Minimalism vs The Cloud
My stereo system (a turntable, two bookshelf speakers, an amplifier, and about 30 vinyl records) is a disgrace to my minimalism. I don’t need it and I don’t love it. But I do like it. As one school of minimalism would put it, it sparks joy.
I treat it as temporary. I might sell it one day, when it ceases to deliver the goods or when I need the money.
I keep wondering if I’d rather have the ullage (the empty space) instead of the stereo system. For now the answer remains: no, I’d prefer to have the records.
Part of the reason for this return to physical media was to buck against digital streaming and jab-screen devices. In many ways, I’m a 20th Century boy.
The bottom line, really, is that I don’t enjoy streamed music. Playing it has little appeal to me as an activity, so while the storage solution of The Cloud might look like a good one, it’s a failure in that the new system doesn’t actually deliver the benefits of the old one. Quitting something you enjoy without a higher goal (e.g. the plan is to move country) is no solution to anything.
I was going to write more fully about this today but, by happy coincidence, my friend Carrie just did the same. She speaks of the benefits of physical media:
It feels like [vinyl] somehow matters more, and because I’m listening with my whole self it’s much more emotionally affecting too.
[Streaming has] broken many artists’ ability to make a living from music. When you can stream pretty much everything ever recorded for less than you’d pay for a single vinyl LP, your streams are almost worthless in terms of what any artist gets paid.
and of the reservations about it:
vinyl is hilariously expensive and may need you to buy a whole bunch of new hardware too
The reasons not to buy a bunch of vinyl records remain the same as when I first put thought into this. It’s stuff. But as much as I dislike the cost and the responsibility of ownership, I also dislike the impoverished world offered by streaming.
The Cloud is a good place to stash your ugly, boring administrative documents. And it makes photographs more sharable and stops them from collecting dust. But music? Not everything needs to be invisibled away. I have real art on my walls too, not those horrible screens you can get now. And real books, not e-books. The physical world is better for you sometimes; to move around and manually make something happen is appealing to the primate brain. And we are primates.
I’m not saying every primal urge should be humoured or that everything should be analogue instead of digital but, overall, a balance can be struck in the interests of mental health and general quality of life.
I’d rather be with my partner “IRL” than look at her face on Zoom. I’d rather write notes with a pencil on paper than in an app. And I’d rather, for now, softly drop the needle into a shiny black groove instead of jab dumbly at yet another screen while wondering if I’m really hearing the proper version or if the streaming provider is punishing the artist I’m currently trying to admire, while simultaneously cursing the range of bluetooth. I mean, yawn.
I may of course feel differently about this some day. Perhaps when I next move to a different apartment.
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Minimalism
Correct!
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Minimalism 101
This Thursday evening, at 7pm, I’ll be teaching a class in minimalism (or ‘living with less’) at Monastiraki in Montreal.
The event is part of Monastiraki’s “School PWYC” series in which people teach classes in whatever they’re enthusiastic about.
This class will explore the idea of living with very few material possessions. We’ll look at the reasons we might want to do this: to save money, to save the planet, to save our souls. We’ll discuss some hints and tips on how to live minimally, how to benefit from a minimalist hobby, and how to appreciate the bare necessities. We’ll celebrate some of the heroes of minimalism, from 19th-Century rebel printer William Morris to future-facing digital minimalists.
I also plan to sing The Galaxy Song and Bear Necessities with ukulele accompaniment. This is a first for me so come along and witness history being made.
Here’s the event page at Ye Olde Book of Faces.
I daresay I’ll have some copies of New Escapologist to sell, and I’ll be happy to hang out and chat after the event too. Come along if you’re in the area!
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Can’t get enough minimalism
A few people emailed us recently to declare a new-found enthusiasm for minimalism. Believe me when I say that if these particular individuals are excited about minimalism now, there’s hope for the whole world yet.
There often comes a point when a fringe activity becomes adopted by the mainstream; a point when a living practice is no longer seen as eccentric. Recycling is a good example. In the 80s, my family seemed fairly alone in separating our garbage into plastic, paper, glass, and organic waste. We weren’t exactly hippies, which suggests the tipping point was already on the horizon, but our activity was certainly seen as odd by our friends and neighbours. In the 90s, recycling became seen as a responsibility, but it was still fashionable to shirk it. Today, the infrastructure to support recycling is convenient and ubiquitous, and recycling has become a matter of civic pride. What do you mean you don’t recycle?
