She’s pretty and strange, and I like that she sounds a little like Bjork, but the music is all wrong. It should be minimalist horror movie music --a drywall screw dragged across piano strings and echoey distant shrieks and bass thumps, and maybe some old 78rpm record noise-- and the video should stutter and stall for a moment every time she looks aside. Also maybe have a shadow of a boom mic or an out-of-focus cat or passing car reflection swoosh by in the background (or foreground) every once in awhile.
She’s right, though: Writing a microscopic list on blinding-white paper in a THX-1138 therapy prison environment can be a powerful motivator to clean the toilet and throw out that old desktop computer equipment. There’s no room in anyone’s life for a 22-inch CRT monitor or a box of iffy modems.
My stuff makes me more. Tools with which to do. Raw materials on which to do. Past projects as inspiration and history. Books to offload storage. Random items that connect me emotionally to other people. Stuff makes me more human. Minimalism just gives you a chance to show how much disposable income you have, letting you throw out everything after you’ve used it. That’s… really boring, in comparison.
We ended up not having kids, but I always lamented that because we’ve downsized so many times, if we did have kids they wouldn’t be able to enjoy what I did, which was to have myriad things to explore on one’s own. Whether a shelf of books and records, boxes of old magazines, or a box full of junked motors, radios and tools, keep it! Too much de-cluttering can deprive your children of unstructured play and self-directed reading. And things they can tear apart and salvage for their own constructions. The bonus is you’re getting them interested in what you used to be interested in without them feeling like you’re shoving it down their throat.
And its first corollary: forget minimalism if you have children.
Unrelated: I love how minimalism is trotted out as a means of escaping the pressures of owning stuff, and yet it’s adherents seem to fetishize the objects they own to an even greater degree.
It’s like with stationary nerds: instead of a drawer full of five cent bics that will get literally thrown around without concern, they (cough, I) will have two really nice pens and then feel awful when they break or are lost.
I can understand the desire for minimalism. I often feel overwhelmed by all this unorganized crap around me. But there have been countless times where some old box I saved, or other doohicky comes in handy or fills a need perfectly that I thank the hoarder side of my brain for not giving into the minimalist side.
By setting the contrast slider of her editing software to “Voldemort” she managed to get rid of her nose*. Now she only has four senses to worry about. Minimalism!
As it says on another blog I read, “The great irony of minimalism is that while it purports to free you from a focus on stuff, it still makes stuff the focus of your life. The materialist concentrates on how to accumulate things, while the minimalist concentrates on how to get rid of those things…ultimately they’re both centering their thoughts on stuff.”
All the holiday paraphernalia that accumulates with children…and they each have their own subset of nostalgic must-keeps. And if you think you’ve found an outlier, the very next time that holiday rolls around, it’s ruined because that one thing was given away.
It’s important to be very rich but have almost no items in your home. Have you ever owned anything? This is why you cannot forgive any of your former lovers. Things like “having chairs” is preventing you from living your best life, and also you should throw away any item of clothing you’re not currently wearing. If it’s not on your skin, you don’t really love it, do you?
