Minimalism: Live a Meaningful Life (4 page)

Okay, we’re joking. Obviously. But people who often dismiss minimalism as some sort of fad or trend usually mention some of the above “restrictions” as to why they could “never be a minimalist.”

The truth is that minimalism isn’t about any of those things, but it can help you accomplish all that stuff (well, to be fair, it can’t help you become a young white male if you aren’t one. But who cares about that anyway?) If you desire to live with less than 100 things or not own a car or travel all over the world without fear, minimalism can help. But that’s not the point.

The point is that minimalism is a tool to help you achieve freedom. Freedom from fear, freedom from worry, freedom from overwhelm, freedom from guilt, freedom from depression, freedom from enslavement. Freedom. Real freedom.

A minimalist can, however, own a car or own a house or have children or have a career. Minimalism looks different for everyone because it is about finding what is essential to
you
. There are tons of successful minimalists who do some or all these things. So how can they all be so different and yet still be minimalists? That brings us back to our original question: What is minimalism?

Minimalism is a tool we use to live a meaningful life. It is a tool to achieve happiness, which is (let’s face it) what we are all looking for. We all want to be happy. Minimalism can help. There are no rules in minimalism. Rather, minimalism is simply about stripping away the unnecessary things in your life so you can focus on what’s important. 

Minimalism has helped us in several ways, including:

• Reclaiming our time
  
• Ridding ourselves of excess stuff
  
• Enjoying our lives
  
• Discovering meaning in our lives
  
• Living in the moment
  
• Focusing on what’s important
  
• Pursuing our passions
  
• Finding happiness
  
• Doing anything we want to do
  
• Finding our missions
  
• Experiencing freedom
  
• Creating more, consuming less
  

How has minimalism helped us with these things? Minimalism is a lifestyle choice. Minimalists choose to get rid of the unnecessary in favor of what’s important. But the level of specificity is up to you. Minimalists search for happiness not through things, but through life itself. Thus, it’s up to you to determine what is necessary and what is superfluous to your life. Throughout this book we intend to give you some ideas of how to determine these things and how to achieve a minimalist lifestyle without having to succumb to some sort of strict code or set of rules.

A word of warning: It isn’t easy to take the first few steps, but the journey gets much easier and more rewarding the further you go. But the first steps into minimalism often take some radical changes in mindset, actions, and habits.

So, if we had to sum it up in one sentence, we would say,
Minimalism is a tool to eliminate life’s excess, focus on the essentials, and find happiness, fulfillment, and freedom.

Embracing Minimalism

It was as our lives were spiraling downward in ever-diminishing circles towards empty oblivion that we embraced minimalism. Or perhaps it embraced us, as it were. It was a beacon in the night. We lingered curiously on the limbic portions of minimalism’s perimeter, scouring feverishly through Internet page after Internet page looking for more information and guidance and enlightenment, watching and learning and trying to understand what this whole minimalism thing was all about. Through months of research (while we removed our anchors) we traveled farther and farther down the rabbit hole, and over time we had discovered a group of people without a lot of things but with myriad happiness and passion and freedom, things for which we desperately yearned.

Eventually we embraced these concepts—the concepts of minimalism and simplicity—as a way of life and discovered that we too could be happy, but it wasn’t through owning more stuff, it wasn’t through accumulation. We took back control of our lives so we could focus on what’s important, so we could focus on life’s deeper meaning.

Happiness, as far as we are concerned, is achieved internally through living a meaningful life, a life that is filled with passion and freedom, a life in which we can grow as individuals and contribute to other people in meaningful ways. These are the bedrocks of happiness. Not stuff.

Creating "The Minimalists"

In the summer of 2010 we had no intentions of writing nonfiction online or starting a website about minimalism. But then, almost accidentally, Joshua met Colin Wright in person while on a trip to New York City in June. Meeting Colin solidified his online personas—his personality shone through in person, displaying layers of happiness and contentment that didn’t seem possible to a discontented man approaching 30, living on the corporate continuum. 

They met in Manhattan after connecting on Twitter. Joshua had been writing literary fiction throughout his twenties, whenever he had a free moment outside of work. He knew Colin was making money online publishing his own material and he wanted to pick Colin’s brain about self-publishing. They met for lunch and Colin was incredibly helpful. He encouraged Joshua to explore the non-traditional route of publishing his fiction, citing several resources that would later become helpful. They stayed in contact after that initial meeting and eventually worked on several projects together, including Colin’s memoir
My Exile Lifestyle
and Joshua’s short story collection
Falling While Sitting Down
.

During that meeting, Colin said one thing that stuck with Joshua—the one thing that led him to team up with Ryan to create
The Minimalists
:

You should do something online. You could make an impact. The world needs people like you to help them see things more clearly.

Joshua wrote these words in his journal. They stuck with him long after the meeting. And with those words we decided to create
The Minimalists
. We wanted to do two things with our website: We wanted to document our personal journeys into minimalism, and we wanted to help other people live more meaningful lives using minimalism as a foundation. We started building the site in November 2010, and quickly discovered we were absolutely clueless about how to create a website. We didn’t know the first thing about HTML or
blogging
or writing nonfiction online (sure, Joshua had his literary fiction writing experience, which helped with our writing, but we were clueless about the rest). So we did extensive research and built our site over a six-week timeframe, laboring vigorously until the last minute. We officially launched TheMinimalists.com on December 14, 2010.

