who is good with details… who has imagination… and who is adept at storytelling… as wonderful a combination as that is in most regards, it can become a double-edged sword sometimes, can’t it, Diana? I know all too well how the edge people rarely see can cut when playing “what-if” with oneself. That’s when we have to deliberately make the choice to hand our mind over to our other faculties, such as logic and reason.

      I find that playing things out to the extreme through the lens of reason helps me take those extremes back from imagination. For instance, even if the worst should happen and all of my imaginative fears in an area come true, will I be proud that I prolonged those events for decades on the front end, letting them steal my happiness (and potentially rub off on others in the form of contagious worry). My reason tells me that that is not wisdom, to continually bypass joy in the present over some time future that may or may not occur. It’s actually the opposite of wisdom (as worry most often is).

      And the next time that sword of my strengths turns on emotion and begins to cut again, I’ll run it through the extreme of reason again. And again the next time. And the next…

      And I know those “next times” will come. Because the good parts of me that produce those not-so-good-sometimes things are part of me. And I like that person. So I’ve just accepted that I’d rather have a sword that cuts both ways at times than no sword at all.

      • D. Wallace Peach

        I was being a little tongue in cheek, Erik, and when I do get rid of stuff, I almost never miss it. I do find it easier and most rewarding to donate stuff than than dump it. So finding a place that can really use it is the best. Takes a little work, but well worth the trouble. Thanks for the reply. You’re the best. 🙂

        • Erik

          Ah, so I am the only crazy one. Alas… 😉

          • Sean P Carlin

            You just got minimalized!

          • D. Wallace Peach

            Hehehe. What a fun and funny conversation.

          • Sean P Carlin

            Hey, Edward Monkford may be a humorless prat, but that is merely one more way in which he misrepresents minimalists!

    • Sean P Carlin

      Thank you, Diana, for the thoughtful comment!

      And I certainly understand your position. I’ll offer this insight, from my experiences in minimalism: We tend to keep a lot of things we don’t want or need under the catch-all justification of “Eh, just in case…” We say, “Well, I might need this, and it’s not taking up any room on that high shelf…” So, into storage it goes.

      One of the best things we can do for ourselves, if minimalizing our possessions is something we’re trying in earnest to do (and I know it ain’t easy), is to allow ourselves zero just-in-case indulgences. None. On the off chance you’ll need that thing down the road, you probably won’t even remember you saved it… and if you do, you probably won’t recall where you put it! Anything we may need at some hypothetical future date is something we can buy or borrow at that time. Don’t hold on to things you don’t have a current use for — that’s my advice.

      Anything we get rid of that we truly need, we can replace for less than $20 in less than 20 minutes from our current location. Thus far, this hypothesis has become a theory that has held true 100% of the time. Although we’ve rarely had to replace a just-in-case item (fewer than five times for the two of us combined), we’ve never had to pay more than $20 or go more than 20 minutes out of our way to replace the item. This theory likely works 99% of the time for 99% of all items and 99% of all people — including you.

      – Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus, “Getting Rid of Just-in-Case Items: 20 Dollars, 20 Minutes,” The Minimalists

      One note I should add here: There is a big difference between a just-in-case item and something we keep on hand for emergencies, like a fire extinguisher or a first-aid kit. Those are insurance policies, and they’re not only okay to have handy, they’re recommended. But the Allen wrench that came with the armchair you just ordered from IKEA does not need to be put in the kitchen hardware drawer after the chair’s been assembled! That’s the sorta shit that becomes too easy to toss in a junk drawer and forget about. “Just in case” should be considered “Just don’t need.”

      And even though I know you were only kidding about your family becoming refugees from societal collapse owed to zombies, future pandemics, climate change, catastrophic infrastructure failure, and/or GOP authoritarianism, given the mission statement of this blog — to push back against the apocalyptic narratives so prevalent in our media, all too often presented as wish-fulfillment fantasies (The Walking Dead) rather than self-preventing prophecies (The Handmaid’s Tale) — I want to remind readers that those are stories told (read: sold) to us in order to engender cynicism, and doomism, so that we don’t demand a better, more sustainable socioeconomic program than neoliberal capitalism.

      Those stories try to tell us that we consumed our way into apocalypse — and the too-late-now inevitability of societal and/or ecological breakdown — and now we should stock up on yet more shit to survive the impending consequences. But, as we learned from Scream, we don’t have to be passive NPCs in this horror story if we don’t want to. I reject those dystopian narratives. We don’t need another hero à la Mad Max, just a collective of legendarily powerful beings known as engaged citizens, as we discussed in the previous post. The past places no absolute limits on the future, and since retiring the relics of my own past, I have a lot more space in my head to consider the possibilities of the future. It’s a much more hopeful place to dream of.

      Hope you had a Happy Labor Day, Diana, and that your region of Oregon isn’t too terribly impacted by the current West Coast heatwave. Sending you good thoughts.

      Sean

      • D. Wallace Peach

        I love your intolerance for “just in case” scenarios, Sean. Great advice. I have one, yes ONE, closet in my whole house, including bedrooms, so the need to declutter is an ever present necessity. Without any storage space, I actually don’t have as much junk as the average bear, and yet I still have too much stuff.

        And thanks for the slap on the hand about my apocalyptic narrative. Lol. I deserved that. And loved loved your second to last paragraph. It’s empowering, and I’m now armed to the teeth with determination to minimize and simplify. I love these discussions. Hugs.

        • Sean P Carlin

          When we moved into our current apartment, Diana, it wasn’t a downgrade with respect to square footage, but the new place definitely does not boast the same great storage space we had in L.A. We view this as a good thing. We pride ourselves on airy cabinets and closets. The only thing you do with storage space is store stuff! This way, when we need our luggage or vacuum or Christmas decorations, those are the only things in our closets, so we don’t have to dig through stacked debris to get to them!

