When I ventured out of the office this afternoon, I ended up contemplating a couple of items on the shlef but walked past them as they were dull. But I went back as I thought of how I felt every morning when I put on tights, always with holes in them - I had to go ahead and buy them. These will last me a good year or so, far better putting the money towards something required than something mindless. I mean, I already have jumpers after all!
So, the weekend on the otherhand was a bit of a mess. I ate my body weight in chocolate.
I find that my well-intentioned routine of eating well, exercising and drinking lots of water takes a complete nose dive when Saturday comes around. I find myself at a bit of a loose end and misinterpret boredom for hunger and find myself pecking away at odds and ends I could really do without.
But hey ho. There's no point dwelling, I just had to admit that to myself after 5 consecutive entries of what seemed to be great progress. I just hope that moving forward, there will be less set backs.
I think now that it's calmer at work I can focus, read and research. I feel it's a better way to spend my time in comparison to what I did before which was trawling through make-up blogs adding things mindlessly to my basket.
I have broken my 'no buy' rule I put in place but the items were Christmas gifts for family. I felt it would be better to make a start now so it wasn't so pressured closer to the time, and i've more time to think about each person and take more time to make them something, in line with my new way of thinking! It'll also help save me a bit of money too. But then, I also seem to buy things earlier and then buy more things closer to the time. I'm really in a loss of what to get Chris for his birthday and for Christmas too. Hopefully something will come to mind soon enough! He's a tricky one to get anything for.
Sigh. Low energy, not a lot of thoughts going on to be honest.
But I did read this gem from Reddit which I found pretty thought provoking;
"Minimalism isn't about having less. It's about having only the things that add value to your life." What does Minimalism mean to YOU?
Good question. It's not a quick answer I'm afraid...
So the aesthetic is something I've always enjoyed since I was young. As young as I can remember really. When I was a kid I dreamed of living in a house with clean lines, empty shelves, rooms with lots of white space and so on.
During my teens, I became passionate about photography and gradually began to lean towards a pretty stark, minimal and often bleak aesthetic in my images. My latest project on Instagram is a good example of where this has ended up and, at the same time, I started to develop a bit of a fascination with Brutalist architecture. A lot of people despise Brutalism and I can see why - it's soulless, it's intimidating and it can look very uncreative. But I find something wonderfully peaceful about it. The unfussy appearance, the lack of pretence and, in some weird way, the soulless, intimidating... bleakness of it. It makes me feel something when I look at it - not necessarily nice feelings I suppose but it's an emotive style for me. Maybe I'm weird.
So, at this point in my life, (teens and late teens), minimalism was a 'look'.
Around the age of 22, I began dressing in almost the same outfit every day. Every day no matter what I'm doing (unless it's, like, sports or something) I wear the same pair of trousers in either blue or dark red, a dark grey cardigan, a white shirt and a blazer. It wasn't really that I decided one day that this is what I would wear forever but I gradually found that I loved dressing in these things and so I slowly stopped wearing other items of clothing. At the time, I never considered this to be anything to do with minimalism but now I realise that this was the first time I adopted what I now believe to be a fundamental part of a minimalist lifestyle. Why? Because a huge reason I continue to do this is because it eliminates a huge amount of complexity in my life - in terms of money spent on clothing, space taken up by it and, crucially, having to make decisions on what to wear with what and when. Dressing is something I don't have to spend as much time, money, space and thought on any longer. Same with doing laundry and shopping. And that makes space for me to spend time/money/space/thought on other things in my life. Plus I love how I look every day.
Another significant moment was moving across the country to a new city four years ago. My girlfriend and I moved from London to Manchester and had to move everything we had in one car journey. There was three of us in the car and not a huge amount of room for our belongings so we had to make what we thought were some tough decisions about what we keep and what we leave behind. It took until a few weeks later for me to realise that they weren't tough decisions at all. In fact, I was already struggling to even list the things I'd had to remove from my life - let alone really miss them. I think that was a bit of a lesson for me. After that, I started to cut down further and further and also being a lot more selective about the things I buy and I actually learned that there's real joy in getting rid of stuff - a different kind to the (also valuable) pleasure you get from getting new stuff. The feeling that comes from releasing things you no longer need is more to do with the self. It's about achievement and a feeling of control over your world and a knowledge that you're not using your possessions as a crutch. I noticed that I wasn't just getting rid of stuff, I was gaining space - in my house and in my thoughts and in my time.
