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Answer by Jonathan Brodsky:
I hate this question. And I hate it because people hear about minimalism and they think it’s about cutting stuff out of your life (literally—they think it’s about throwing stuff out). It’s not about that. When you’re talking about a life philosophy, it’s about how you assign value to the things and people in your life. It’s about how you figure out what’s essential to you.
It’s not about the stuff. The “less stuff” part of minimalism is just a way to help you focus on the other things you value because you have less stuff to focus on.
I think focusing on the stuff is a poor proxy for focusing on what actually matters to you (whatever that is). You can just as easily get obsessed with getting rid of stuff as with acquiring stuff, and neither of those is good. It’s better to be happy with who and where you are, and I find that a lot of that happiness is about where you think you’re going.
So write down where you want to be in life 10 years from now. Do it stream-of-consciousness style—you can always edit it later. When you do edit it, edit it down to the parts that you actually have influence over. You can’t control whether your kids get into Harvard. You do have influence over whether your kids are excited about learning. Those differences are pretty important before you get to the next step. Take your time editing.
Make it real by showing it to people. Tell them that this is what you want to do. They might tell you that you’re crazy, or stupid, or worse. It doesn’t matter. You made it real. In the future, whenever anyone asks you why you’re doing something, you can just refer to this document. It eliminates so much unnecessary social cruft from your life.
Keep it real by referring it to it every week. Whenever you want to make a big purchase, reference it against what you wrote. Whenever you want to take a new job, reference it. You get the picture. This works for lifestyle, it works for careers, and it works for pretty much anything else you can throw at it.
When you get to the life that you wrote about (or you decide that you were targeting the wrong things and want to rewrite it), then write another one.
Pretty soon, you’ll naturally just start skipping over the “stuff” that some people who espouse minimalism are telling you to consciously do without, and you’ll be skipping it because it’s just not something that matters to you. And that is the point of all of these life philosophies. They’re about pin-pointing what matters to you.
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