          And I was in no way scolding you for doomist thinking, Diana! I know you to be someone who cares deeply about the world in which she lives, and I have never known you to espouse cynicism or hopelessness. I only saw an opportunity to make a point that I come around to a lot on this blog: that our dystopian narratives — the kind that treat the collapse of civilization as not merely inevitable, but preferable — are very often stealth propaganda to justify the continued extractive practices of late capitalism:

          For many, it’s easier, or at least more comforting, to approach these problems as intractable. They’re just too complex and would involve levels of agreement, cooperation, and coordination that seem beyond the capacity of humans at this stage in our cultural evolution, anyway. So in lieu of doing the actual hard work of fixing these problems in the present, we fantasize instead about life afterward. The crisis of global warming morphs into the fantasy of living off the grid. The threat of a terrorist attack on our office tower leads us to purchase an emergency personal parachute for easy egress, and to wonder how far up the org chart we might be promoted once everyone else is gone. The collapse of civilization due to nuclear accident, peak oil, or SARS epidemic finally ends the ever-present barrage of media, tax forms, toxic spills, and mortgage payments, opening the way to a simpler life of farming, maintaining shelter, and maybe defending one’s family.

          – Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now (New York: Penguin Group, 2013), 246

          And I believe, as I wrote in “Challenging Our Moral Imagination,” we need storytellers with the moral imagination to envision a world worth living in,

          a world which, having lived through the terrors of the Fifties through the early Nineties with overhanging terror of a nuclear Armageddon that seemed inevitable at the time, has found itself faced with the equally inconceivable and terrifying notion that there might not be an apocalypse. That mankind might actually have a future, and might thus be faced with the terrifying prospect of having to deal with it rather than allowing himself the indulgence of getting rid of that responsibility with a convenient mushroom cloud or nine hundred.

          – Alan Moore, Twilight of the Superheroes, (unpublished comic-book proposal, circa 1987).

          All right, that’s enough soapboxing for me! For those who don’t know, Diana has just released her latest fantasy novel, The Necromancer’s Daughter. Check out the book trailer here!

          • D. Wallace Peach

            Thanks for the shout out! A book about good people with moral courage prevailing against all odds. Perfect for this conversation!

          • Sean P Carlin

            Exactly! When you told me the narrative conceit of the The Necromancer’s Daughter a few weeks ago — a practitioner of the dark arts brings a stillborn infant to life and raises her as his daughter — I got so excited by the promise of that premise! Really can’t wait to read!

  7. Tara Sitser

    Wow! Sean, Erik, Dell & Diana – I have read through all your comments and there is just SO MUCH to unpack here. Well said one and all!

    Sean, this blog covers so much territory; personal space, movie script content, commercial storytelling, societal materialism, childhood history, letting go of our past, hanging on to our past, the personal cost of what we choose to keep and what we choose to hide from ourselves, and more. And yet, you have shown that the concept of minimalism, or its rejection, underlies every one of those concepts!

    I want to add one more argument in support of letting go and one in support of hanging on to stuff. I will qualify this by saying both of these require very selective choices in order to bring value to your life. But here goes: After my mother died there were many things – photos, clothes, furniture, etc. – that were mine for the taking if I had wanted them. But I knew that those particular items would be reminders of a life I did not wish to carry forward with me. Bad memories can sometimes trap us in places and attitudes we’d be better off without. And old, familiar things are loaded with memories.

    At the same time, past career experience as well as family and personal history can be the key to unlocking identity and psychological issues we find ourselves struggling with. Many times we wrestle with understanding why we feel a certain way about or react a certain way to a situation without realizing the constraints that old habits can have on our choices. Even, and maybe especially, when those old patterns of thinking are so drilled into our nervous system we aren’t truly aware of them anymore. For that reason I keep old scrapbooks of past career achievements and just a few items that symbolize past traumas. Sometimes I need to remind myself to remember what I went through in my past which leads me to say to myself, “Oh, that’s why I’m afraid of this. But I don’t need to be controlled by what no longer exists in my life.” or “These are the things that have made me who I am today. I can be proud of those no matter what happens in the future.”

    A very big set of inter-related topics indeed! I enjoyed reading everybody’s take on this. Good work, Sean and Friends!

    • Erik

      Tara, I look at what you are doing as a form of creative journaling. And that means of seeing where we’ve been is always of value, I believe, because it reminds us of how far we have come and keeps us focused on where we are headed. Journaling of any kind does take time and attention (and often a little money); but the keeping of a journal—as with all books, whether published or not—is a different kind of “holding on.” It’s condensing those big boxes of unseen things into concise runes that magically expand to full size in our minds, which is efficient, effective and, I think, the best of all worlds where rendering the past is concerned.

      • Sean P Carlin

        Wow, Erik, that’s one of the most moving and poetic descriptions of writing, be it fiction or nonfiction, I’ve ever heard: “It’s condensing those big boxes of unseen things into concise runes that magically expand to full size in our minds, which is efficient, effective and, I think, the best of all worlds where rendering the past is concerned.”

        Indeed, sir. Writing is the act of taking thought and feeling and experience and trauma and endowing all that with context, shape, and meaning through narrativity. It’s the synthesis of things that don’t make sensethings that “just happened”things that were painful — to create the two products of value we most need and expect from art: beauty and catharsis.

      • Tara Sitser

        Erik, You have captured exactly my hopes for the actions I’ve described, “…it reminds us of how far we have come and keeps us focused on where we are headed.” Thank you for that clarity. It is, more often than not, hard to see where we are currently standing which can make it very hard to choose our next steps. Those sign posts and reminders of the past help to give context to current circumstances and light the way for future choices. Or, just as easily, can warn us away from something we thought we’d wanted to pursue.