I think minimalism (or ‘Reduction’ if you remember the most rejected of ‘The Three Rs’) is in a similar place to where recycling was in the 90s: people are becoming aware of the advantages, to stop reacting so violently to the suggestion that they voluntarily curb their consumer privileges, and to appreciate the minimalist aesthetic. Tablet computing is already encouraging a post-materialist attitude in some areas of consumption, and cloud computing promotes a certain distance between you and your stuff.
I think we’re on the brink of a third wave in terms of our attitudes to stuff. The new cycle will concern itself with empty space and quietness as the new luxury goods. Why a third wave? Peak Oil: the idea that we’ve already reached the point in time when the global production of oil reached its maximum rate, after which total global production gradually declines. We have to get used to not being able to buy cheap, disposable, largely-plastic products. We have to get used to inaccessibility due to products not being so readily and cheaply shipped.
Technology will partway solve the problem. Oil can be replaced by renewable energy resources. But to really solve the problem, we have to adjust to a new relationship between humans and stuff. It’s not a greenie fantasy anymore, but a cold necessity. Out goes the cheap and disposable, in comes the expensive and durable. Out goes lots of pointless stuff, in comes maximum utility and beauty. Out goes the idea that high-tech will save everything, in comes the balance of Brave New and Brave Old Worlds.
Space and quiet will be the new luxury goods. You’ll see. Buy shares in the quiet industries.
Criticisms of minimalism
We often talk about minimalism at New Escapologist and our interest is three-fold:
– Environmental: by reducing your consumer habits, you have less impact on the natural environment.
– Financial: by consuming less, you don’t need to spend as much money. Consequentially you don’t need to work so hard at earning money.
– Aesthetic: by reducing physical possessions, you can have a cleaner, more manageable living or working space.
In our time talking about minimalism, we’ve encountered a few criticisms. Some of them are fair, some understandably verge on the hostile (understandable because minimalism asks people to curb their consumer freedom), and others are from people who’ve completely missed the point. In this post, I respond to some of the most common or most remarkable.
I have a guest post at a blog called Skool of Life. My piece responds to six real and fairly common criticisms of minimalism.
The post has also resulted in some reasonable comments, to which I am able to respond. In particular, a bloke called Andy worries that defining one’s self as a minimalist is as bad as defining yourself as a materialist. It gave me the opportunity to say this:
1. The desire to define yourself one way or another is a piece of psychological baggage a minimalist might want to jettison. Let’s not worry about defining ourselves. Self-expression is a nonsense championed by Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays. It is little more than a marketing device that minimalists should proof themselves against.
2. Even if you choose to define yourself by owning a small number of things, your doing so is certainly better than defining yourself as someone who owns a large number of things. Your reluctance to consume will help the environment and help your wallet. So, while I’d advise against defining yourself in this way, it is still outwardly and empirically better than defining yourself as a materialist.
Enjoy the post! Please Tweet the link around if you can.
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On resistance, minimalism, workplace tedium and cottage industry
The only real difference between an Escapologist and someone who simply hates their job is that the Escapologist has begun to take deliberate measures toward actually changing things. I think most people who hate their job don’t realise that escape is an option.
From an arrogant interview I did for Andrew Williams at his new blog, Rainy Day Wonder.
Issue 20
In Issue 20 — Reduce and Resist! — we return to the Escapologist’s all-important topic of Minimalism. That is, of living with less. The idea is to escape the cumbersomeness of possessions, that mass of material things that would conspire to slow you down and to keep you, unnecessarily, in one place. Better, we say, to be mobile, fleet-of-foot, ready to skedaddle when you feel like it. When you have few needs, you have the great power to say, like Bartleby, “I’d rather not,” and to walk away.
Minimalism comes with the happy and subversive hope that maybe, if all people needed less, world problems would be easier to solve and we wouldn’t need to hollow out our planet or to forever participate in America’s stupid oil wars. Among other things, we’ll review J. B. MacKinnon’s _The Day the World Stops Shopping_ and ask if (or rather how) consumerism can be escaped for good.
