Minimalism and deprivation

Speaking of minimalism! It’s important to qualify what it means. I think that a lot of people hear about this concept and assume right away…

Speaking of minimalism! It’s important to qualify what it means. I think that a lot of people hear about this concept and assume right away that you are depriving yourself of things. Deprivation also takes a lot of will power. So even if someone thinks they can live with the deprivation, they are sure they’ll fail due to lack of will power.

I want to tell you that it’s completely wrong. There is no need for any will power what so ever (In fact, that’s a recipe for disaster but I digress. I’ll leave that for a later post). What it does take is a change in the state of mind. You must understand that having more does not mean being happier. That’s something that you must also internalize.

Internalizing this concept is beyond the scope of this article but it’s an absolute must. Once you do, everything else becomes so easy. It’s just so intuitive and second nature to dump the stuff you don’t use. And as you dump it, you clear the house, you lower your mental maintenance cost and you lower your anxiety level. This becomes a reinforcing loop.

If, on the other hand, you approach this from the view of deprivation, you’ll fail quickly. All you’ll see is all the things you’re missing while glossing over all the freedom you gained and happiness by subtraction.

My articles are rarely some sort of cohesive set of ideas that you can follow along with but I love how all these ideas from the FI community, minimalism, and happiness really overlap and come together so well. It proves to me once again that these are all correct. It’s sort of like science when you have a hypothesis about something and based on this hypothesis you keep seeing evidence in real life. It just makes your hypothesis that much more likely to be true.