What this blog is about.

Chris Baskind of More Minimal recently closed his blog, pointing out that minimalism on the blogosphere seems to have been taken over by “childless, 20-something information workers, living out of backpacks and Macbooks commuting between $500-a-chair seminars on how to blog their way to financial independence.” His post made me pause and think, since I fit at least partly into that description.

On one hand, he has a very good point. The internet needs only so many 23 year olds describing how they pared down their possessions to 100 things. Most 23 year olds have only just moved out of their parents’ home and don’t have that much stuff anyway. There are already a few bloggers who do this kind of thing rather well, so I don’t see the need for me to follow that route.

Selling e-books is something that I’m also unsure about. I admit that I was initially a bit confused by a lot of minimalist bloggers: you’re telling me to stop consuming and to buy less things, but you want me to shell out for your e-book, which is remarkably similar to your blog posts? I’ve read one or two e-books and they were hardly life changing. I’m not saying that I’ll never promote or write my own e-book, but it’ll have to pretty damn special.

On the other hand, a lot of minimalist bloggers are young simply because they’re part of the generation most comfortable with the internet. Plus they haven’t invested decades of their life in working to accumulate so it’s not so difficult for them to make the change.

I’m sure there are plenty of people with families and full-time jobs who are trying to practise minimalism. They just don’t blog about it. But because those people have that experience their story is so much more interesting. That’s why I really value the contribution made by people like Colleen at 365 Less Things – they have something different to say. I recently came across the No Impact Man blog, which is fascinating because it’s not just him, but his family as well.

I can’t and won’t make apologies for being young and childless, though I do find it amusing that I’m becoming more interested in the ‘typical minimalist things’ – yoga, running, coffee, etc. Chris Baskind is certainly on to something!

However, I thought it would be a good idea, as much for myself as anything else, to more clearly define what this blog will be about. In no particular order:

• Minimalism. Obvious, really.
• Sustainability. The way we live in the West simply can’t be sustained for longer than a few more years.
• Charity. My world is not the world.
• Travel. To the extent that it is compatible with the others.

Sure, there are other blogs covering some or all of this to varying degrees. But everyone has a contribution to make.

Hipsters: the same as the rest of us.

Someone at work recently recommended this Adbusters article on hipsters to me. I know I’m very late to the party, but the article’s argument has been floating around in my head for a few days. For one thing, I currently live in Shoreditch in London, probably the closest thing to a hipster area this side of New York.

For the benefit of anyone who hasn’t read the article, the author basically attacks the hipster subculture for having no fundamental basis and for being nothing more than a target market for advertisers. I’m reluctant to give hipsters more importance than they’re really due, especially since they aren’t a significant sub-group this side of the Atlantic. So I’ll take them as a rough proxy for modern youth culture (that is, white, relatively middle class youth culture).

Until maybe the late 80s every social or musical movement had some kind of ideology behind it. Sure, most people only followed the ideology in a tenuous manner (look at hippies and their hangers-on) but at least it was there in some form and being followed by somebody. As far as I can tell this begins to disappear in the 90s, at least in the UK. The focus moved on to the music itself: rave, ‘lad’ culture as shown by Oasis, etc. There was no real purpose behind the music, but at least there was a definite sound. Note that I’m just describing general trends here, I’m sure there were sub-cultures somewhere that had good ideas.

It might be too late to look back on the most recent decade, but I think that it’s notable for its lack of cultural movements. I suppose Live8 and Make Poverty History were based around music, but only a very broad sense. They were reflecting what was already popular rather than creating something original. Nu-rave was a popular trend in the UK, but for barely more than 18 months and even then it was defined as much by Topshop as by anything else.

With hipsters it’s not possible to find even a coherent trend in music. What do hipsters listen to? I have no idea, and I live in the middle of a hipster area. I’d guess electro but that’s about as vague a genre as you’ll find. Mashing up and synthesising music from other genres seems to be the big thing.

Since the point has already been made by Adbusters I won’t labour it, but hipsters are defined more by brands than by anything else. Is there any fundamental reason for why hipsters behave they way they do? Are they the logical conclusion of living true to a set of values? I doubt it. Without the foundation of an ideology, dressing like a hipster is enough to make you a hipster. Having a vague interest in the environment probably helps too, but it’s not essential. It sounds good though, right?

