minimalism & intention
I recently read two books which offer overlapping insights - Fumio Sasake's Goodbye things: The New Japanese Minimalism, and Cal Newport's Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World. Although each author approaches the subject of minimalism from a distinct perspective, they both ask us to reconsider the extent to which the objects in our lives can become a burden to us.
For Sasake, it is all of our possessions, these objects we collect and retain in the spaces we inhabit. Sasake's story is very much a personal one, a chronicle of his own transition from a way of living which reinforced his unhappiness, through the discovery of minimalism as a practice, towards a renewed zest for life, finally freed of the weight of possessions. The picture he paints of his "preminimalist days" does, indeed, have a certain heaviness to it:
"I was always comparing myself with other people who had more or better things, which often made me miserable... I couldn't focus on anything, and I was always wasting time."
Once Sasake began to dispense with his things, however, the picture changes dramatically. Casting off comparisons with others, practising the art of letting go, and creating space in his world, he describes a transformation, not only of his apartment but also of his day-to-day experience. In the end, the process provokes for him the question of happiness itself - of what it is and how we can live happier lives.
In Newport's case, it is our digital devices, our phones, our laptops, tablets, smart watches - in a word, our screens - which weigh us down. Or, rather, they capture us and hold hostage our attention. Newport is able to render visible the real machinery behind our device attachments, the Silicon Valley industries and their contemporaries earning a living off of our carefully developed screen habits.
Where Sasake explores minimalism as a practice that has helped him to move past a sticking point in his own life, there is little social or political critique here. One almost feels as though the book is missing its second half. On the other hand, Digital Minimalism is directly critical of the attention-holding industries and much more reflective in general, carefully examining the changes these kinds of technologies have introduced into our social relationships. Newport selects various anecdotes, more often from the history of the United States, to illustrate his points, referencing the undervalued virtues of solitude, for example, or the richness of face-to-face, structured game playing.
Neither Sasake or Newport, though, argues for any kind of total abandonment of things, digital or otherwise. Minimalism, for both, is not a question of asceticism but instead of essentiality. In other words, the practice of minimalism arises through a deliberate stance against maximalism - that is, the notion that more, more, more will eventually pay off.
In fact, an important point in both books is that our attachment to these objects is rarely evaluated in terms of its cost for us. We're not in the habit of asking what we're giving up in order to take in more things, or tap one more notification. Ultimately, for Sasake as well as Newport, we pay a price in two different currencies - we lose our time, and we lose our intention.
Time is the more obvious casualty. Sasake notes the fact that cleaning and tidying become much shorter tasks when you don't have as many things. How much more quickly can you vacuum a well-furnished living room versus one with hardly anything in it? Along the same lines, we waste time searching for things amongst all our clutter, and we waste time finding somewhere to put them when we're done. In the digital realm, we clock in hours spent glued to our screens, often achieving little else than attending to the siren songs of little red dots.
Our intention, however, the authoring of our own choices, is surely the greatest expense of a maximalist life. Sasake speaks about a kind of aimless, distracted consumption, collecting objects for fad hobbies we know we'll never give our full commitment, clothes we'll never wear, books we'll never read. The images all around us ceaselessly whispering a promise of satisfaction just one more purchase away. Newport describes the conspiracy to capture our attention as "a battle we must fight", as the apps and services invading our world threaten to "diminish our soul's authority".
The solution, for both authors, is a return to intention, a return to deliberate, active, choice. However you live amongst these invading artifacts, make sure you're choosing a relationship with them that supports the life you want. Through the practice of minimalism, they argue, we might find a clearer view through the fog of modern consumerism and reclaim some agency in a world that strives to snatch it from beneath our feet.