🚧 Under Construction 🚧

I've been fascinated with the idea of minimalism for a long time now and have gone through various stages of me trying to implement it in my life. I think it started out as a way of differentiating myself from my father. He has grown up in the years following world war 2 and, like many of his peers, has a tendency of hording things. This generation seems to have been branded with a sense of scarcity that never evades them, even in times of extreme abundance like these. He has purchased every imaginable kitchen aid (often multiple times), every tool, every storage bin and time-saver. He also seems to have an encyclopedic memory of how much everything has cost without remembering where he put a single thing and often altogether forgetting it existed.

Keeping track of all our possessions and storing and maintaining them can be both difficult and time-consuming. I do not own a lot of things and yet I am reliably surprised to discover some items in my possesion when I sort through my stuff. Thoughts like "Wait, I still have that?" or "I really should get back into [...]." usually accompany these discoveries. Possessions can become a burden. That scrapbook I have been meaning to finish, the lego set I've assembled once and is now stored away in its box on my cupboard, half-finished electronics projects, etc. Looking at these things doesn't make me feel good. It makes me feel nervous or uncomfortable because they remind me of things I have started and not finished and will probably never finish if we're being honest here. Most items are meant to be used and owning them without ever using them is just wasting their potential. Of course there are other things too, art or plants that we appreciate for their beauty or trinkets and random objects with sentimental value to us. These have their place and there is nothing to be gained by disposing of all of them. Again, I don't want to burden myself with them either though. It is enough, to have one or two items that remind us of a loved one. We don't need to be reminded of them constantly. Anyways, I think it would also make us blind to them. A cup I've got from my mother will be much less significant if I also have 3 other cups, the chairs, a teapot, a shelve, an ornate vase and a lamp from her in my kitchen.

For me, minimalism is about making decisions about my life. I don't just own an analog camera, I commit to it. I take care of it, use it, learn to get better at taking pictures with it. We only have a finite amount of time in our lifes and hours in our day. There are many things that I would like to do and it is so easy to sprawl and start with all of them without getting good at or deriving meaning from a single one. A good way of preventing this is to decide carefully, what you purchase or keep in the first place. This will make it so much easier to decide what to do on a day-to-day basis since you don't have nearly as many options. In my room, I can play piano or guitar, draw, read, listen to music, sleep, use my laptop, study, exercise or play board games. I can't watch TV, use VR-goggles, build with lego, solder electronics, 3D-print, weave on a loom, knit, play with magnetic toys or use another one of countless objects that I have had in the past and decided to get rid of. Some of these decisions where not easy to make, like getting rid of my electronics equipment, but they make my daily decisions a lot simpler and allow me to focus. It can be enough to compartmentalize your interests too. Like a workshop where you only build things or a band where you only go to play the guitar. I can still do electronics in university or at work but I don't do it in my free time.

There are so many topics that I could go into here: gifts, digital minimalism, really expensive minimalism, pseudo minimalism, extreme minimalism. For now, I will leave it at this though and perhaps I'll go into more detail here in the future.