And so there we were: these two suit-and-tie corporate guys, nearing 30 as our twenties twilighted, listening to and taking advice from some Gen-Y blogger. We had started a website, documented our journey into minimalism, and started writing a couple essays a week for the site. And then several months of unexpected excitement transpired, and our lives changed within nine months of creating our website. 

We met some of the most amazing people on the Internet, eventually turning those online relationships into real-life friendships, the likes of whom included incredibly cool bloggers like the aforementioned Leo Babauta and Joshua Becker, as well as myriad others, such as Julien Smith, Chris Guillebeau, et al. With the help of many of these outstanding people, as well as our amazing readers who relentlessly shared our essays, our website grew exponentially—within nine months we had over 100,000 monthly readers and over 10,000 subscribed readers. By that time people were spending over 11,000 hours per month on our site. We had been featured an interviewed on popular websites all over the web. We received the most incredible emails about how we have changed peoples’ lives with our essays. We published an essay collection called
Minimalism: Essential Essays
, which reached #1 on Amazon’s Bestseller list. Joshua published his first fiction book,
Falling While Sitting Down: Stories
, which also reached #1, as did the first publication of the book you’re reading right now. As a consequence, we both left our corporate jobs and began focusing full-time on living more meaningful lives.

What It Means to Live a Meaningful Life

What does it mean to live a meaningful life? Generally, through our essays and books, we speak of minimalism as a tool that has allowed us to pursue more meaningful lives, so it’s important we define what this means.

After much cerebration, deliberation, discussion, research, and experimentation, we discovered five dimensions that allow us to live a meaningful life:

1. Health
   
2. Relationships
   
3. Passions
   
4. Growth
   
5. Contribution
   

It took us months of removing the anchors from our lives and getting rid of the clutter that surrounded us to discover these five areas. We didn’t stumble into them haphazardly. Instead, we discovered what was most important in our lives through trial and error. 

Minimalism made this discovery possible. By age 28, everything in our lives seemed foggy. We had everything we were
supposed
to have, everything our culture advertised would make us happy, and yet we weren’t. Worse, we had gotten to the point at which we didn’t know what was important anymore. Getting rid of the clutter in our lives allowed us rediscover these five key areas. Thus, getting rid of our stuff was the initial bite at the apple, allowing us to make room to fill our lives with more meaningful pursuits.

Through months of rigorous documentation, the above five areas are the areas we changed in our lives that had the largest positive impact and resulted in more satisfaction and contentment for the two of us. The following five chapters discuss each of these concepts in depth, much more than can be discussed on our website. Throughout these chapters we consider why these areas are the most important areas of our lives, how minimalism has allowed us to focus on these dimensions, and we give  you personal examples of how we changed our lives in all five areas.

The book’s final chapter,
Confluence
, binds together these five dimensions and asks the reader some important questions about his or her life. These questions are not rhetorical; they are meant to make you think, take notes, and make lists based on those questions. Similarly, as we stated in this book’s foreword, we encourage you to actively engage in all the following chapters by reading the content more than once, taking notes, highlighting meaningful passages, making lists, and, most importantly, taking action. 

Ultimately, this book is meant to make you take little actions each day that will radically improve your life over time.

Let’s begin, shall we?

CHAPTER 2: HEALTH

The Importance of Health

Health is the most important of the five dimensions of living a meaningful life. Don’t believe us? Let us prove it.

Imagine winning the lottery, finding a perfect match in your significant other, paying off all your debt, moving into your dream home (on the beach, of course), and not needing to work another day in your life. 

Now imagine you wake up tomorrow morning with a sharp pain in your gut. You leave your beach house, drive to the doctor in your luxury vehicle, and wait for her to tell you what’s wrong. “You have less than a month to live,” she tells you. “And you likely won’t be able to do much more than get out of bed after today.” Oh, the heartache. You finally got “everything you ever wanted,” but your failing health immediately took it away, and your possessions couldn’t do a thing for you. Without your health you’re unable to enjoy even the simplest things in life.

Defining Health

We are not health experts. This is not a book about diet and exercise. By the end of this chapter it might start to feel like a health and exercise book, but we assure you that is not our intent. Rather, we believe your health is the best place to start your journey towards a more meaningful life. We want you to enjoy your life, and living a healthy lifestyle gives you the optimum conditions to do so. Everything in this chapter is based on our personal experiences of weight loss, exercise, dietary changes, lifestyle changes, and miscellaneous things we’ve experienced that have helped us and others live more meaningful lives.

For the purposes of this book, we are referring to
physical health
when we use the general term
health
. We recognize that the word
health
extends beyond physical health as well. For example, concepts such as emotional health, mental health, spiritual health, and financial health are all broad concepts that are important aspects of enriching your life. These concepts are touched upon—directly or indirectly—within this book, because
emotional
,
mental
,
spiritual
, and
financial
health
can be a result of living meaningfully and intentionally, and we discuss many of these concepts in detail on our website (while generally avoiding them in this book for the sake of attenuation). 

The Main Ingredients

In its simplest terms, there are two main ingredients of living a healthy life:
eating
and
exercising
. In other words: what we
put into
our bodies and what we
do with
our bodies. 

This might sound overly simplistic—at the surface it is simple—but fundamentally, the two things that most impact your physical health are what you eat and how you exercise. You already know this, at least intellectually, but this chapter is designed to help you feel it emotionally and provide you with some incredibly simple tools to help you improve your health.