I don't see your point but feel all your anger. Not sure if I'm just catching it from another project, but it is odd to me that you default from a guy owning a few shirts to causing major economic injustices.

I don't own much physically. I spend my days volunteering and traveling living a pretty simple life. I write posts and sometimes people like and share them. This post was written in May of last year and reached HN today. I'm not trying to promote this much, I'm just doing something for me and sharing it on a bloggity.

The assumption that I'm just snapping my fingers to have an immigrant army at my beck and call is laughable. I couchsurf most nights. I've slept under overpasses. Not just swiping my credit card.

I flew more miles in 2010 than humanity did ~300 years ago. Times are a changing. I could fly around the world for the equivalent to a mortgage payment. What is excessive there? Do you default to negativity for anything related to what is possible?

I'm living a different life that almost everyone I know. Nothing jaw dropping or amazing here, just different, and treat it as such.

Hello from Colorado (this week).

That's the nub - you don't live a simple life, you live a very complicated life where the "stuff" in your life has been abstracted out of sight.

To define ownership by physical possession is utterly facile. The economic decisions you make result in great mountains of "stuff" being made and used and consumed. You haven't structured your life to have less "stuff" in it, only that you avoid having to carry it.

Aviation fuel is stuff. It has mass and volume, it smells and tastes of something. Huge facilities have been built to extract and refine it, and vast areas of land and sea have been irrevocably damaged by that process. Very real, physical wars were fought over it. Your plane ticket is a stake in all of that, a fractional ownership of the machinery that puts a plane in the air.

Viewed from inside your head, your life seems minimal. But from a bird's eye, it looks like a bulldozer on the rampage.

This community is one of hackers, people who strive to look more deeply, to understand how things work at the most fundamental level. If we do not understand the deep impact of the things we consume and the lives we lead, who else?

The parent comment made some really good points. You papered over them with a straw man argument about the "immigrant army," then you shrugged your shoulders and said "meh", and there's also a hint of New Age silliness in there (Questioning a person's sense of "what is possible" is a silly way to claim the moral high ground. It's the New Age way to say "oh, you must not understand art".)

The original comment was that you are able to maintain a footprint of the same magnitude as you had before by simply living life "on demand" as it were, instead of storing stuff. If you really want to tout this lifestyle as minimalist, post your credit card statement so someone can fairly consider the actual cost of living this way.

In fact, parent alluded to another point that I would enunciate here: from the definition of Minimalism that says you actually have to reduce your impact -- a person who owns all of those things you don't, but doesn't eat meat, is more of a Minimalist than what you've laid out here.

Sorry to be harsh, I often don't take the time to clean up my comments after I've written them, to filter the wrath.

There are certain people upon whom you rely and are not acknowledging

to

You must have an army of personal slaves

so that he can conveniently dismiss it with a laugh.

Anyway, I don't think that this commenter is 'angry', he just doesn't feel like what your doing is really all that minimalist because you don't kill/grow your own food. Of course I'm not really sure I agree with him. You are minimalist in some ways and not others. I don't really see what's wrong with that.

Your angle might be that you can save time and be happier by owning fewer things? That's good advice. As an innovator, you've offered advice that can help other innovators with our first-world problems finding happiness.

There's some anger in the response, yes. But you are being made an example of. There's still a life of privilege in the way you're living, that probably you'd be happy to acknowledge. There's also some things that might not care about that others do - like carbon footprint, modern consumerism, money inequities, vegetarianism, etc. Or maybe you do care about those things too.

From one perspective, reducing your greater impact on the world by some amount seems to at least be routed in a desire to improve things - to make a nobel idea a reality as much as possible. Whether or not the overall impact is measurable is countered by the nobel gesture of the person at least.

From another perspective however, simply reducing the number of "possessions" one has to a ridiculously small amount by offloading the benefit provided by having said possessions to other segments - in essence, renting everything - doesn't seem to have much of a purpose at all beyond being slightly inconvenient. While I highly doubt anybody can only "own" 15 things - no, underwear cannot be excluded, even if you don't wear them more than once - whether the low bound is 15, 30, 75 or 200 seems rather irrelevant. As such, I'm not sure of the point.