I agree with Adbusters that this is where hipsterdom differs from previous trends. To take punk as example, punk fans were also defined to an extent by their clothes, but those clothes were the result of their counter-cultural beliefs, not the starting point of their sub-culture.

Yet is this really all that surprising? Why should hipsters be drawn out for particular criticism? Almost everyone in modern Western society defines themselves by their possessions. To be successful means to be materially successful, nothing more. Hipsters are no different. Hipsterdom is just the current social trend that wholly embraces consumerist attitudes.

I’m not old enough to say when this process began, so I’ll leave it to someone more experienced to make that judgement. We no doubt look back on the 60s through rose-tinted glasses. Personally, I believe that excessive consumption is a general human trait; the only reason we weren’t so excessive in the past is that we couldn’t afford it.

Whenever someone deride hipsters for being shallow I’m reminded of the old proverb about taking the plank out of your own eye before looking at the speck of dust in someone else’s. Hipsters are only doing the same as the rest of us, albeit with more questionable fashion choices.

The more interesting question is what comes after hipsters. If one takes hipsters as a defining element of the Noughties, what will follow them in the next decade? I remain optimistic and hope that a mass uptake of environmentally-aware minimalism is just around the corner!

Accidental minimalism

Sitting in the park today, I had the realisation that for fairly significant stretches of time I have unintentionally practised minimalism.

I had to fly to each country I lived in during my year abroad, meaning that I was limited to what I could get into a suitcase. Admittedly, I managed to fit a hell of a lot into a big suitcase (going way over the baggage weight limit), but that was for eight months. Plus, I was living in Russia so I needed the bulky winter clothes. It didn’t take long for me to realise that I didn’t need a lot of the stuff I’d brought, so when I went home for Christmas I took a lot with me and returned with only a dinky little suitcase. While the Moscow metro is undoubtedly impressive, it has a lot of stairs and you don’t want to be lugging around 28kg of stuff with you for long.

When it came to going to Spain, I had learned my lesson and went with much less stuff. Of course, a Spanish summer requires much less in the way of clothes and I was there for less time. But all considered I think I still managed to travel pretty lightly. Not as light as I could or should have, but an improvement at least.

Now I am working for the summer in London and again living with fairly few possessions. I have been able to get rid of maybe a dozen things so far, mostly clothes, but I’m unsure if I’ll be able to pass on much more. If it weren’t for my work items, my room would be rather bare.

For all three time periods I’m only counting the things that I personally brought. I made use of cooking equipment and the like, but I think we can reasonably ignore such things.

The marvellous thing about my realisation today was that I never felt like I was lacking in anything. Without even really thinking about it, I had massively downsized my possessions and had easily carried on without missing anything.

I’m sure everyone has had similar periods in life, even if they were just holidays. The idea of throwing out or selling possessions that you’ve spent years amassing can be daunting and intimidating. But just think: if you’ve already managed without them for a while, then you know that you can do it. You can brush off the doubt that’s holding you back.

I suppose this is the same principle behind the 30 day rule that a lot of bloggers recommend, where you put questionable items away for 30 days and see if you find yourself needing them. The difference is that rather than putting a few items in a box, I put almost everything in a box right away. Rather than chipping away from the mass of possessions, I put away the mass of objects and snipped out the bits that I needed.

I firmly believe that these kind of experiences demonstrate that minimalism need not be a massive revolutionary shock to your life. If you want it to be, of course it can, but it turns out that it’s something that many of us have already done a couple of times without thinking.

The real trick is maintaining the change after you’ve made it, so that the new and unfamiliar becomes second nature. This is an area where I feel I could make more of an effort, especially when out with friends. Even if I bring food with me it’s very tempting to get a snack along with them or whatever. I’m in the situation where I live rather simply during the week and then fall down slightly at the weekends. So this is what I plan to do:

Small, simple steps.

Sometimes making a wholesale change works, sometimes you find yourself slipping back.

If this happens, set small manageable targets. I’ve already mentioned before how cutting out takeaway coffees can save you bundles. But perhaps you find yourself giving in more than you’d like. Fine. Rather than going right down to zero, create a more manageable target. Maybe rather than five a week you have two. Set regular days when you can have them so that you don’t fall into the trap of having coffee twice on a Monday and then giving in by Thursday. Once you’re used to that, take it a step further again until you reach a point that you feel is sustainable.