        Coming back to the original topic of Minimalism, sometimes you have to clear space in your life for something new to show up. And that means figuring out what to let go of.

        • Erik

          I’m in full agreement with all of the above, Tara.

        • Sean P Carlin

          Exactly, Tara: Minimalism isn’t about clearing out so much as it is making roomfor the truly important things.

          As I told a reader in the comments of the previous post, when I finally stopped trying to keep up with multimedia franchises I’d long since ceased enjoying — Star Wars and James Bond and Buffy and Batman and Halloween and Scream (among many others) — I was actually able to reconnect to the one or two movies in those series that actually mean something to me; I was able to recall why they’d resonated with me in the first place, before becoming an interminable “subscriber obligation.”

          And when I bid a permanent goodbye to all of those franchises — when I let them go and relieved myself of the (self-imposed) commitment of keeping up with them — I found I had all this time in my life and in my head for new stories: new novels and movies and TV shows! That’s merely one area of my life in which the practice of minimalism has empowered me to let go of things that no longer have value to make room for new things that do.

    • Sean P Carlin

      Tara,

      What a great comment! Thank you — for adding so much value to this post with your response.

      In my essay writing, I try to illumine links between disparate concepts, drawing from my varied interests — narrative craft, socially conscious storytelling, environmentalism, minimalism, animal welfare — and often through the lens of my own personal experience. Sometimes, I’ll concede, those essays are more creatively successful than others! I certainly think pretty much any of the blog posts from the past two years, beginning with “Forget It, Jake, It’s Tinseltown,” represent the best examples of the work I produce.

      Part of the reason my posts are so long (4,000 words on average, though some are as long as 6,000) and so dense is because each one I write is a creative challenge I present to myself: Can you take this crazy notion and make it work? Making a case for why the worst superhero movie ever might actually be the purest superhero movie ever, or how multimedia franchises encourage and monetize commercial adolescence, or the way Scream teaches us to question institutionalized narratives are not the kinds of theses that lend themselves to pithy 800-word posts. My friend Suzanne over at mydangblog writes short-and-sweet anecdotal posts brilliantly! I wish my mind worked like hers! But it works like this, so these are the kinds of essays I write. I’m just lucky to have a readership that engages me so thoughtfully, yourself included!

      For me, the philosophy of minimalism indeed underlies all issues because it is, fundamentally, an understanding that everything — everything — comes at the cost of our money, time, and/or attention. Therefore, the entities/activities in which I invest those assets — my writing, my blogging (and the specific subjects about which I blog), my environmental activism, my kitten fostering, my family, my friends — are all things of profound value to me. I no longer sink my money, time, and attention into bullshit, quite frankly. Those assets are too valuable to me.

      Therefore, everything I choose to do is something I’ve deemed worthy of the cost to me in my time, money, or attention. So, yes: that tenet underlies everything, because it’s about how we choose to spend the assets we have in order to get the fullest return on investment — the fullest possible life. It isn’t about cleaning out your home; it’s about understanding the true cost of our things, and being better able to evaluate when something is useful/valuable, and when it isn’t — when the time has come to let it go.

      It sounds to me, Tara, like you did that very thing — made a consciously considered judgment about what to keep and what to let go — at two inflection points in your life. Whether or not you thought of what you were doing as minimalism is irrelevant; you were practicing the principles of minimalism regardless. And in each instance, you reached a different conclusion. Such is what I mean when I say minimalism isn’t a rulebook, but rather a toolbox.

      With respect to heirlooms and mementoes, I’ll say this: Any physical object from our past that can supply psychological self-insight has value, and should be appreciated for that value. I can certainly understand a scenario whereby someone says, “My father just died, and I have to sort through all this stuff that’s going to be an emotional minefield for me. I have to do it and I want to do it… but I’m not in the headspace right now to do it.”

      In an instance like that, I can see someone putting those items — totems from the past — into storage until such time as the death itself can be processed. Sometimes we’re just not ready to deal with a trauma, especially one that risks opening even older wounds. I can certainly relate. It was the implosion of my screenwriting career that inspired me to start this blog eight years ago, after all, but I did not share the story of my professional collapse until this past January. I just wasn’t ready before that moment to “go there.” It took many, many years of introspection, therapy, and personal growth — to say nothing of applied practice at letting go — before I could write that piece and close the book on that chapter of my life.

      If a physical memento reminds us of an experience, be it positive or negative or both, and that reminder serves as a source of strength or encouragement or inspiration or catharsis for us, then that item has value. Period. Therefore, what I would suggest is that if the item in question has helped us exorcise some demon, and it serves no further purpose, then we should feel empowered to let it go. Those past-things don’t have to go back into storage at that point simply because we don’t know what else to do with them. But if those reminders, like scrapbooks and symbolic trinkets, provide a narrative context for the story of one’s life — either previously, currently, or eventually — then they are valuable. Minimalism helps us better suss out the things in our life that have value, whatever that value may be (only we can say), and the things that don’t, either on account of being worthless or having outlived their intended purpose.

      Thank you, Tara, for sharing your perspective and personal experiences so candidly, and for enriching this conversation with your take on this multifaceted subject. I value all of my readers — you, Erik, Diana, Dell, Jacqui, Jeff, Dave (and everyone else, past and present) — because you all “get” what I’m going for with this time- and attention-demanding blog, and you invest your time and attention in it. For a minimalist and a writer, there’s no greater gift than that — no more meaningful or generous gesture. Thanks to you all.

