Minimize Everything!

Much has been published about the culture and lifestyle of minimizing and it is well worth your time spent researching the “minimize movement”. Essentially, the trend suggests we get back to a simpler life, by unloading all the physical junk we’ve collected. The burden of materialism carries many costs, the least of which is financial. More junk requires a bigger house, or perhaps a storage unit! How many of us have a two-car garage that has never had a car parked in it? If you have never tried minimizing, please do give it a try. Unloading extra possessions benefits you psychologically: Giving away things gives you a good feeling. It also benefits you spiritually when you help others. Physically, you benefit by freeing up space.

After reading books and listening to podcasts, Sandy and took stock of their surroundings. When they got married, they combined Sandy’s smaller home full of furnishings into a larger, but lesser furnished home. Together, they were swimming in furniture consisting of a four bedroom house with more beds, chairs, tables, dressers and other furniture, appliances, knick-knacks, decorations, wall hangings, throw pillows, rugs (well, you get the point…) than is reasonable. It seemed silly to keep all these things because they infrequently entertained, and their extended families resided too far to visit regularly. What they really need is a simple ration of commodities. Together, they made a concerted effort to go through each room and gather unneeded, unused, and unnecessary things for a regular trip to Salvation Army or the weekend community yard sale.

One philosophy they often leverage is the twenty dollar/twenty minute rule, or 20/20 for short, which simply says when you are trying to decide whether to keep this “thing,” consider it worthy of keeping ONLY if it would take more than twenty dollars or more than twenty minutes to replace.

Another idea is to pick any whole month and for each calendar day, eliminate a quantity of things equal to that day. So, for the first of the month, eliminate one thing, the second of the month, two things and so on. Anything will do, even simple junk from your desk or kitchen-drawers: old cell phone cases, chargers, swag from a conference, or old pots and pans. Gather these 20/20 things together, and then donate, sell, trash, whatever. Just getting rid of things is weirdly enlightening and spiritually uplifting.

The baggage of consumerism and materialism is measured in much more than ounces, space, and dollars; these destructive behaviors burden your soul and suppresses a happy existence.

Age, health, and youth are factors, too. Sandy and Nick are both over 50 and personally, likes his hot running water, Internet, color television, electronic gadgets, thermostat controlled HVAC, and microwave. But even in his short lifetime, many of these things simply did not exist. Nick personally remembers rotary telephones, pagers, black and white TV, and life before the Internet (encyclopedias). Nick learned to type in high school on a manual typewriter! Sandy remembers air raid drills. When they were teenagers, not every teen had a private land line, let alone a cell phone. Their music was distributed on vinyl records, 8-tracks, and cassettes.

Minimize everything, means in terms of quantity, time, space, waste, power consumption, and any other dimension in order to achieve efficiency. If you had to pedal a stationary bike to watch television, how much less TV would you watch and how much more efficient would your cardio-respiratory system be? A smaller home is easier and faster to clean . Less square footage (and better insulation) make your HVAC systems more efficient and less expensive. Smaller homes require less power consumption. How many TV’s do you have? How many buttocks live in your house and how many chairs are available for sitting?

All joking aside, do the math. How much stuff do you really need?