I probably sound like I’m obsessed with buying coffee, by the way. I’m not, though I do like it. It’s simply a very good example of a popular non-essential. The principle applies to anything. If your friends always buy food when you go out and you feel left out, order something smaller and healthier.

Often blogs suggest getting everyone to try going to the park or doing similar free things instead of going to the cinema or out to a bar or whatever. I appreciate the sentiment behind this but feel that sometimes it’s better to compromise with the situation you’re in. Your attitude to this will invariably differ to mine, but if your friends like going to bars it seems a bit silly to stop going with them in order to save a few pounds. Just be moderate while you’re there.

This post is more about putting thoughts to paper than setting out a structured list of exercises, but I hope it’s useful. If you want to make the move to minimalism and are finding it tough, just remember: take it in small steps, and you’ve probably already done it before.

How to save £1000 a year (and what to do with it).

Today my train on the London Underground was so packed that I didn’t even have space to open a newspaper. After wondering a bit about why people make such journeys every day for years on end, I tried to be a bit more productive.

One of the ways in which I’m trying to be more sensible with money is by cutting down on takeaway coffees. I’d got into the habit of getting one on the way into work and another at lunchtime. I decided to cut this out, apart from maybe once a week, since most of the time drinking the coffee was automatic and I barely even noticed I was drinking it. Today on the tube I did a few calculations on this change.

An average small cappuccino costs about £2.10. What with sizes as they are, why you’d ever want more than a small cup is beyond me. Two of those a day for each working day works out at £21 a week. For the sake of simplicity we’ll assume that this happens every week of the year. £21 for 52 weeks equals £1092. That is, by cutting out those two coffees I’m saving myself over a grand each year. If you don’t drink much coffee, the same applies for buying lunch each day or whatever. Hell, even if I cut down to one coffee a day, I’d still have a tidy lump sum at the end of the year if I saved the extra cash.

I then started to think of the various things you could do with that money:

1. Save it.

An obvious choice, but surprisingly effective. If you save that £1092 each year and reinvest the interest, a 5% interest rate will give you £6335.69 at the end of five years. There is a hell of a lot you can do with that kind of money!

2. Donate it.

A choice for the moral reader. My tube train happened to have an advert for a homeless charity I donate to called Centre Point. £12 a month gives a homeless person a room for up to two years and helps them to move off the street permanently. That comes to £144 a year, which means that with your coffee money you could get seven people off the street and still have some change to spare. Money donated to developing countries obviously goes even further. Your coffee money could save dozens of lives.

3. Volunteer.

The UK’s VSO offers a volunteering programme for 18-25 year olds called Global Xchange. It’s a crummy name, admittedly, but an attractive programme. You spend three months volunteering in the UK and another three in a developing country. £600 covers pretty much all your expenses. With the money left over you could do another programme such as BUNAC’s Volunteer USA. 12 weeks costs just £250, though there are other expenses such as flights and visas. Still, that coffee money would cover the great majority of your costs, meaning that you could volunteer for almost a year on the money that would have gone to Starbucks instead.

In effect, by cutting back on takeaway coffee or lunches or whatever you can easily put away around £20 a week while barely impacting on your lifestyle. If such easy changes can reap such large rewards, imagine what a difference the big changes could make!

Adverts for advertising

Today I was on the train coming back from a friend’s party. On the train with me was a family coming back from their summer holidays. I noticed that one of the children had a toy dog with him. It looked oddly familiar and I realised that it was the Churchill dog. For those not familiar with British advertising, the dog is the mascot of an insurance company called Churchill. Over the last few years there seems to be a developing trend where the advert itself is what is being advertised, rather than the product.

For a few years Vauxhall has been running its C’mon ad campaign with little plush toy things running around. You can buy these in the shops just like the Churchill dog. Compare the Market recently had a massive success with its meerkat mascot and I have no doubt that you’ll be able to buy toy versions of the meerkat, if you can’t already. Advertising campaigns are becoming the end in themselves, becoming a separate entity detached from the product being advertised.