      Sean

      • Tara Sitser

        Sean, I do love the concept of Minimalism being a toolbox that you can pull from in a variety of ways rather than a framework that you are expected to fit into. Not only does that give you room to adapt to the specific circumstances happening in front of you but also encourages you to consciously evaluate what is happening for you at any given moment. I think, for most of us, it is also true that how we respond to a memory or an object will change over time. The ability to reevaluate old patterns and beliefs is essential to growth. Something that seems to be sadly missing from the thought process of so much of our population these days. When so many people do what they do and make the choices they make simply because it is what they have always done Minimalism may be one of the most important concepts we have.

        • Sean P Carlin

          Indeed, Tara. We live in a culture of automatic and accelerating behaviors — the habitual and unchallenged perpetuation of old patterns and beliefs, as you identify them. Markets, politicians, partisan pundits, and religious leaders — among others — depend on automatic and accelerating behaviors as the means by which they consolidate power and capital.

          Thought, therefore, is antithetical to their direct interests. Thought makes a pause, and consider our actions before we take them. Thought inspires us to question whether the things we are doing and the things we are buying are actually good for us.

          We understandably find comfort in rulebooks and frameworks, because they spare us the time and attention we would otherwise spend on thinking through a particular issue. I don’t have to expend time choosing what to drink this morning when I always have Starbucks. I don’t have to choose what to do after Sunday dinner, because that’s when the latest episode of House of the Dragon airs, and if I don’t watch it in real time, it’ll just be spoiled on Twitter tomorrow morning. (In the leadup the show’s premiere, the New York Times had the courage to ask: “How About We Just Don’t Watch the ‘Game of Thrones’ Prequel?”) Habits eliminate choice, thereby “freeing” us from the time and attention required to make those choices.

          But I have found that when we interrogate our behaviors, especially the automatic and accelerating ones, we discover that they are actually costing us steeply in money and time, often for little appreciable return in value. By thinking through our actions and habits, we vastly reduce — or, if you prefer, minimalize — the amount of money, time, and attention we pour into automatic and accelerating behaviors, thereby freeing up those assets for other things/experiences that actually add value to our lives. Through minimalism, we train ourselves to spend our assets — our money, time, and attention — more mindfully and selectively, and thusly get more in exchange for less. (And by “more” I simply mean more value, not necessarily more stuff.)

          The way we reduce choice in our life isn’t by becoming habit buyers and brand loyalists, but rather by “unsubscribing” to all the shit we don’t need (and, often, don’t even enjoy). When we have fewer demands on our money, time, and attention, we are able to choose how we invest those assets more mindfully and meaningfully. We pick up a lot of habits in life because there was a time they provided value — as I mentioned in the previous comment about all the media franchises I once enjoyed — but no longer do. You are absolutely correct when you say that how we respond to a memento or keepsake or even a personal relationship or TV show can change over time. This is where our Spidey-sense comes into play: When something in our lives produces anxiety — or even “merely” apathy — then we know the time has come to let it go. Simple as that. We let it go — with gratitude in our heart for it, and with the acknowledgment that it has served its purpose and we are now moving on.

          That’s minimalism. For those interested in learning more, I highly recommend the Netflix feature Minimalism: A Documentary About the Important Things.

    • D. Wallace Peach

      Great point about cleaning out the parents’ stuff, Tara. My parents saved everything (WWII children) and downsizing into an apartment was painful for them. They moved a lot of their belongings into a storage unit that I’ll one day need to clean out. I’ve started asking my daughter and niece, will you someday want “this” or “that” (including many heirlooms). If they say no, I’m carefully getting rid of it (selling or donating). I will try my best not to leave my daughter with a house full of things she doesn’t want and can’t use. 🙂 What a discussion. Thanks for chiming in. 🙂

      • Tara Sitser

        Thanks for your reply, Diana. I also had a mother who wouldn’t ever throw anything away. I applaud you for investing your time and effort into clearing away the unwanted clutter. Much of our parents’ generation were raised with an attitude of scarcity. Understandable, I guess, But my mom couldn’t let go of anything because “you might need it someday. You never know!” I do like to be prepared. My husband and I stockpile essential like favorite foods and pet supplies. But making space around yourself is a part of healing. And I’ve always believed we are more affected by our environment than most of us realize.
        Great to chat with you here!

        • Sean P Carlin

          Yes, it’s critical to frame these matters in — and understand them by way of — their appropriate sociocultural context.

          In the 1930s, we had the Great Depression, which affected an entire generation: It definitely made them, generally speaking, savers. I have/had older relatives who lived through the Depression who save the unused soy-sauce packets that come with their Chinese-food deliveries, stuffed into a bulging Ziploc bag in the pantry. That mentality comes straight out of the Depression, for sure, and the scarcity associated with the era.

          Then in the 1950s, owed largely to economic intervention strategies taken and public-works programs initiated by FDR as a direct response to the Depression, we had postwar prosperity: suburban sprawl and automobile culture and a corporate repackaging of the so-called “American Dream.”

          The boomers who came of age in the ’50s, after briefly flirting with the Haight-Ashbury countercultural movement, then morphed into the Thirtysomething yuppies of the 1980s, that period of turbocharged materialism, what with the buy-now-pay-later mentality that credit cards fostered, to say nothing of the keeping-up-with-the-Joneses decadence it fueled.

          (I have written elsewhere about how the deregulation that occurred under Ronald Reagan trained my generation to be good little consumers, which is directly responsible for the crisis of “commercial adolescence” about which I have spilled so much ink — the collecting of nostalgic toys by grown adults.)

          Then the neoliberal economic policies of the 1990s more or less codified the just-can’t-get-enough mindset of contemporary Western culture. The precipitous spike in carbon emissions of the last 30 years is a direct result of neoliberalism, a topic about which Naomi Klein writes at length in her essential texts This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (2014) and On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal (2019).

