Simple Living

I typed a response to this yesterday, but my phone ate it. 🙃 For anyone else trying to comment here, you need to explicitly set the language of your comment to "English" when responding to Kbin users (which OP is.)

I started out in spaces related to minimalism before I found the simple living movement. It definitely felt like a good fit in some ways, but a very bad one in others. For example, I definitely prefer to own less stuff than the average person, but I would say that for me this comes from a rejection of consumerism. Whereas many "minimalists" are very driven by consumerism: opting for buy very few items, but only those of the best brands or with the right "aesthetic."

There is also a tendency for grifting in those spaces. People become microcelebrities and put out blogs, videos, and even documentaries all rehashing the same, meaningless message. "My life was so terrible, and then I discovered minimalism and discarded all my possessions, and now my life is great." The epitome of this is "The Minimalists," two guys who somehow ended up with a Netflix documentary. This content has a great aesthetic, but lacks substance of any kind. They fail to dig into the things that explain why shopping doesn't make us happy (the hedonic treadmill,) or provide a meaningful critique of consumerism.

So, compared to the average person, I would say that I am a minimalist. But it isn't an identity I would tout in front of self-professed "minimalists," because we have fundamentally different values.