I sometimes hear people say that adverts have increased in quality to the level that they’re sometimes more entertaining than the scheduled programming. To me that’s more a criticism of the programming than a compliment to the advertising, but over the years there have been some clever and striking adverts. I guess I have a begrudging respect for an advertiser who creates something that breaks through all the white noise and creates something recognisable.

Yet something has gone horribly wrong when advertising spawns products, rather than the other around. Are we going to have advertising for the products created by the original advert? Manufacturers might be on to something here: if an advert spawns a product, which in turns spawns a new advert, if that new advert were in turn to create a new marketable product then manufacturers only need to create one product and let the other ones develop by themselves.

Perhaps this has always gone on and I’ve simply never noticed it before, but it seems a rather insidious development that advertising not only tries to tell us what we want but makes us want the advertising itself too. The line between business and entertainment becomes even more blurred; that is, if there still is any such line left.

Of course, if you’ve found your way on to this blog then you already know the answer: stepping out of the endless cycle of consumption and living with what you need, not what you’re made to think you need. I myself have many steps ahead of me on this road, but I like to think that realising the absurdity of the current system is a good first step.

A minimalist guide to moving into university

What with the recent release of A level results, I thought it would be timely to write a short guide for those about to leave home and move into university.

For someone interested in minimalism, starting university presents a great opportunity and several challenges. You are effectively wiping the slate clean and starting afresh but without having to go through the process of decluttering. If you still have a room in the family house you can simply leave a lot of things at home. But moving out for the first time also reveals how many possessions you have. From my own experience and from helping new students move in I have a few simple tips that should make the physical moving one of the least stressful parts of beginning uni.

Know your limits.

I mean this in several senses. The room you are moving into, especially in first year halls of residence, is likely to be rather small. Try and get an idea of how much space you’ll have so you can be realistic with the amount of stuff you can bring. Working on the assumption that you’ll have half the space means you’re unlikely to over-estimate.

Secondly, you have the physical transportation to worry about. If you’re flying then weight limits are the obvious problem. If you go over the standard weight limit (20kg-23kg), you’ve probably got too much stuff. Bulky heavy items like bedding and pots and pans can easily be bought in your new home. Trains and cars obviously have no similar limits, but remember that you’re going to have to pack all of the stuff up and then move all of it in. It’s far better to spend your first day getting to know your neighbours than making half a dozen trips between your room and your car.

Don’t forget shared possessions.

You might pack up all the possessions in your room and think that you’re not taking too much stuff, but bear in mind all the things around the house that you make use of: scissors, towels, etc. There are dozens of little things that you probably use more often than you realise. You’ll either have to stop using them (in many cases easier than you’d imagine) or buy your own later, which will add to your clutter and expenses.

If in doubt, leave it.

Many how-to guides on minimalist blogs recommend that you put some items into a box out of the way and if you don’t use the items within a set time period then you should get rid of them. You can use your room at home as one big box. If you have even a little doubt about whether you want to bring something, simply leave it. If it turns out that you need it, ask family to post it over or pick it up when you’re next home. If you get along just fine without it and forget about its existence until you return home then you know that it’s one less possession that you need in your life.

Remember that you’ll change.

This one sounds pretty trite, but is generally true. There’s no point bringing your entire wardrobe, especially items that you rarely wear. You’ll be living in a new place surrounded by new people who have new ways of behaving, dressing and living. It is inevitable that your tastes and interests will change and mature at a surprising rate. You’ll find that things you used to consider dear to you no longer hold the same importance.

Go with an open mind.

This sort of sums up the above, but applies to more than material possessions. Some people try to completely reinvent themselves at university. This rarely works, as there are some fundamental character traits that are difficult to change. That doesn’t mean that you can’t work on parts of yourself that you want to improve, of course. Start with an open mind and allow things to progress unencumbered with existing ideas and preconceptions. The same applies to possessions. Bring what you need to get by in relative comfort, but don’t try and transpose your past surroundings to a new location.

I firmly believe that students are the best placed of anyone to start living a minimalist lifestyle. They tend to move in and out of accommodation regularly, so they are acutely aware of what possessions they have. Most students tend to have relatively few possessions with them at university, though far more than they need. Money is generally pretty tight, giving all the more reason to practice a minimalist approach to finances. Lastly, and most importantly, they are surrounded by so many opportunities that material possessions are unimportant. They are surrounded by hundreds of people from all over the world, all studying different things and with different interests and passions. Many universities have hundreds of societies offering an easy way to try out new experiences. It is probably the period of life when material possessions are at their least important. Why let yourself get held down by consuming and owning when doing and experiencing is so easy?