          My point in saying all this, Tara and Diana, is that we are all caught up in a very entrenched system that thrives on the (mostly gratuitous) buying and selling of goods, an economic imperative that has degraded both our quality of life as well as the health of the planet. “Keeping up with the Joneses,” as it were, is making us unhappy and the environment unstable. That has to change.

          But changing entrenched systems — moving, for example, to a post-capitalism society — is extremely difficult. It has been done, it can be done, and it will be done: There is a reason, after all, our current era is referred to as late-stage capitalism, and I truly believe that if I’m lucky enough to live another 40 years, that shift will at least be somewhat underway. Neoliberal capitalism is unsustainable.

          Changing that system is going to require the concerted effort of governments and corporations — the same institutions that established and (still) promote neoliberalism. In the meantime, however, we can all find ways as individuals to reclaim our sanity — to say nothing of our money, time, and attention. We can take up practices that make us more mindful of what we buy (minimalism) and what we eat (veganism). We can learn to silence our phones, and calm our minds through meditation. We can learn to begin reforming our own predisposition to engage in automatic and accelerating behaviors — that’s the lesson Scream teaches.

          We start by recognizing that we are not to blame for the socioeconomic system into which we were indoctrinated, and that, moving forward, we are choosing to practice applied mindfulness as to how we spend our money, time, and attention. We do not need to fill our homes and our heads with the Next Big Thing. I daresay most of us — at least here in this particular comment section — are fortunate enough to already have all that we need.

          I mean this sincerely (this isn’t a paid endorsement): If you’re looking for inspiration on how to choose better, please read Erik’s book Alternate Reality: The Better Life You Could Be Living. (And if you do, let’s do our pal a favor and leave a starred review of it on Amazon and/or Goodreads.)

          • Tara Sitser

            Sean, what a wonderful, spot-on summation of our current predicament: “…we are all caught up in a very entrenched system that thrives on the (mostly gratuitous) buying and selling of goods, an economic imperative that has degraded both our quality of life as well as the health of the planet. “Keeping up with the Joneses,” as it were, is making us unhappy and the environment unstable. That has to change.”

            I have a very clear memory of a moment in 1985 when I had just had to move, after eight years of living in a cute little bungalow that I could afford easily, into a place that I shared with a good friend because neither one of us could afford the current rentals that had skyrocketed in the last handful of years on our own. I saw our society transition from the past couple of decades where anyone with a more-than-poverty-level fulltime job could support themselves in relative comfort to a culture where even college graduates making a decent salary struggled to make ends meet. I saw more and more of my friends and co-workers delaying marriage and family because it was just too expensive. My thought at that moment was, “We are a generation of people in our 30’s with roommates. Something is terribly wrong here.”

            I love the thought of a Post-Capitalist economy. Hurray for Minimalism!

          • Sean P Carlin

            The mid-1980s, Tara, was when the free-market fundamentalism of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher — privatization, deregulation, corporate tax cuts, the dismantling of the so-called “welfare state” established under FDR — took root, and with the ensuing collapse of the Soviet Union by the end of that decade, capitalism had not only vanquished communism, it had evolved into a new supercharged permutation of itself: neoliberalism.

            This is the reason, during the past 40 years, the wealthy have grown super-wealthy while the rest of us find ourselves working longer and harder for less and less. The fact that the generations to succeed the boomers — Gen X (my cohort), the Millennials, and now Gen Z — have all done worse for themselves than their parents is a testament to the systematic neoliberal redistribution of wealth from the common good to the billionaire class. It’s a fascinating subject, and I highly recommend the books of activist Naomi Klein to anyone who wishes to learn more about it.

            It is the reason why you took note, in 1985, of a socioeconomic shift that was already underway. In that way, Tara, you were preternaturally sensitive to something that was happening in the culture. But make no mistake: It was a deliberate strategy on the part of the ideological right — a corporate counterrevolution designed to stem the increasing public disillusionment with capitalism that was happening in the 1960s and ’70s. It was gloriously successful… and we have all paid the price for it.

            Fortunately, the younger generations that got the shit end of the stick — that got stuck with the bill for all of the free-market profligacy of those neoliberal economic policies — recognize how sick and unsustainable this iteration of capitalism is, and while I do not expect to live long enough to see a post-capitalist society (à la Star Trek), my hope is that the next few decades will mark a leftward shift toward a system of democratic eco-socialism.

            It takes time to reform entrenched systems — decades or longer — but there is an understanding right now, particularly among young people, that the way we are living is entirely unsustainable, and that we need systemic reconceptualization. And Joe Biden, to his great credit, hears the voices of all those young people, and has put policies in place — like the Inflation Reduction Act (which is a climate bill in all but name) — to begin to transition us (hopefully) from a neoliberal economy to a green economy. And even though I do believe this will take more decades to happen than I personally have left on this earth, I’m reminded of the words Vice President Gore is quick to quote: Change takes longer to happen than you think it should… then happens faster than you thought it could.

            We’re gonna get there. And if minimalism helps people redefine their relationship with materialism, then I am only too happy to spread the good word, and to encourage people to learn to live more fully with less stuff.

      • Sean P Carlin

        My apologies, Diana — I somehow overlooked this particular response (even though I know it wasn’t specifically directed to me). I feel so fortunate this post resonated with you all, and that it has inspired such robust conversation! Thank you!

        What you’ve described here — about your parents leaving you with a storage unit full of stuff that will one day become your responsibility, and how you have no wish to pass on that same burden to your own daughter — is something that came up in my discussion with Erik. Based on what you are describing, your parents had a houseful of stuff they’d accumulated over the course of a lifetime but no longer really needed or used, yet wouldn’t part with. And one day, those items are going to inevitably become an imposition on your money, time, and attention. (That experience — dealing with the copious personal effects of a late parent — is one that Joshua Fields Millburn relates with great detail and candor in Minimalism: A Documentary About the Important Things, and served as a catalyst for his conversion to minimalism.)

