Sustainability is on everyone's lips and minimalism is an important step towards this. But in their obsession with optimization, many people don't seem to have understood the meaning behind it. Ultimately, it's not about being proud of an apartment that's as empty as possible, but rather about using your existing possessions as efficiently as possible and consuming them intelligently.
“People keep spending money they don’t have, on things they don’t need, in order to impress people they don’t like,” the US comedian Danny Kaye once said, pretty much summing up the human consumption problem to the point. Far too rarely do we ask ourselves whether we actually need what we have hastily put in the shopping cart or clicked on. Whether it offers us added value and whether it makes us happy beyond the purchasing process.
The motivation behind a purchase is far too often related to social pressures. We also want to type around on the cool MacBook instead of opening the cheap Medion laptop in the café and having to look at us askance. We want to impress with the latest sneakers and let advertising fool us into having needs that don't really exist if we listen deeper within ourselves.
Consuming on credit – To impress people we don’t even like
Sometimes areUrge and compulsion to consumeso strong that we even go to the bank to get oneto take out loans. The debt means that we have to toil for years or decades on the hamster wheel so that we can pay for everything that we or our fellow human beings think we have to in order to lead a worthwhile life.
It's so simple: In principle, everyone only has to work as much as they need to achieve the standard of living that they personally consider desirable. This is also one of many aspects. Minimalism is not limited to consumption, but affects all areas of life.
Use instead of throw away, save instead of buy
Blogs, podcasts and YouTube videos, on the other hand, all too often give the impression that minimalism is about owning as few things as possible. And so new minimalists often spend hours, days and months sorting out drawers, cupboards and boxes. The seemingly superfluous is stuffed into huge bags, which are photographed and proudly posted on one's social media profile before they end up on the pyre of consumption - the landfill.
My grandma, the true minimalist, would throw her hands over her head at the sight of these pictures. Because instead of practicing sustainability, resources were destroyed. Minimalism is not about living as sparsely as possible;to consume as intelligently as possible. And this primarily means making full use of what you have instead of throwing it away too quickly.
As a rule, not only have we paid for what we already own, but it also had to be produced using valuable resources. More effective than throwing the 20 plastic bags you own in the trash and buying a hipster gym bag that was produced using a lot of resources would be to consistently use up the bags until you can't transport anything in them anymore. That's exactly what my grandma did, who spent her life using scratch paper instead of buying expensive notepads. That's why they're the absolute trend right nowhomemade oilcloths, which save foil and plastic packaging.
Appreciation of what exists
Maybe my grandma is an extreme example – like the influencers you meet on Facebook and Instagram. Of course, you can get rid of things that you have never used and do not want to use in the future. Only then should they not end up in the garbage heap, but in the hands of someone who knows and appreciates their value and uses them until they have truly earned their final rest in the consumer graveyard.
True minimalists reduce their possessions by using them up and wearing them out rather than throwing them away. That's exactly why you can recognize true minimalists not by their empty apartment, but by their consumption and usage behavior.