An eye-opener.

In the space of about a month, my aims and views on life have changed more rapidly than they ever have before. A month ago I was browsing clothing forums and dreaming about how I would get a good job and buy myself a lovely Savile Row suit. Never mind that it would cost a few thousand pounds or that far cheaper suits would do perfectly well – it’s about satisfaction, isn’t it? Now, thanks to an idle Google search and plenty of minimalist blogs, I have realised that material possessions never bring satisfaction nor happiness.

About a year ago I returned from a year abroad in Russia, where my possessions were whatever I could fit into the suitcase on the way out. Oddly, I never really thought of this as restricting. Yet when I came home again and started back at university, I suddenly felt that I needed to possess all these different things in order to be satisfied. Clothes, wine, books, whatever. The actual item is irrelevant. The only important thing is the act of purchasing or opening that box from Amazon. Sure it was nice to try on something new or to have some kind of accepted brand, but it didn’t last. Besides, most people don’t notice or care, and the ones that do are probably wankers. Being a student, of course, this was not a sensible long-term plan for my finances.

Not to worry though, since I had a summer internship lined up, which would pay off my overdraft and then some. I’m now about halfway through the internship and my current plans bear no resemblance to my aims and dreams of even two months ago.

There seems to be a fundamental illogicality in the idea that you work long hours for lots of money. I’m not in banking or anything like that, but the hours are substantial (much more than the average) and the pay is commensurate. The people I’m working with are driving themselves to do work they hate for hours they hate for money that they don’t have time to spend. If you’re working fourteen or more hours a day, when you finally leave your plans for the evening barely extend beyond dinner and bed. So why live like that? As far as I can tell, for status and achievement. Being able to say that you work in xxx industry, earning xxx a year and living in xxx area. Getting that promotion a year or two earlier than your contemporaries working more reasonable hours.

But then, of course, there’s always someone further up the chain than you. You make manager, but then there’s senior managers right above you. You can afford to live in that nice area of town, but not the car or yacht or private jet or whatever the hell else it is that people with too much money buy. And so you have to keep at it in order to make the next step.

I guess a lot of this depends on how enjoyable you find your work. I have fairly limited experience so look to the others around me. None of them seem particularly happy at finishing work at 11pm. They are stressed and in poor health because almost every waking hour is dedicated to working. If your work has some kind of benefit to wider society or is part of your wider interests I can see how people would choose to dedicate themselves to that one aim. But what if your work is dull, or serves no greater good? What if you’re working on producing some report you know will probably never be read? If your dreams and aspirations happen to align with your work, then you are truly lucky. For the majority though, I suspect that unfulfilling work crowds out every other part of their life.

So I began this summer with the plan of starting a high-flying corporate career to fund some kind of aspirational life that I vaguely felt I deserved. Now, I no longer crave a materialistic life and I now see no benefit in working crazy hours to service that lifestyle. Perhaps you read this and think that this blog is nothing more than the shock of a student meeting the realities of working life. There’s probably more than a grain of truth in that. However, with the current opportunities available it seems silly to ignore the alternatives. Fifty years ago the aim was to get on the bottom rung of the corporate ladder and pay your time to work your way up to comfortable mediocrity. This is still the aim for many, but it is not the only option.

In many ways I am at an ideal point to begin to change my attitudes. Living in temporary accommodation means that I haven’t had time to accumulate clutter. In a year’s time I will have no obligations, mortgages, contracts, nothing.

In my London accommodation I have counted less than 100 things. This ignores the tat I have stored elsewhere, of course, but it was an eye-opener to see that I am already living with less than 100 items. I have still managed to find ten items to donate to charity, though, neatly combining minimalist ideals with charitable causes.

For the time being this blog will probably be little more than a form of self-regulation, ensuring that I don’t stray from my aims. But I am excited to see where it can go in the future and I hope I can find my own niche in the minimalist community. Once you have found a purpose you don’t need possessions to fill the gap.

tom