Order today to receive your copy promptly in December 2026.
Landfill
apart from the fear that I’ll one day have a use for the thing I’m binning, the thought of anything going into landfill weighs heavily on my soul.
Adrian “Urinal” Chiles writes amusingly about decluttering today.
Don’t worry too much about the landfill thing, Adrian. Do your best to intercept the passage to landfill but remember that (a) all things are destined for landfill except for those that remain aboveground when the asteroid hits, and (b) everything is already landfill.
“Waste” happens not at the end of a manufactured thing’s life, in landfill, but at the start of its life when raw materials are extracted from the Earth.
Nobody seems to get this. It is my contribution to the eco/bins/minimalism conversation.
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Letter to the Editor: You Didn’t Make the Cut
To send a letter to the editor, simply write in. You’ll get a reply and we’ll anonymise any blogged version.
Joshua from The Minimalists writes:
Howdy, Joshua from The Minimalists here. You didn’t make the cut.
A couple years ago, I made a quiet decision: I removed more than 100,000 inactive subscribers from The Simple Newsletter to keep it affordable, intentional, and clutter-free.
You’re reading this email because you were one of those people.
Since then, I’ve completely rebuilt the newsletter from the ground up. It’s still free — but now it’s simpler, more thoughtful, and far more useful.
So I want to welcome you back.
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Dear Joshua. How fucking dare you?
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Get all the minimalism you’ll ever need in the pithy pages of Escape Everything! instead. Or indeed our newsletter, for which, you’ll be happy to know, you made the cut.
Hark, a Bum
I’m totally useless and a drain on society fulfilling no beneficial function whatsoever. I’ll be 50 in one year. I have nothing to show for myself; no addictions, no high blood pressure, no ulcers, no cholesterol problems; no health problems physical or mental other than the occasional guilt over failing to be a great American entrepreneur.
Thus wrote columnist Tom Chartier in “I am a Bum” in 2004. Let’s skip over the obvious smug remark that maybe Tom shouldn’t have anchored his life goals in Conservative Libertarianism. Come over to the light side, Tom. We have fun here.
But, wait, it looks like he comes to that conclusion himself:
I’m a house husband [now]. My job is to hang out with my son. Oh sure, this means I won’t get the penthouse suite, a company limo and will never get to sit with Wayne Gretzky in his luxury box at the Staples Center but I don’t really care. I will also never get to make underlings squirm in terror at the thought of being told their services will no longer be required, but “say hello to the wife and kids and don’t forget the fruit basket on your way out.” Oh sure, it’s a sacrifice but I am willing to make it. Oddly enough, unlike most of the big Kahunas out there standing center-ring running the show, these things don’t give me any satisfaction. I don’t even enjoy humiliating people, ruining lives or squashing bugs. So I guess there’s no point in me running for office but…I don’t care!
Now you’re getting it, Tom.
Chartier eventually escaped to Grand Cayman in the Caribbean where, ironically enough, he found his version of:
the American dream: No job. No taxes. No winters. No smog. No commute. No military. No Wal-Marts. No terrorists. No crime. No Piggly-Wigglys. No war mongers. No Americans. Well, er, there are a few of us here but we’re in the minority. … we’ve all fled something or another for a better life. I certainly have.
A couple of months after posting the above, Chartier claimed that his declaration of bummery has touched a nerve, that “many readers out there seem to be inspired by my total lack of success. Cries for help have poured in from across the land.”
Why, he’s just like me.
And so, in a step-by-step guide to being a bum, which is actually rather wise and very funny, he ends up advocating for minimalism, downsizing, going car-free, contemplation, choosing the right location instead of the default one, binning off the idea of career, and generally taking it easy.
He concludes:
The trick to being a bum is all mental. It’s all up to you to identify what is really important in your life and what is extraneous balderdash.
Then, and only then, you must have the courage and commitment to flush the useless turd blossoms of your life down the swirly bowl and take the plunge. Go West, Middle Aged Man! Go West and fail! Or go East if that works.
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New Escapologist Issue 18 is shipping now. We also have a launch event in Glasgow on 19th November. Come along if you’re nearby!
