Minimalism is a Cult
On the surface, my life adheres to the tenets of (physical/digital) minimalism:
- I don't have social media accounts, never have, never been interested in any of them (though I did have admin access for some workplace and community accounts). No Friendster, no Plurk, no Fourquare, no Path, no Facebook, no Instagram, no Twitter, no Tiktok... (I do have a LinkedIn account, which was nearly inescapable), though I do have instant messenger apps like Whatsapp, Line, and Discord.
- I don't have subscriptions. If I want to read something, I navigate to the website/blog directly from a collection of bookmarks.
- I'm not on ecommerce sites. If I need to shop something from those places, I'll need to ask my friends to help. When I worked in ecommerce, my coworkers were bewildered.
- I deliberate thrice over for everything I want to buy, and my home is filled with things I actually use, books I actually read, games I actually play.
And yet I'm quite allergic to articles about minimalism, because usually it comes from a very first world perspectives and assumptions, a good concept gone sour in mangled cultural translations. It's often written from assumptions of abundance and excess, from a point of view where you are a passive consumer and you have no agency at all, while in my part of the world the minimalist life fetishized on these websites, peppered with buzzwords such as mindfulness, is just a consequence of not having much in the first place. It would then proceed to shame you for holding onto something, make you embarrassed for getting yourself the stuffed doll or summer dresses you had wanted since you were 10. To convince you that you want a life bereft of anything.
To be clear, decluttering in itself is not a bad idea, dark patterns is a real problem, but assigning moral judgment on it is a very very bad one. Demonizing things don't work to wean people off them. If anything, the allure of a guilty pleasure probably gets stronger. I refuse to feel guilty for my weekly caramel latte, for the board games and books filling my room, for vivacious distractions I put into sterile personal webpages, and for the time I spend chatting. After all, it's best approached as a tool to rein and shape the kind of life you want living, and only you know what you value and what you can let go.