Almost minimum. Reflecting on ejection

Day by day, week by week, the fatigue sets in. The feeling that you are doing somehow worse than everyone you know. You are less successful, have fewer savings, are too fat, not fit enough, not spiritual enough, not… screw it, I’m going to order that new lamp that I have had in the basket for a month.

This, sadly, is how most of us think. The layers of thoughts culminating into a cacophony of Amazon orders in the middle of the evening, hoping, praying, wishing, that you haven’t missed the opportunity for the elusive, next day delivery.

Hipsters to Habits

I stumbled across the idea of minimalism almost two years ago. It had existed in the peripherals of my awareness before that, as things for hipsters and posers. I thought it was specially reserved for muppets who were more interested in taking photos of their house than existing in it.

However, around this time, I was binging the Minimalists podcast while I was tidying up. It really got me fired-up to throw stuff out. A little later I was recommended their book, ‘Everything That Remains’ (Millburn and Nicodemus, 2013) which is a sort of journal of progress. I enjoyed, for the first time, thinking about the mindset behind the mission of minimalism.

However, it was November 2024, when I realised that minimalism was not just an idea, or a good inspiration to declutter, but a method for increased contentment. The book ‘Goodbye, Things’ (Sasaki, 2017) changed my attitude towards the topic. It’s the story of a man becoming an extreme minimalist and explaining his thoughts on the topic. Upon my first read, I thought the author was a bit loopy. As I considered his extreme minimalism, I started to think more and more that he wasn’t really missing out on anything, and, the only reason I rejected it so harshly was because it was abnormal to me.

I read it again a few weeks later, when I wanted some tidying up inspiration.

Since that time, I have read the book about five times, cover to cover, and, I have been working on ejecting things from my own life, at a steady but consistent pace. I am now, at the point of writing this, basically, done with all the major work, at least.

The Ongoing Ejection

My desk is now a haven of simplicity. There is one wire which I move between my MSI Claw for games and my MacBook for everything else. It’s still busier than I would ideally want, of course. But it’s the cleanest it’s ever been up to this point.

My office now contains one bookshelf, a desk, and a mini fridge with a printer on top. There are also some fans dotted around because summer is looming. There are three long shelves on the wall, one of which I intend to remove because it is quite high up, and I worry that it’s a clutter attractor. That’s it, nothing else.

There are pictures on the wall, though. While I want to remove them and bask in the simplicity, echo has become a real problem since I ejected all the objects.

As you can see from the picture, while it sounds sparse and without personality, even the few things I have kept actually look way busier than I would like. Those pictures are starting to irritate me.

I have made a rule that I will not allow myself to own more books than fit on that bookshelf. The wall-mounted shelves are for housing coffee making equipment, an arcade controller that I adore (and will not be parting with) and a big speaker which serves as a noise maker when I am not wearing headphones.

The shelves are also busier than I would like, too. Now I have less clutter, the small number of things in the office annoy me because they feel untidy. I’ll be working on removing things like spare cables and extra trinkets soon.

Since I got to this point, I genuinely have felt calmer, more focussed and cleaner. I take some odd joy in being able to see the edges of the room.

My daughter thinks I’m raving mad, but I can honestly say, I have never liked a room as much as I like this one.

The rest of the rooms in my home are similar, but I spend the majority of my leisure time on the office so it’s been the major project for me. I thought for a while that there would be a point where I would be annoyed and think I had gone too far. Should I have reached that point, I was intending to replace the three shelves and extra desk with high-quality items, so at least the decluttering would have been to serve a purpose rather than a waste of time. It’s shocking to me that at no point have I regretted disposing of anything. I just keep getting more joy, the more I eject from my life.

I don’t think you ever reach an end point with this, I think perhaps there are checkpoints where you have to adjust to the new state before moving on to the next wave of ejection.

Still, it’s been a good time, so far. Once I have painted it all, I’ll make a room tour video, it won’t take long. And, the lamp, as it turns out, can stay in the basket. ☺️

References

Sasaki, F. (2017) Goodbye, Things: On Minimalist Living. Kindle edn. London: Penguin.

Millburn, J.F. and Nicodemus, R. (2013) Everything That Remains: A Memoir by The Minimalists