        This is what I mean when I say that in our refusal to deal with our stuff, we put it “out of sight and out of mind,” but doing so is a denial of mortality, in a way. It’s certainly an act of selfishness, because it is predicated on a refusal to acknowledge that we are passing on the burden of money, time, and attention those items represent to another person — and ostensibly someone we claim to love, at that. Please understand, Diana, I am not making a judgment about your particular parents, rather calling out a mindset that I see a lot: a comfort taken in the indefinite storage of unwanted stuff without any sense of the cost we are passing along to our heirs.

        As I said to Erik, I think the responsible thing for all of us to do — in our forties, fifties, sixties, whenever — is to have a frank discussion with our children or heirs about what they might want and what they definitely don’t. We need to create a “safe space” for this conversation, free of judgment or hurt feelings, in which we bequeath them only things of value, and make sure the things that have no value — at least to them — aren’t left in their lap to deal with.

        I do believe we have a moral obligation to “clean up our own backyard” before we pass. And since we never really know when that might be, the best and most responsible thing to do is to minimalize our belongings today, and make sure we don’t keep mindlessly accumulating more shit in the future. We need to have empathy for the future custodians of our possessions, and that’s as simple as realizing that everything we own is an imposition of money, time, and attention. And if we’re okay paying the price for that, fine — that’s our prerogative — but it’s worth bearing in mind that those costs will eventually be passed along to our heirs. Our false sense of comfort comes at a very real cost to them.

        So, use things as long as they’re useful… and then sell or donate them. But a storage unit is nothing more than a timebomb waiting to go off in someone else’s face. Storage units serve a purpose when we’re between homes — a short-term solution during a period of domestic upheaval — but anything put into self-storage for more than 90 days is something we are better off selling or donating, and then just buying again if and when we need it.

        Agreed, Diana: What a great discussion! You’ve all added value to this post, and I thank you.

  8. Priscilla Bettis

    I have minimalist tendencies. This show, for example, is nothing I’ve seen because TV is something I’ve 99 percent let go from my life. It wasn’t as satisfying to me as a good book. It sounds like your journey is typical, a transformation of your surroundings and the way your brain works. Very interesting post!

    • Sean P Carlin

      Thanks, Priscilla!

      Indeed, the sheer deluge of new (and archived) content across the sundry streaming service is absolutely dizzying. Every week, another friend will recommend a new “must-see” show that I not only haven’t ever seen… I’ve never before heard of it! There’s just so much to watch — far too much. And for reasons I covered at length in my two-part post “In the Multiverse of Madness,” Hollywood is militarily adept at turning us all into “hostage buyers” of its product — it knows how to get us watching and keep us watching, regardless of whether we even enjoy what we’re being served.

      Speaking for myself, the more must-see programming that’s offered, the less inclined I am to sample any of it. And what I discovered by preemptively “opting out” — of Star Trek: Picard and WandaVision and Obi-Wan Kenobi and House of the Dragon (among many others) — is that I didn’t miss any of those shows. I didn’t miss the narratives, and I certainly didn’t miss the anxiety that comes with having to keep up with all that crap (in real-time, at that, lest it be “spoiled”). I reclaimed all the time in my life — and space in my head — that I’d reserved open-endedly for media franchises I didn’t even enjoy, and have reinvested instead in books: I have been getting so much more reading done of late! I’ll take a standalone literary experience over a multimedia “universe” any day…

      On that note, I’ll take this opportunity to make everyone aware that Priscilla has a brand-new novel coming out this November called Dog Meat, available from Potter’s Grove Press. Preorder a copy here.

      Thanks for sparing some of your time and attention on this post, Priscilla! Your voice is always welcome here.

      Sean

      • Priscilla Bettis

        What a nice surprise, THANK YOU for giving my book a shout-out!

        • Sean P Carlin

          My pleasure, pal! Friends of the blog are always welcome to promote their projects here, and since I’d issued impromptu shout-outs for Diana and Erik, I thought I’d share the news about Dog Meat, too! Anyone interested in learning more about the novel should be sure to follow Priscilla’s WordPress blog.

  9. AB

    What amazing timing for this article to come out! I am in the process of cleaning out clothes I haven’t worn for years from the back of my drawers. Some of them have sentimental value (like a college sports shirt), but otherwise, doing my best to let them go and donate them. I do believe minimalism gives freedom and allows more room into life. I know for me, sometimes I imagine the task will take much longer than it actually does, and I have to do my best to prevent anxiety from locking me into inaction. It’s sort of like going to the gym, trying to do a little bit everyday and make it a lifestyle so things do not pile up! Thank you as always for great insights!

    • Sean P Carlin

      Thanks for reading the piece and sharing your thoughts, AB!

      As you are aware, I spent 20 years in Los Angeles, where the weather is fairly consistent, and thusly so is one’s wardrobe; I would often wear the same T-shirt and cargo pants on the Fourth of July as I did on New Year’s Day. Because I more or less wore the same clothes all year long, it was easier to know which shirts/pants I was using consistently, and which languished in the back of a drawer. That made minimalizing my clothes much easier.

      Clothing minimalization here on the East Coast, where I live now, is a little trickier, because obviously some items — like bathing suits and heavy coats, for instance — are going to go into “seasonal storage.” Accordingly, what I have tried to do is limit the variety of those seasonal garments I keep on hand. I now own only three coats — one for each season: a lightweight army-surplus jacket for the spring; my café-racer MC for autumn; and a fleece-lined jacket for winter. That’s it. I have a spring windbreaker, a fall jacket, and a winter coat. I don’t have a hall closet stuffed with coats I barely use, just three pieces that are easy to access (they hang six inches apart from one another), and I never have to think about which one to wear, because that decision is dictated by the time of year.

