Minimalism In The Time Of Corona

Commonplace Newsletter #019

Agnes Martin, Untitled, 1960. Like lifestyle Minimalism, Minimalist art is sometimes pleasant but generally uninspiring.

When times take a turn for the worse sneeringly saying ‘I told you so’ is neither big nor clever. But it is fun. So that’s what we’re going to do.

Not really. Though vindication, or at least having your hunches proven by circumstance, is nice and all, it’s better- and ultimately more persuasive- to have compassion for those who were not on the same page as you.

Gloating is a temptation, but like most tempting things feeding it simply causes it to grow. And that is not good for anyone.

So the thing that I have warned about, and the thing which this era-defining year has proven, is that Minimalism is not all that it is cracked up to be.

And as I have not yet fully laid out the case for this in one place, I figure that today is as good a time as any to do so.

So here we are.

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What We Talk About When We Talk About Minimalism

‘The things you own, end up owning you.’

Tyler Durden, Fight Club

... if you have no ownership over yourself. 

I quote the above line from Fight Club because that movie (but not the book, significantly enough) has become something of an Ur-text for the Lifestyle Minimalist movement. 

See, the Minimalists believe that we live in a hyper-consumerist world where we live cluttered and stressful lives and work cluttered and stressful jobs before retiring to cluttered and stressful homes. We are broke and debt-riddled and the trinkets and gadgets that we were duped into buying on credit have become like the locks and chains that weigh down the ghost of Jacob Marley.

So far, so reasonable. 

But we run into problems, I believe, when we move beyond the diagnosis and start getting into the treatment plan.

The Minimalist- generally speaking (because, like all dogmatic movements Minimalism has experienced its share of schisms and heresies) argues that the solution to all of this clutter is to simply get rid of it. Without all of the burdensome stuff in your home and in your life you will feel light and free and at peace. You will be more creative and more spiritual to boot.

Again this sounds reasonable. Stuff is the problem and so the solution is the removal of stuff. 

This would be all well and good were it not for the fact that all of that stuff is a symptom and not the root cause of your problems.

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Sparking Misery

Gun to my head, I would say that the main problem of the modern world is that we tinker with the surface rather than truly tackling things from the ground up. We draw a blood sample, we generate some numbers and then we prescribe something to either reduce or elevate said numbers. All without forming a holistic narrative of what is truly going on. We tinker with the ‘what’ while the ‘why’ remains neglected.

In a world of quick fixes and surface-level thinking iatrogenics* becomes the silent killer.

And though less dramatic, Lifestyle Minimalism is fraught with its own iatrogenic effects.

[*Iatrogenics- Iatro (physician) + Gen (producing) I.e. a condition or side-effect, usually unfavourable, that is induced by the treatment itself]

Though I try not to be an armchair psychoanalyst for people who I’ve never shook hands or broken bread with, I can’t help noticing that those who are drawn to Minimalism have, as a rule, been dealt more than their fair share of damage, trauma or neglect in life. 

I know that I personally was drawn to the decluttering urge when my life was at a particularly low ebb.

When you are beset by troubles, objects that are repositories of memories- books, clothes, documents, photographs- become burdensome reminders and accusers. You want rid of them. You crave breathing space and sanctuary from these wagging fingers.

And so you dump them all in a determined purge. But as the Sufi Poets once told us ‘this too shall pass’ and with effort and growth- or merely the passage of time- you find that your perspective shifts. And so you realise that you went too far with the purging and that the sparse gunmetal and magnolia aesthetic you bought in to- rather than affording us a zen haven of tranquility- has become cold and antiseptic and purgatorial.

Thus we buy back most of the stuff we dumped until it becomes oppressive once again and the cycle repeats ad infinitum. Minimalism, in spite of its laudable anti-consumerist sentiments, ends up becoming an engine of increased consumption even among those hard-to-reach clients who are sceptical of the whole rotten Consumerism operation.

This is either the bitterest of ironies or it is a marketing coup of such finesse that it would make David Ogilvy weep a single tear were he alive to witness the diabolical elegance of it. I can’t decide which it is.

But speaking for myself and the people in my life who have dabbled in Minimalism, I know that regret and re-buying is far from a rarity. The whole thing has the same logic and the same trajectory as crash diets. Because food- like stuff- isn’t in and of itself the issue. It’s simply the way despairing mental states are externalised and made manifest.

Fix those and the food choices become wiser and the possessions become more carefully selected and lovingly managed without the need to resort to the scorched earth tactics of throwing everything away.

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Storing Up Treasures

You might say that I’m overstating the case here, and that I’m painting a particularly extreme and distorted picture of Minimalism to bolster my biased worldview. Maybe so. But sometimes you have to take something to its logical conclusion to tease out its implicit problems. An idea that holds itself above being stress-tested is in truth the worst kind of ideology.

You may also say- and this is more interesting- that talking about Minimalism is irrelevant as the ‘movement’ was at its height some five or ten years ago and is now simply old news. This is also true, as far as it goes.

But whether it is currently in the zeitgeist or not, I think that this year has been a time where the downsides of Minimalism have come home to roost.

Imagine the scene. You decide to downsized your life. You shred paperwork, you donate clothes, you digitise and dump all of your physical media and instead subscribe to some streaming services. You let go of sentimental items that don’t spark joy. If you need something you buy it, but until you do you decide not to bother.

You bask in your floor-furniture-and-Apple-product apartment like a latter day descendent of that iconic picture of a cross-legged Steve Jobs (wherein- despite being a pioneer of digital music delivery- he had a turntable and a stack of LPs interestingly enough).

All well and good.

Until a pandemic hits and you can’t leave the house and you realise that your flat has the same square footage and number of amenities as a solitary confinement cell.

The only thing to do in such a dwelling is to go online. There is nothing that is not screenbound and Internet-mediated, and we wonder why after a few months of this routine people began to riot and be beset by anxiety and depression and all the rest of it.

Those drawn to Minimalism are often city dwellers. At least some of it is a coping strategy for mitigating the sting of high rents for small rooms where the only jobs going are underpaid. A lot of it is mere cope, as the kids like to say.

And though materialism and greed are not the solutions to any of our problems, spending more time offline almost certainly is. Being more creative definitely is. And these activities require a certain amount of stuff. I don’t mean necessarily materials, the absence of which is a barrier to entry. I mean that sound mental health requires offline time and this requires having at least some books or physical music or instruments or games or basically anything that is fun and occupying and that doesn’t require a charger and a WiFi code.

This may not need to be said but I’ll say it anyway. I am not arguing against being orderly and organised. I am not arguing against only owning beautiful things that you either need or love or both. What I am saying is maybe think twice about going all in on Digitalism which seems in many ways to be a synonym for the modern urban Minimalist lifestyle.

Contentment comes from freedom. Freedom comes from optionality, whether that is in the form of cold hard currency (professional Minimalists, the ones who make a living from proselytising it, usually have enough cash to be able to buy or rent or rebuy whatever they may need ad hoc) or in the form of having some slack in the system. For ‘normal people’ this slack is often in the form of having some tools and materials and media lying around spare, even if they haven’t used it for a long time.

But your life is your life. The beauty of it is that you always have the freedom to make decisions. And the beauty of it also is that you can learn from the errors of others without having to actually experience them first hand.

And if you ever do make such a first hand error you can write about it and others can benefit and so the whole sorry experience becomes meaningful.

Or at least that’s what I am telling myself as I type this concluding sentence.

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