The Hidden Benefits of Digital Minimalism — The New Oil
A few years ago, minimalism was all the rage. Marie Kondo was on every TV, The Minimalists were in everyone's podcast feed, and I found myself confused, regretting not having started a blog or something years ago. I've always been a bit of a minimalist myself, and it had never occurred to me that other people might not be aware of that philosophy. I figured that others simply chose to live a more materialistic lifestyle, and that at any point anyone could wake up and go “wait, I don’t actually want this crap” and downsize. It’s not like I took a class. I don’t even remember learning about “minimalism” until I was in my mid-twenties. I just took all those childhood after-school specials to heart when they said “things don’t matter.” It was also probably influenced by my time in the military, moving from duty station to duty station (or even just room to room) constantly and having to be able to pack my entire life into two bags I could carry by myself, sometimes with no warning.
While the cultural bandwagon has moved on to the next fad we’ll all forget about in fifteen minutes, it’s clear that minimalism left a mark. Before Marie Kondo, if I told people I was a minimalist they assumed that I lived in a tiny studio apartment with a sheetless twin-sized mattress in the corner, and perhaps a single plate and cup or something. These days people tend to understand that it instead means that I probably just have a smaller and more sparse home than average. Of course I still own things. That purple planetscape poster in my video backdrop? I owned that for years before becoming a content creator. And a small bookshelf’s worth of print books (I experimented with ebooks but didn’t like it). Next to my desk, I have my college diploma and a poster for an award-winning play I did the sound for framed on the wall. I own multiple coffee mugs, some clothes I haven’t worn in a while, and some band posters and wall flags. But until I met my wife, I didn’t own a TV, or a lot of those “knick-knacks” that you see taking up space on tables and shelves, or other wall decor, or most of our specialized kitchen appliances like an air fryer or food processor, or spare blankets, or any of those extra things that some would argue make a house feel like a “home.”
