#022 ✰ Closing the gap
Between who you aspire to be and what your stuffs say about you.
Good day to you!
I hope this note finds you well.
As you know, our mission is to help people free themselves from rampant consumerism, so that they can dedicate more time, money and bandwidth to be and build. 👉 We want to be the tool that empowers your future materialistic decisions.
Out
The body ✅ ; The mind ✅ ; The home❓
We believe that our level of anxiety is correlated to both the quantity and quality of stuffs that surround us. To find peace and harmony, we need to find our own equilibrium.
Which, according to the definition that most minimalists are using, fits in what minimalism actually is.
Minimalism is a tool to rid yourself of life’s excess in favor of focusing on what’s important—so you can find happiness, fulfillment, and freedom. The Minimalists
Labels suck.
None of us three really enjoys labels, I’d even say we tend to run away from them. Because way too often, the image that a label carries along is based upon the most radical folks identifying themselves as such. This is why one tends to associate the word minimalist with ‘someone-who-owns-two-briefs-and-one-fork’, vegetarian with ‘grazing-grass-or-eating-nuts’ or an ecologist as a ‘hippie-who-flats-tires-and-takes-down-5G-antennas’. Labels suck. There are so many realities behind one word.
Let’s dive in.
Here’s what we want to enable, stuff-wise:
acknowledge where you are today
📲 nope, you don’t need to document your whole house to get started! Just start with a sub-category you cherish (a collection?), or on the opposite, one that you’re pretty ashamed of. Get familiar with what you have.decide who you want to be
what do I most value? what enough is?close the gap
reduce: if I had lost it, would I buy this again?
refine: start building a slow, conscious wishlist, one that ressembles the person you aim to be.
Your cheat (sub)category.
In most diets, there is a cheat day. A day when you don’t need to pay attention to calories or quantity. You just get to eat as you please. This acts as a safety valve and allows you to stick to the diet over time. And get results.
How about applying the cheat day trick in the world of physical possessions? Instead of a ‘day’, there’d be a sub-category where you just… allow yourself to go wild. While intentionally downsizing to your essentials in most part of your home, this would be the category that you keep as your cheat one. Could be a collection (if you collect anything already) or just a vertical you know you have tendency to fall for easily.
Most of us just like the act of purchasing something. We’ve been trained to like it for quite some time already. But what if these purchases pulsions were contained into one single area? Instead of buying stuffs here and there depending on our mood, we’d learn how to reroute them towards one single vertical? As a first attempt to overcome them.
Maybe it is about time to address rampant consumerism as an addiction. As such, we might need to set up habits that are going to stick in time. What do you think?
Be free.
I can’t see a better conclusion that this one:
There is tremendous freedom in learning that we can eliminate the non-essentials, that we are no longer controlled by other people’s agendas, and that we get to choose. With that invincible power we can discover our highest point of contribution, not just to our lives or careers, but to the world. Essentialism
What’s new in the app 📱
We’ve improved the whole ISBN scan and fixed a couple of bugs that got triggered in between.
Request your invite to the beta over here 📣
In
Podcast:
Everything Is Alive ; interviewing Things that surround us: Louis the Can of Cola, Dennis the Pillow, or Tara the Bar of Soap. Not sure where to place this between hilarious and f*cked up, somehow reminds me of Sausage Party.
Articles:
The eight secrets to a (fairly) fulfilled life ; I tend to avoid these catchy titles but I must admit Oliver is pretty on point here. I am particularly fond of these three:
The capacity to tolerate minor discomfort is a superpower.
The future will never provide the reassurance you seek from it. (…) We want to know, from our vantage point in the present, that things will be OK later on. But we never can. (This is why it’s wrong to say we live in especially uncertain times. The future is always uncertain; it’s just that we’re currently very aware of it.)
The solution to imposter syndrome is to see that you are one.
How much clothing is enough? differentiating needs from wants. “Some people would say that clothing is a need, but that’s a conceptual mistake. Clothing is not a need, rather it is a solution for two actual needs: temperature regulation and bodily integrity.”
Two kinds of momentum “But once we’ve emotionally committed to a cause or a project or a person, the cost of change is high, partly because it involves feeling as though we made a mistake.” This really applies to letting go of possessions, too!
Quote:
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life? - Poet Mary Oliver
Have a beautiful day! 🎨
Mathilde