Personally, I'd read deeply into some of the other very intelligent comments here. Ignore any perceived anger, because I don't think it exists.

    What's the point of minimalism if not
    to reduce one's impact on the world? Am
    I understanding this "movement" incorrectly?

It sounds like a pretty cool adventure that you're having. My first reaction was "15 possessions and no pan?", but I can understand that in context of the travelling that you're doing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNYcviXK4rg&feature=relat...

And, of course, I can be a "minimalist composer" even while writing complex works for entire orchestras:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Coolidge_Adams

None of these forms of minimalism is more "real" than the others.

Meanwhile, I'm afraid I don't understand your point. At least the OP has provided a living example of his style of minimalism. Can you give us a living example of yours? Even poor people "use money to access what they need", eat meat, travel by bus, use shared public infrastructure, and hire immigrant workers. Even subsistence farmers do these things. Even ascetic Buddhist monks do these things. (They don't subsist entirely on oxygen, after all: They're supported by donations. Or, if you insist, they "outsource the burden of sustaining their lifestyle".)

So when you say the words "real minimalist", who am I supposed to see in my mind's eye? Could it be someone I've ever actually met?

Of course Andrew's claim to minimalism is only relative to most people in the developed world. But there are tens of thousands of twentysomethings from developed countries travelling the world for extended periods of time with a similar amount of luggage (Most of us spend a bit more on clothes and a bit less on laptops; guess it depends on whether you prefer the inconvenience of laundry or Windows!) It seems to be as mandatory as national service for youthful Australians (and a mandatory experience after national service for Israelis). The secret about life on the road being fun got out a while ago.

It's not Andrew's fault, of course, if news coverage tries to turn him into some sort of innovator he's perhaps never claimed to be.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dieter_Rams#Rams.27_ten_princip...

Hidden complexity isn't minimalism. True minimalism demands fundamental simplicity. Minimalism makes the truth of a product, a process or a place more obvious, rather than obfuscating it behind white melamine. The actuality of less.

Minimalist lifestyle choices are those that positively simplify, that meaningfully reduce the total impact of our lives. Eating soy rather than beef, eating local strawberries in June rather than air-freighted strawberries in December. Insulation over of heating, two wheels over four. Measuring the size of your lifestyle in kilowatt-hours and hectares and litres.

If you're looking for the living embodiment, see Jason Rohrer. http://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/jason-rohrer/simpleLife.ht...

But there are assumptions, context, about lifestyle minimalism that the minimalism supports some goal to minimize consumption with an eye toward "the things we own end up owning us" and to keep their footprint small. The gp notes that the subject of the article has not actually done that, he's just pushed consumption off onto other people and businesses. An example you asked for of someone who lives minimalistically is a myth I heard as a kid about people who could fit everything into their VW Bug and be on their way.

I guess I don't think you're wrong so much as right but the gp's assumptions are common and more accurate to how minimalism is usually thought about.

One eventually realizes that minimalism of any kind is a trick of the mind. Nothing is really simple, even things that aren't alive, and nothing really exists in isolation. A thing can be minimal only relative to something else, and only along a limited axis, and only so long as you don't think too deeply.

(Did I just say that Trio's classic "Da Da Da" has only one note? Oops, I lied, I didn't look deeply enough: The chorus has a background singer, and though she - it sounds like a she - is designed to be a minimalist background singer she does sing multiple notes, adding vital depth and texture and helping to make the chorus sound so awesome: It's a joke of a chorus, but it's so much more musically rich than the verse that it sounds like heaven when it arrives.)

That's true. On the other hand it's there. All that infrastructure wasn't installed for his use exclusively. So, yes, I agree he's just moving the ownership from personal to distributed corporate/community. It's somewhat comparable to playing lose with accounting rules and moving money into off-shore banks. But, even homeless people utilize what is out there for them to use -like shopping carts, fast food restaurants, etc. I'ts not as though they become wilderness foragers.

>OP outsources the burden of sustaining his lifestyle to people poorer and browner than himself.

