Why minimalism helped clear more than clutter.
What I feel is most liberating about my lifestyle is not owning unnecessary things, or unnecessary paradigms.
I’ve watched my parents and my grandparents stay stuck in one version of themselves for an entire lifespan, not because they lacked the imagination to want something different, but because the things and the patterns around them didn’t allow it. I grew up in a big house full of things, and most of the time I was out in the woods with the dogs anyway. Even now, with my son’s and my whole life packed into a six meter van, I still sometimes feel I have more than I need.
What actually gets cluttered
Erich Fromm wrote about this divide long before minimalism became something you could put on a mood board. In To Have or to Be? he draws a line between two ways of existing. One builds identity out of accumulation: what you own, what you’ve secured, what you can point to and call yours. The other builds identity as something ongoing, a person who stays open to becoming someone slightly different next year than they are now.
The having mode isn’t dangerous because objects are bad. It’s dangerous because once your sense of self is welded to what you possess, letting go of any of it starts to feel like losing yourself. A house full of things becomes a house you can’t leave. A routine becomes a self you can’t outgrow. The clutter was never really the furniture. It was the paradigm the furniture came wrapped in.
That’s what I watched happen to the people who raised me. Not a failure of will. A structure that didn’t leave room to move.
Clearing the head, not just the shelf
Minimalism has helped me so much, clearing my own head and allowing growth. I’m grateful I made the choice to experience it. But I want to be honest about what it actually cleared. It wasn’t mainly the objects, the real shift was underneath that. Fewer things to be identified with. Fewer patterns that were really just habits nobody had questioned in years.
Fromm would say that’s the whole difference between having less and being more free. You can own very little and still be entirely in the having mode, gripping tightly to the few things you do have, terrified of what happens if the identity built on them slips. Or you can own very little and be in the being mode, where the smallness isn’t a sacrifice at all but just what’s left when you stop needing objects and routines to hold you together.
Still asking what’s necessary
I didn’t set out to prove a philosophy right. I set out to live my truth, and the lessons came with it. What I know now is that the freedom worth having is about not owning unnecessary things, and not owning unnecessary paradigms either.
Still here asking what’s actually necessary, and still a little surprised by how short that list turns out to be.