Minimalism: Live a Meaningful Life (3 page)

The death of Joshua’s mother put everything into perspective: We only have a finite amount of time on this earth. It can be spent accumulating monetary wealth, or it can be spent in a meaningful way—the latter of which doesn’t necessarily preclude someone from the former, but the relentless pursuit of riches doesn’t lead to a meaningful life.

So we decided to take an inventory of our lives. We wanted to find out what was making us unhappy, and what we needed to do to change those things in our lives, so we could experience happiness, passion, and freedom.

Anchors

First, we identified our
anchors
. In other words, we had discovered that “getting what we wanted” (large houses, bigger paychecks, material possessions, and corporate awards) wasn’t making us happy, so we wanted to identify what was anchoring us—what was making us feel stuck and preventing us from growing. 

The concept of anchors really struck a chord with both of us. It forced us to take an honest look in the mirror and identify everything we thought might be holding us back from living happy, fulfilled lives. 

The exercise we performed was simple: over the course of one week, each of us wrote down anything we thought
might be
an anchor. After all, the first step to solving a problem is to identify the problem, right? As the week progressed, our lists of anchors grew, and by the end of the week Joshua had written down 83 anchors and Ryan, 54. Plenty of anchors.

Our next step was to identify our priorities. We started prioritizing by breaking our anchors into two categories: major anchors and minor anchors. Major anchors were the most obvious examples of things that were keeping us from feeling free and content, including things like our houses (viz. the large mortgage payments that went with them), certain relationships with people (viz. unhealthy, pernicious relationships that didn’t add value to our lives), car payments and other large bills, major debts, our careers, and anything else that took an appreciable amount of our time without returning value to our lives. Minor anchors made up the bulk of our lists and included items like cable bills, Internet bills, other bills, smaller debts, unused clothes, unused household items, nighttime college classes, household clutter, certain unproductive or unhealthy periphery relationships, daily drive time (time wasted in the car each day), and other small things that took small amounts of our time, attention, and focus.

We decided that getting rid of many of these anchors over a period of time would allow us to reclaim much of our own time, time which could be spent in more meaningful ways. Because the major anchors appeared to be the hardest to tackle, we started with those in an effort to deal with the hardest things first. For example, every extra penny Joshua earned was spent on making extra payments toward his debts. No more trips, vacations, or fancy dinners; all his money went towards paying off his car and his vast credit card debt, which, despite a healthy income, had climbed to an incredibly unhealthy level. Eventually, over a two year period, Joshua paid off his car and paid down his debts. Other major anchors were handled in a similar fashion. We eventually jettisoned many of our possessions, eliminating the excess in favor of things we liked and enjoyed—things we actually used in our daily lives. Over the course of two years, our  anchors of old were no longer weighing us down.

Making Hard Decisions

Because some of the major anchors involved our relationships with other people, some tough decisions had to be made. Soon after Joshua’s mother died in late 2009, Joshua decided that his marriage of nearly six years wasn’t working. He knew that neither he nor his wife were happy, that neither of their values or long-term desires were aligned, and that they both wanted vastly different things in life. They loved each other and wanted to find a way to make their marriage work, so they sat down and talked about their differences and worked on a plan to save their marriage. They both attended marriage counseling and took steps to come into better alignment, working together for months in an effort to repair a broken marriage. Their differences, however, were too great, and Joshua and his wife decided to part ways. It was the hardest decision he ever had to make. Thankfully, they were able to remain close friends who still care about each other deeply.

Furthermore, Joshua was faced with the dilemma of what to do with his mother’s stuff after her death—those sentimental items we tend to hold on to in perpetuity. It was an incredibly difficult time in his life, it goes without saying. His mother had lived a thousand miles away, and after she passed it was his responsibility to vacate her apartment in Florida. It was a small, one-bedroom place, but it was packed wall-to-wall with her belongings. His mother had great taste—she could have been an interior designer—and none of her stuff was
junk
in the
Hoarders
sense of the word. Nevertheless, there was a lot of stuff in her home, likely three or four apartments worth of stuff in her tiny one-bedroom apartment.

His mom was always shopping, always accumulating more stuff. She had antique furniture throughout her apartment, a stunning oak canopy-bed that consumed almost her entire bedroom, two closets jam packed with clothes, picture frames standing on every flat surface, original artwork hanging on the walls, and tasteful creative decorations in every nook and cranny and crevasse. There was 64 years of accumulation in her apartment.

So Joshua did what any son would do: He rented a large U-Haul truck. Then he called a storage facility back in Ohio to make sure they had a big enough storage unit. The cost of the truck was $1600. The storage facility was $120 per month for the size he needed. Financially, the cost was expensive, but he quickly found out that the emotional cost was much higher.

At first, Joshua didn’t want to let go of anything. If you’ve ever lost a parent or a loved one or have been through a similarly emotional time, then you understand exactly how hard it was for him to let go of any of those possessions. So instead of letting go, he was going to cram every trinket and figurine and piece of oversized furniture into that Lilliputian storage locker in Ohio. Floor to ceiling. That way he knew that Mom’s stuff was there if he ever wanted it, if he ever needed access to it for some incomprehensible reason. He even planned to put a few pieces of her furniture in his home as subtle reminders of her.

The week after her death, he started boxing up her belongings. Every picture frame and every little porcelain doll and every white doily on every shelf. He packed every bit of her that remained.

Or so he thought.

And then he looked under her bed.