It's important to note that this is fucking difficult sometimes. But the first and most crucial part of minimalism is, I think, about learning. It's about learning to understand which are the things in your life that make your life better, which ones have no effect, and which ones make it worse.
At this point in my life, minimalism was all about letting go of material possessions.
After moving to Manchester, I began my career in advertising and have worked at an ad agency for the last three years. I don't mean to blow my own trumpet but I'm pretty fucking good at what I do. I know the industry well and I've learned a lot very fast. But the industry makes me feel sick sometimes. And this, I think, has been the thing that's really brought me to where I am today. Being inside an industry that manipulates people into wanting MORE and BETTER and EVEN MORE STUFF has turned me off consumerism so much. It's enabled me to recognise how much of our lives we spend chasing a dream, investing not just our money but our time and energy into the idea that more will make us happier. That a lifestyle of consumption will make things better and that, somewhere, somehow, there's a goal. That we'll be content when we reach it. We literally buy into that promise and, I don't know about you, but it hasn't worked for me yet. And so I've started to give meaningful consideration to the things I introduce into my life - not just from a 'how useful will it be' perspective but also a 'how much fulfilment will this bring me' perspective.
Also worth mentioning I think is that my job is very full-on. It's fast paced, it's high pressure, it's noisy and 'always on'. It's extremely difficult to switch off from and we're expected to react quickly and almost always be reachable. It's something that, over the last year particularly, I've found to be intruding on the other important things in my life. Alone time, peace, becoming absorbed in my hobbies, paying attention to my girlfriend, passionate sex, health, being in nature, looking away from screens, discovering new music, contemplating things, writing, debating, eating well, riding my bike, going to the cinema... the list goes on but all of these things have been sacrificed to various degrees by the way that my career encourages me to live. Not only that, but it's affecting the way my brain works. My attention span is lower, I'm find things distract me easily, I feel uncomfortable just sitting and 'being' without any stimulation. Again, the list goes on.
And so, I've decided to take what I consider to be a minimalist approach to the way my work fits into my life. I leave the office on time unless there's something which absolutely MUST be done that day. I take a lunch break unless there's something that absolutely MUST be done right now. I ignore my work emails when I'm at home. I don't reply to my email except at certain designated times of the day when I'm working (every hour I put in ten minutes to go through email rather than letting them interrupt what I'm doing at the time). I've given my work phone back to my company (even though I was very excited by having two iPhones when I first got it and felt very important). I've also switched off all push notifications for things like LinkedIn, Facebook, Messenger, Twitter and YouTube so that I can check my social media on my own terms and I've removed Reddit from my bookmarks so that, to visit it, I have to type r-e-d-d- into the URL bar (reminding me that maybe I don't need to be on here). I've decided that the electronic devices I own are there for when I have something to use them for, not a default activity where I get home from work, land on the sofa and mindlessly flip my laptop open and flick the telly on. I've removed from Facebook all the 'friends' I don't care about and begun to take the same approach in 'real life' too - no longer investing time in the people with whom my relationship is giving me nothing.
After all of this, I've begun to consider minimalism as a mindset rather than just a 'look' or even a lifestyle. It's about a kind of... self-understanding. An understanding of what you value in your life and how you find fulfilment. And then a kind of courage. Finding the strength to remove the things from your life that you've acknowledged shouldn't be there. But this realisation has also brought me to a difficult point in my life - where I've unearthed a problem I'm struggling to solve:
Is my professional skill set compatible with my beliefs as a human? Can and should I continue to work in an industry that relies on the existence of consumerism, when I hold a strong belief that the desire to find meaning through material possessions is preventing people from finding contentment? And do I have the courage to let it go?
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