Uploaded July 2023 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago
We spend so much time on the hunt, but nothing ever quite does it for us and we get so wrapped up in the hunt that it kind of makes us miserable.
"Black Friday shopping maniac still playing out tonight at malls across America."
"High hopes of saving some big bucks on those holiday gifts."
This is not something that just happened yesterday. This is something that has been sold to us over the past hundred years by those that want to make a whole lot of money.
"Now that's what I call a good looking car!"
You have this thing that you were obsessed about, but then the new version comes out, and now you no longer care about the one you have. In fact, the one you have is a source of dissatisfaction.
People are beginning to recognize that they have been tricked.
There is no "out" until you become aware. You're not going to get happier by consuming more.
US has a land of opportunity where somebody could start out at the bottom work hard and do well. There's no question that what it means to have made it or to have achieved the American dream in the United States has increased tremendously in material terms.
A hundred thousand dollar a year plus kind of income became more and more an aspirational norm across the society because that's what's portrayed as normal on TV. A six-figure income.
Beginning from about the mid-1990s Americans went on a buying spree that was probably unprecedented in human history. And a lot of it had to do with the cheapness of products coming mostly from China. Whether we're talking about fashion, electronics, all types of household goods.
So stuff cheaper but it's also more available you can order stuff 24 hours online in their big box stores. We ended up accumulating a lot more stuff so much so that even though we have about three times the space per person that we used to in the 50’s, so a lot more space. We got so much stuff, we need space on top of that and so there's a 2.2 billion square foot personal storage industry, which is ludicrous.
So you have people living in these enormous homes and if you really look at it people don't use the space that they have. Someone did a study and they showed a heat map of like where people have traveled inside their homes. Over the course of a normal day was a family of four and they were in the very average home and what they found is that people used about maybe, maybe 40 of their space. Nobody used the dining room, no one used the living room. There was a big porch, no one used the porch. I mean I'm not saying this is the way everyone lives, some people use dining rooms but it creates this big vacuum that you have to fill so people are throwing all this crap into their homes that they don't need
We are living our life depending on the space we've got rather than creating our space to fit our lives. It's so easy to go wrong and you wind up with three dining tables in the same house. Well you got to run pretty fast to eat three tables at the same meal. Nothing is more responsible than living in the smallest space you possibly can.
It got to a point in my life where I don't know what was important anymore. Then at some point when I was approaching 30 years old, I noticed something different about my best friend of 20-something years. Josh, he seemed happy for the first time in a really long time, like truly happy, ecstatic. But I didn't understand why because we had both worked at the same corporation we had both wasted our 20s, climbing the corporate ladder together and he had been just as miserable as me. So I did what any good best friend would do - I took him out to a really nice lunch. I think we went to Subway and I sat him down and I asked him a question, “Why the hell are you so happy?” He spent the next 20 minutes telling me about this thing called, “Minimalism”.
Before I discovered “Minimalism”, I think my life looked like pretty much anyone else's - I had a lot of stuff – hundreds, thousands of books, DVDs and VHS's, closets full of expensive clothes, all of these things that I brought into my life without questioning. But when I started letting go I started feeling freer and happier and lighter and now as a minimalist every possession serves a purpose or brings me joy. I have a bed and a chair and a radio and I have some furniture in my dining room, in my kitchen I have appliances. I don't have any excess stuff, everything that I look around at I have to be able to justify to myself not to anyone else but just justify to myself, “Does this add value to my life”, and if not, I have to be willing to let go.
There’s nothing wrong with consumption. The problem is; “Compulsory consumption”. We are tired of it, we are tired of acquiring things because that’s what we’re supposed to do.
We spend so much time on the hunt, but nothing ever quite does it for us and we get so wrapped up in the hunt that it kind of makes us miserable.
"Black Friday shopping maniac still playing out tonight at malls across America."
"High hopes of saving some big bucks on those holiday gifts."
This is not something that just happened yesterday. This is something that has been sold to us over the past hundred years by those that want to make a whole lot of money.
"Now that's what I call a good looking car!"
You have this thing that you were obsessed about, but then the new version comes out, and now you no longer care about the one you have. In fact, the one you have is a source of dissatisfaction.
People are beginning to recognize that they have been tricked.
There is no "out" until you become aware. You're not going to get happier by consuming more.
US has a land of opportunity where somebody could start out at the bottom work hard and do well. There's no question that what it means to have made it or to have achieved the American dream in the United States has increased tremendously in material terms.
A hundred thousand dollar a year plus kind of income became more and more an aspirational norm across the society because that's what's portrayed as normal on TV. A six-figure income.
Beginning from about the mid-1990s Americans went on a buying spree that was probably unprecedented in human history. And a lot of it had to do with the cheapness of products coming mostly from China. Whether we're talking about fashion, electronics, all types of household goods.
So stuff cheaper but it's also more available you can order stuff 24 hours online in their big box stores. We ended up accumulating a lot more stuff so much so that even though we have about three times the space per person that we used to in the 50’s, so a lot more space. We got so much stuff, we need space on top of that and so there's a 2.2 billion square foot personal storage industry, which is ludicrous.
So you have people living in these enormous homes and if you really look at it people don't use the space that they have. Someone did a study and they showed a heat map of like where people have traveled inside their homes. Over the course of a normal day was a family of four and they were in the very average home and what they found is that people used about maybe, maybe 40 of their space. Nobody used the dining room, no one used the living room. There was a big porch, no one used the porch. I mean I'm not saying this is the way everyone lives, some people use dining rooms but it creates this big vacuum that you have to fill so people are throwing all this crap into their homes that they don't need
We are living our life depending on the space we've got rather than creating our space to fit our lives. It's so easy to go wrong and you wind up with three dining tables in the same house. Well you got to run pretty fast to eat three tables at the same meal. Nothing is more responsible than living in the smallest space you possibly can.
It got to a point in my life where I don't know what was important anymore. Then at some point when I was approaching 30 years old, I noticed something different about my best friend of 20-something years. Josh, he seemed happy for the first time in a really long time, like truly happy, ecstatic. But I didn't understand why because we had both worked at the same corporation we had both wasted our 20s, climbing the corporate ladder together and he had been just as miserable as me. So I did what any good best friend would do - I took him out to a really nice lunch. I think we went to Subway and I sat him down and I asked him a question, “Why the hell are you so happy?” He spent the next 20 minutes telling me about this thing called, “Minimalism”.
Before I discovered “Minimalism”, I think my life looked like pretty much anyone else's - I had a lot of stuff – hundreds, thousands of books, DVDs and VHS's, closets full of expensive clothes, all of these things that I brought into my life without questioning. But when I started letting go I started feeling freer and happier and lighter and now as a minimalist every possession serves a purpose or brings me joy. I have a bed and a chair and a radio and I have some furniture in my dining room, in my kitchen I have appliances. I don't have any excess stuff, everything that I look around at I have to be able to justify to myself not to anyone else but just justify to myself, “Does this add value to my life”, and if not, I have to be willing to let go.
There’s nothing wrong with consumption. The problem is; “Compulsory consumption”. We are tired of it, we are tired of acquiring things because that’s what we’re supposed to do.