Among the organized chaos that comprised the crawlspace beneath her bed, there were four boxes, each labeled with a number. Each numbered box was sealed with packing tape. Joshua cut through the tape and found old papers from his elementary school days from nearly a quarter century earlier. Spelling tests, cursive writing lessons, artwork, it was all there, every shred of paper from his first four years of school. It was evident that she hadn’t accessed the sealed boxes in years, and yet she had held on to these things because she was trying to hold on to pieces of her son, pieces of the past, much like Joshua was attempting to hold on to pieces of her and her past now.

That’s when he realized his retention efforts were futile. He could hold on to her memories without her stuff, just as she had always remembered him and his childhood and all their memories without ever accessing those sealed boxes under her bed. She didn’t need papers from twenty-five years ago to remember her son, just as her son didn’t need a storage locker filled with her stuff to remember her.

Joshua called U-Haul and canceled the truck. And then, over the next twelve days, he donated all her stuff—100% of it—to places and people who could actually use it. Of course it was difficult to let go, but Joshua realized quite a few things about the relationship between our memories and our possessions during the entire experience:

• We are not our stuff. 
  
• We are more than our possessions.
  
• Our memories are not under our beds. 
  
• Our memories are within us, not our things.
  
• An item that is merely sentimental for us can useful for someone else.
  
• Holding on to
  things
  weighs on us mentally and emotionally. 
  
• You can take pictures of items you want to remember.
  
• Old photographs can be scanned.
  
• Letting go is incredibly freeing.
  

It is important to note that we don’t think that sentimental items are bad or evil or that holding on to them is wrong. We don’t. Rather, we think the pernicious nature of sentimental items—and overt sentimentality in general—is far more subtle. If you want to get rid of an item but the only reason you are holding on to it is for sentimental reasons—if it is weighing on you, if it’s an anchor—then perhaps it’s time to get rid of it, perhaps it is time to free yourself of the weight. That doesn’t mean you need to get rid of everything though.

One by one, over time, the two of us tackled many of our anchors—big and small. In the process of tackling our anchors, we searched for ways to do so more efficiently. We searched for examples of people who had overcome their fears, who had freed themselves of their anchors and started living more meaningful lives. This is how we inadvertently stumbled upon the concepts of minimalism.

Discovering Minimalism

In late 2009, shortly after Joshua’s mother had died, while his marriage was in shambles, and we were both unhappy with our current nose-to-the-grindstone situations, Joshua came across a website called
Exile Lifestyle
, developed by a guy named Colin Wright.

We were intrigued by Colin’s website. Here was this young, 24-year-old entrepreneur who was living an amazing lifestyle—a seemingly impossible lifestyle. He had left his high-paying job to pursue his passions, which happened to be traveling the world and running his businesses from anywhere. His website—what he called a
blog
, a term we were unfamiliar with at the time—documented his travels and allowed his thousands of readers to participate in his journey: Colin’s readers got to vote on where he would travel next. 

We were amazed that this guy “left everything” to travel to a new country every four months; not that we wanted to travel that extensively ourselves (we didn’t), but we did want to have the freedom to pursue our own passions, which we had discovered weren’t inside the corporate juggernaut. 

Colin also used a new term with which we were utterly unfamiliar: he said he was a
minimalist
. On his website he wrote about how this movement called
minimalism
allowed him to focus on the important stuff in his life while shedding the excess crap that got in the way. This was fascinating—it was like someone turned on the lightbulb for us for the first time and presented us with a tool to help us weed through the clutter in our lives to finally to get to what was important. Because he traveled, he only owned 72 things at the time—there were pictures of all his possessions on his website, all of which possessions could fit into a bag he carried with him while he traveled. The most striking part about this was Colin’s contentment. He exuded happiness and excitement and passion. He loved his life and this was completely apparent.

It’s important to note that although we deeply respect Colin, we didn’t want to live like him, we didn’t want to travel the world or live with less than 100 things; but we did want the freedom that his minimalist lifestyle afforded him, and we wanted the happiness and passion that accompanied that freedom. And so during the first half of 2010, we slowly removed our anchors, one by one, as we followed Colin’s journey.

But maybe we were too old and too rooted to become minimalists. Maybe this minimalism thing was only for young guys without many possessions who wanted to travel extensively. 

We discovered that wasn’t true either.

Through Colin, we discovered two other minimalists who were in many ways a lot like us: Leo Babauta and Joshua Becker. 

Leo Babauta, creator of
Zen Habits
,
Time
Magazine’s #1 blog in the world, had a story that resonated with us immediately. He was a once-divorced guy in his mid-thirties who overcame all kinds of adversity to live a more meaningful life. Using minimalism to simplify his life, he had been able to accomplish some amazing things in less than three years: he had quit smoking, lost 70 pounds, got into the best shape of his life, got out of debt, moved from his native Guam to San Francisco, and quit his corporate job but was still able to provide for his wife and six children.

Similarly, thirty-something Joshua Becker, a husband and father of two children living in Vermont, was able to simplify his suburban-family life using minimalism while maintaining his job at a local church and helping other people learn more about minimalism through his website
Becoming Minimalist
.

Leo Babauta and Joshua Becker proved to us that minimalism wasn’t only for single white guys who didn’t want to work a 9-to-5. It was for anyone who was interested in living a simpler, more intentional life. It was for anyone who wanted to focus on the important aspects in life, rather than the material possessions that are so heavily linked to success and happiness by our culture.

In fact, on our website we have a page dedicated to defining minimalism in a parodic, tongue-in-cheek way, poking fun at the cynics and skeptics who treat minimalism as a trend or fad. We start our definition with a joke:

To be a minimalist you must live with less than 100 things, and you can’t own a car or a home or a TV, and you can’t have a career, and you have to be able to live in exotic places all over the world, and you have to write a blog, and you can’t have any children, and you have to be a young white male from a privileged background.