That's a bit of unnecessary inflammatory dressing.

He (or someone else) could have easily done the same thing in China, or Finland or South Korea or Greece. Or, similarly, someone brown could have done similar. Not all browns over the world are destitute, as one might portray.

With regard to the OP. it would seem, at least marginally, relying on the machine rather than on personal ownership is more resource efficient.

And, yes, as others pointed out, minimalism, is a pretty malleable term.

Help me out here, how am I supposed to be saving the planet today again?

"Real minimalists?" What, is there like a club or something?

Unlike you, Andrew isn't engaging in a game of "shoulds" and "oughts." He's just experimenting with his lifestyle and learning from the process.

> Minimalism is equally easy as it is boring to do. What shirt today? The one I didn’t wear yesterday. “How tough is it for you?” You mean, to pick the shirt I didn’t wear yesterday? Once you get used to simplicity, the complex normality others have becomes the audacious thing.

However, don't get upset when someone calls him on his anti-ownership bullshit. He still owns things; he's just shoving the energy of owning things on to someone else.

I think owning less things is a good goal to have, but not the way he's approaching it. It should be spending less money on things, not spending more money on disposable things so you can technically say you don't own a lot.

This is a project to help with some personal growth, not really a "I'm better" or "everyone should be like me."

It is just something I did. It taught me amazing things.

I learned a ton from him about the benefits of mobility--something I would have thought the lean, mobile startup crowd here on HN would've related to more.

Attachments--to belongings or business plans are a source of strength but are also over emphasized. I admire what you've done and think we could use a lot more of it.

Cheers!

That makes him a bit of a douchebag who deserves to be called out on his bullshit minimalism claim, not just someone who's just "experimenting and learning". He consumes way more resources than most people on this planet, including most Westerners. By what insane standard is that minimalist?

He's experimenting with a different lifestyle and what might come about by imposing artificial constraints upon himself which I think is really admirable.

Your post is at least keeping with the theme that has been prevalent over the past few days, HN is just mean now.

Hopefully it's just a phase.

He's not claiming that everyone else is doing it wrong, is he? Even though I like owning stuff and wouldn't give it up easily, I find his idea of minimization intruiging.

Are you defining "fair share" as "median"? or as "takes less than what he produces, as defined by how much value others think he provides in terms of how much money they give him for his work"?

Much as you may dislike capitalism, and whatever flaws it has, it's the best system we have for identifying the value of some product or service: a thing is worth what someone else is willing to give for it. Expanding thereon, note that that thing (product or service) is probably worth _more_ because one can usually turn around and acquire/generate even more wealth with it.

OP writes a blog post. He acquires enough income somehow from it to pay for a seat on a cross-country flight. What he pays for that seat in turn nets not just enough to cover costs, but to turn a profit on that flight. That profit in turn allows employees & shareholders to buy [insert warm fuzzy life-enhancing goods/services here]. During said flight, he writes another post which will net an income enough to cover the next such cycle. Upshot? he buys a red-eye flight instead of paying for a bed (divided by however many nights he would own, but perhaps not use, said bed), "minimalizing" that bit of his life, and the world is better for it.

You may think it's "not fair" somehow, but you're not willing to put up the value-representing money to trump it. What's your "footprint"? and how might that be criticized? (say, by the "strip mining" of forest land for carrot farms.)

at first when reading this article, i was imagining my life with only 15 items. then after reading jdietrich post, it made me think a little more..

i would say, i'm very eco-friendly and very aware of my actions. i would not say i'm a minimalist. nothing in my apt is unnatural. no toxic chemicals. from the soap, to the tooth-paste, all the way down to the cleaning products. i compost, recycle, etc..i bike everywhere, use a carshare service (citycarshare), etc etc..

either way, interesting read.

i shop at rainbow grocery for produce, which most of what they have is local. it's more expensive, but worth it. i support local first.

not to rant: but coming from a lebanese culture and giving up food i love (meat, dairy) to be more eco, and of course, have optimum nutrition has been the best decision i've ever made in my life. no joke. i think/hope one day, more people will start to convert to plant based diets, as they will see the the truth in the data.