      I have found that it is very easy to distinguish the clothing we love — the stuff we feel good wearing! — versus everything else (which somehow never manages to come out from the back of the drawer). My advice would be to donate all the clothes you keep on hand yet never find an excuse to wear to Goodwill, where they will serve a purpose again. You won’t miss ’em — that’s a promise.

      And remember this: With the onset of anxiety, we are usually tempted to stop what we’re doing and “deal with it later.” But anxiety is our friend! It is our subconscious signaling that we no longer need or want the item in question, and we need only grant ourselves the permission we seek to let it go. When you feel the hum of anxiety in your viscera during a clean-out session, learn to recognize it for what it is: a call we issue ourselves to find the courage to let that thing go for good, not to put it out of sight and out of mind yet again. And when the thing is gone, with it goes the sense of anxiety it produced in us.

      Good luck cleaning out! And remember to listen, quite literally, to your gut!

  10. dellstories

    W/ the Twitter situation, I’ve been getting more into Tumblr. Yes, it’s still around

    I found a post about Marie Kondo I thought you might like

    https://www.tumblr.com/lyrslair/702125405982932992

    • Sean P Carlin

      Hey, Dell!

      I can’t access that particular post; when I click on the link, I get this message: You’ll need to be on Tumblr to see this particular blog, along with a log-in/sign-up prompt.

      Any chance you might copy-and-paste a relevant citation?

      Who knows how long Twitter will remain operational, or if the situation there becomes so toxic and unsustainable that the only sensible and/or moral course of action is to bail. If Twitter went away tomorrow, I can’t say I’d cry about it. It’s the only social-media platform I use, save this blog, and these days I mostly only use it to promote links to my posts or other articles of interest. If Twitter were to become defunct in the next few months, I’d have to think long and hard about whether I want to bother with another social-media outlet, or if this blog becomes my sole online platform. On the matter of minimalism, having fewer social-media obligations that cost me, often considerably, in time and attention would not be the worst thing I could think of.

      Hope you had a nice Thanksgiving! As of now, I’m planning to publish that long promised Heat 2 review in mid-December. It’s going to be as epic as Heat itself!

      • dellstories

        I liked Twitter. I learned a LOT about my ADHD and Autism from the people there. Though honestly… I’d never felt the sense of community I’d felt elsewhere

        In my experience, the social media site itself is FAR less important the the people in whatever sub-community you form in it. I think of a social media site the way I think of a word processor, drawing program, video game controls, etc.:

        Let me have my fun, let me do what I want or need to do, and don’t get in my way

        My Thanksgiving was good. I went over my sister’s, saw my family

        How was yours?

        >
        themagiciankingsley
        Nov 4

        you know, the more i think about it, the angrier i get about how mainstream media and even people in general treated marie kondo when the life changing magic of tidying up got big. it’s just so unnecessary and sad to me and i think the vast majority of people would love what she has to say if they just actually looked into it instead of maliciously memeing her to death? i’m not talking about the cutesy does it spark joy stuff but all the things portraying her as some bizarre evil cleaning dictator.

        i actually read her book when i was about twelve years old, in the most shocking and probably only example of me ever being ahead of a trend, and even at twelve i really loved everything she said. at that point in time i lived in fear of my mother’s threats that she would come and throw everything away while i was school, and my small and very adhd mind simply could not grasp the concept of “have less stuff”. have less of WHICH stuff? how? i’d never actually been taught how to clean my room besides being told “pick up stuff” and “be organized”, and as she points out multiple times, cleaning is not an intuitive thing. it’s a learned behavior and skill.

        anyways. her entire philosophy centers on surrounding yourself with things that you love, and only things that you love (or things that you absolutely need). she explicitly says over and over again that it is not about throwing things away, it is not about minimalism, it is not about “what is the smallest amount possible that you can survive on”. she literally has a whole section where she talks about how hard it can be to throw things away when you’ve lived in poverty all your life and you don’t have absolute confidence that you can replace something that you really needed if it gets thrown out, even though you’re not likely to ever really need it–you’ve just been conditioned to think that because that’s literally how you survive, when you’re poor. she talks about how that mindset can serve and how it can damage. she talks about how minimalism is sort of a rich people thing, cause they can afford to throw everything away.

        this woman really came out here and said “i want you to be surrounded by things you love and i’m going to validate your fears and your difficulties in getting to that place” and people somehow got mad at her. i don’t understand it
        #it’s because one quote of hers got taken out of context#and people thought she was telling everyone to get rid of all their books#and the racists latched onto that shit like a barnacle and fueled the fire
        … See all
        Avatar
        Avatar
        Original Poster
        themagiciankingsley
        Nov 10

        @bcomic-blog you are literally who I’m talking about. She said that SHE PERSONALLY keeps 30 books. She never denied saying it, she’s had to state multiple times that that is what SHE wanted for herself because 30 was exactly how many books she wanted to keep and that she’s never said that everyone should. Jesus Christ actually read her book
        Avatar
        jpo1960
        Nov 19

        Thank you so much for this. I keep thinking about the way things spread, and how they are read, interpreted and understood. As a songwriter I learned early on that whatever I wrote went into the air, and no matter what I intended by writing and singing, it would be received (if I was lucky) in a way that surprised me. Often, I was gratified and informed by what people heard.
        Avatar
        charitysplace
        2d

        They misrepresented her because people en masse are very good at ignorantly hating on something they know nothing about.

        • Sean P Carlin

          In many respects, Dell, the point you make about social-media platforms such as Twitter is the same one I’ve made about screenwriting programs like Save the Cat!: They’re only as useful — and as constructive — as we make them. They are a means to an end — that’s all. Intention is everything.

