In the joy of less

Cover picture credit:“2001: A Space Odyssey” - Stanley Kubrick

Here I am again writing in the age of “Big vector databases” generated content, writing with my dyslexia, poor imagination, and limited vocabulary - baraka mn lbka ochka* -. 

The subject for this writing is very close to my heart, and so far, it has given me a lot of backlash from people... You may read, listen, and scroll a lot of content about minimalism, but this will be different in a way that it’s my take and experience.

A disclaimer: I’m not advocating anything with this.

Let’s make one thing clear before we deep dive. According to Definitions: “Minimalism is intentionally living with only the things I really need — those items that support my purpose. I am removing the distraction of excess possessions so I can focus more on those things that matter most.” - Joshua Becker

It’s by choice that you choose to live simply, with only a few people, items, and simpler experiences. And it’s pretty obvious that not advising people to romanticize poverty and discredit effort ...

As a side note, A friend once told me, “Minimalism is having a $1M apartment with an Ikea desk in that living room.”

Growing up enjoying you’re relatives’ toys and clothes can lead you to different opposite directions: 1- want more because you never had “enough”; 2- enjoying less because you learned how to. None of the takes are bad or good, it's just what you judge as bad/good. Picturing that we don’t have pure free will nor an objective reality (let’s keep that last one to another Saturday morning writing).

Learning how to appreciate small, simple things in life was my coping mechanism to all the drama happening around me, and became a way of living after.

The idea, in my opinion, is simple, as there are billions of objects of possibilities of things that you can own (assuming to be a happy or worthy person), possessing all those things is impossible (in our mediocre lifespan), we have to choose wisely and thing to qualify as important and of course less possessions means better control.

I'd love to give another analogy for this, imagine you have a closet for your clothes, and it’s full of your shirts and underwear on the floor, you have a problem, right? Your life is the closet and it has a limited space. The clothes are the possessions you chose once, thinking you would look nicer, and worth more .. but now you have two problems:  the clothes on the floor and the sorting, grouping, and cleaning of those items (time & money complexity) .. in this optic people with less will only have one of these problems at once.

Dramaticly talking about material objects in the first part, but minimalism can go much lower level, in behaviors, human interactions, and social exposure ..  adrenaline junkies people are usually less happy and experiment a bad mood swings compared to more “boring” people like me .. chasing EVERY experience, trip plan, profile on a dating app, rooftop party… It will lead the person to an unnatural state of the brain, and they can’t tolerate normal, boring, hard-by-design real life - you can think about it as addiction. 

So, as you don’t do cocaine, make sure you’re not a maximalist.

One last take on how to qualify the worth and the energy to spend chasing, acquiring, and patching people/objects in your life is the ratio  simplicity x quality/quantity; knowing that always our time will decrease (1/time) - aka fatality -  .. so better to not focus on the quantity.

Cheers 

*For my non-Arabic readers means enough bitching