          Thanksgiving was nice, thanks! We hosted it here in our new home. We’re making new memories here all the time!

          I actually spent part of the weekend pulling some “treasures” from my old bedroom closet in my mother’s apartment next door, including five boxes of comics I haven’t looked at in close to thirty years. I donated the comics to an old friend who runs an online business buying/selling them, and I put some high-value collectables up on eBay and sold them for several hundred dollars. The money was gravy: The real reward was being rid of all that stuff.

          The comics were interesting to sift through, because it was the stuff I bought in the 1980s and ’90s, and going through them was like flipping through an old photo album. It was an emotional experience. In many cases, I remembered where I was and who I was with when I bought them. But I didn’t need or want them anymore, and I was happy to give them to someone who did want them and can use them. Holding onto all those comics wasn’t going to somehow make the days of innocence relivable on-demand.

          You know, last week, the trailer for Indiana Jones V dropped, and within hours, multiple friends (many from the real old days) texted me with the same message: Did you see it?! I told them I hadn’t watched the trailer because I’ll never watch the movie. Furthermore, I outlined for them what happens next, just in case they want to spare themselves this misery: We’re going to spend the next six months in a state of feverish anticipation for this film (endless trailer analyses have already flooded the Internet), only to be walloped with a tsunami of disappointment the weekend it’s released, at which point we’ll spend the next six months — and probably far longer — bitching about it with friends and shitting all over it online (on the subject of bad uses of social media).

          (I’ve already seen several idiotic pieces demanding Indy V address some of Crystal Skull‘s biggest plot holes, like why Indy was not only hired back by his university at the end of the movie, but why he was then promoted. Sorry, friends: Mangold isn’t going to waste a minute of his movie trying to “explain away” poor storytelling choices made by the last movie. I have always said the problem with Crystal Skull was not conceptual; Lucas’ creative instincts were on point when he selected an extraterrestrial MacGuffin for the film’s Atomic Age setting. The problem with that movie was executional: a bad script from a terrible screenwriter and lazy direction from a filmmaker who completely and irreversibly lost interest in those kinds of blockbusters somewhere between the first and second Jurassic Park movies. This new movie is not going to “resolve the issues of previous entries in the franchise,” no matter how badly fanboys need it to.)

          That’s not what I want from an Indiana Jones experience. For me, Indy (both the movie trilogy and the TV series) was a sublimely joyous experience that I cherished each time a new installment was released — one that predated the forensic-fandom culture that reigns on the Internet today (to say nothing of the nostalgia–industrial complex that caters to it). This new movie is destined to disappoint the fan base, and then we’ll be stuck reading pointless critiques about why it failed creatively for all eternity…

          Fuck all that. Here’s the reason why Indy V will inevitably disappoint everyone so rabidly excited to see it: because they don’t want to see Indy V. What they want is to be the ten-year-old kid who first saw Raiders forty years ago. That’s what they want. And this movie won’t — can’t — give them that. Those days are gone. And that’s why I parted with all those comics I’d bought and read and reread and obsessed over as a kid: because it was time to let them go. And to be sure, I spent my Thanksgiving weekend looking over each one, and taking a moment to appreciate what it meant to me, and then sending it on its way. It felt good to leave behind childhood things.

          And afterwards, I said to my wife that I wish someone had taught me about letting go when I was young — about not collecting things to no apparent end. And in her infinite wisdom, she said, “What good would that have done? Would you have listened? Childhood is a time when we have so little control over our own lives. We’re told what to wear, when to go to bed, where to go to school, and so on. The only thing we can exercise any control over are the private little collections of stuff we amass — be it books or comics or action figures or stuffed animals or what have you.”

          While KonMari and minimalism aren’t quite the same thing, for reasons I explained in the post above, both of them offer tools toward the same end: to keep only the possessions that add demonstrable value to one’s life. Everything else, we let go. If KonMari helped that particular Tumblr blogger sort through their material possessions and confront the anxiety that both owning it and parting with it caused them, then it is a good and helpful thing. Just like Twitter, just like Save the Cat!, minimalism and the KonMari method are appliances that can add value to our lives. But if they don’t, then simply disregard them.

          But like anything that gains overnight popularity, Tidying Up with Marie Kondo has found itself the subject of kneejerk derision. My advice to those like that Tumblr poster would be to not get drawn into such arguments. Haters gonna hate — isn’t that what they say? If someone wants to crap all over KonMari, let them. Don’t dignify it with a response. How sad for them that that’s how they choose to invest their time and energy. Much like JP Delaney, who didn’t bother to understand minimalism before he wrote a novel (and produced a TV series) dismissing it as a “‘weird and deeply obsessive’ psychology,” people mocking Marie Kondo get off on being judgmental, rather than having the courage to exercise curiosity. Fuck ’em!

  11. helenaolwage

    A precious lesson! Some things are hard to get rid of, but once you do, it clears your mind. It’s almost like psychology. I wish I knew how to make good use of space, though.

    • Sean P Carlin

      Exactly, Lena: Minimalism is about retraining your mind, not merely decluttering your home. It’s about learning to live more fully with less stuff.

      Knowing how to maximize the use of space — and I speak as someone with an innate talent for it — is both a gift and a curse. You wind up creating room for a lot of useless junk, as I learned when my wife and I minimalized our L.A. apartment. My advice? Have less space that needs to be filled with less stuff. Our New York apartment has less square footage and smaller closets than our L.A. pad — and that is by design. We’ve also made absolutely certain that every item we’ve brought into our new home has been done consciously and intentionally. So, even though our new place is technically smaller, it actually feels much grander and more open.

      In summary: If you own less stuff, you’ll feel less pressure to fill the space in your home. And in short order, you’ll come to cherish living in an uncluttered, minimalistic home. That’s the best use of space I can think of!

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