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.
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New Escapologist newsletter #2
Hello Readers,
Welcome to our second New Escapologist email newsletter. Among other things, we’d like to tell you about our Christmas and New Year special offer, and to solicit your own escape stories.
1. Yuletide and New Year offer
Get Issues One and Three together for just £7 (€8.40 / $11.16). This is a great opportunity for New Escapologist blog readers who’ve missed out on the printed editions so far. This is almost certainly the cheapest New Escapologist will ever be, so cash in quickly if you’re interested. Offer runs until the end of December at.
2. Survey results
Thanks to everyone who took part in our recent survey. 73 people have completed the survey to date: far more than we had anticipated. Feedback was largely positive, but we’ve got a feel for the areas in which you’d like to see changes and the direction in which we should now move. A summary of the results can be found at the blog.
3. Issue Five
Our fifth print edition is coming along nicely. Coming in January 2011, the Bohemia-issue will celebrate the artists and eccentrics of history who have chosen to live as Bohemians, plus lots of practical articles on how to live the Bohemian life. Featuring Jacob Lund Fisker (of Early Retirement Extreme), beards, entropy, rambling, flâneurism, bedsits, Quentin Crisp, garrets, Buddhism, Bohemian neighbourhoods, digital work ethics, Alexander Trocchi, Erik Satie, Emperor Norton, Bohemian dating, brewing your own beer, and more.
Pre-order Issue Five at the shop.
4. Expozine 2010
We had a great time at Montreal’s Expozine 2010. I’ve never seen so many dealers and consumers of independent media under one roof. I’m told it is the biggest event of its type in North America. Almost everyone to whom we spoke was enthusiastic about indie media. A journalist called Jeremiah had a very positive outlook, explaining that many of the big, exciting cultural movements — the Surrealists, the Beat poets, John Lennon, the Merry Pranksters, movements in jazz — began as single events such as this one. These happenings become legend. A nice outlook, I thought.
You can read about our Expozine experience in our blog report.
5. New Stockists
Thanks to Expozine, we have three new stockists in Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly Bookstore (211 Rue Bernard); the Concordia Cooperative Bookstore (2150 Bishop)); and Galerie Monastiraki (5478 St-Laurent).
The GmbH bookstore in Glasgow also recently took some of our stock. Stockists in other towns coming soon.
6. Wanted: escapee case studies
Have you escaped? Do you have particular ideas on how you might escape a tedious desk job? We’d love you to write about it at our blog. Simply reply to this email if you’d like to get involved. The best stories will get a free copy of New Escapologist.
7. Escapology Microblog
Rather embarrassingly, we’ve opened a Twitter account.
If you hate Twitter, you can also enjoy our lengthier blog entries by subscribing to our RSS feed.
8. An Escapologist’s Manifesto
A useful blog entry from a couple of weeks ago reproduced the mini-manifesto we published in Issue One. The feedback in the comments thread was great. If you’d like to offer an opinion on our manifesto and contribute to the interesting conversation, you can still join in.
Thanks again for reading.
Until next time,
Robert Wringham
Editor, New Escapologist
www.newescapologist.co.uk
An Escapologist’s Diary. Part 20.
I’m feeling pretty sickly today after some home-baked pumpkin seeds proved impossible to digest.
Collapsed on the Chaise, reading Catch 22 and watching the snow fall outside, I tried to recall the last time I was properly ill. Aside from a couple of self-induced hangovers, I’ve managed to avoid all malaise for over a year.
But how can this possibly be? I’d be frequently bed-ridden with fevers and tummy bugs when I had a job. Ah! When I had a job.
That’s the answer, obviously. Work is bad for your health. The stress, the misery, the forced early rises, the bad canteen food and the fact that you have to share an office and a morning bus with so many sneezing, sniffling, moaning, grey-faced lottery players must have something to do with it.
Lordy. It’s at times like this (and most other times, come to think of it) that I’m really glad to be a skiver.
Librairie Drawn & Quarterly
The latest Montreal stockist of New Escapologist is the prestigious Librairie Drawn & Quarterly, the only brick-and-mortar outlet dedicated to the famous Drawn & Quarterly publishing label.
This is quite a coup for us, so thanks to Julia for sorting out the consignment for us.
Reader survey results!
We recently opened a reader survey. We’ve received 71 responses so far, which I think is pretty good. The survey can still be completed here.
This post will undoubtedly be a little dry, but since the results are collectively yours, I’d like to share them with you and offer a few musings:
Most readers heard about New Escapologist via The Idler or Early Retirement Extreme. Looks like a good reference is significantly more valuable than dicking around with Twitter or Facebook.
Most readers rate the printed magazine ‘Good’ (4/5) or ‘Brilliant’ (5/5), which is quite a complement. The main suggestions for improvement were ‘more articles about practicalities’ and ‘more esoteric, historical or philosophical pieces’, with very few people lusting after fiction or poetry. This suggests we’re largely doing the right thing and you can expect more of the same in future issues.
Most readers rate the blog as ‘Good’ (4/5). Most (30) advise we change nothing about the blog, but significant minorities want longer (10) and more frequent entries (14). Four people suggested we ‘kill the blog’, which is fair enough.
For the advanced minimalist: an interview with Leo Babauta
Leo Babauta is the founder of the Zen Habits website and books and (more pertinently to this post) the website, Mnmlist. His sites have thousands of readers. I caught up with Leo by email and asked him a few questions for the advanced minimalist:
Q: After minimalism, do you find yourself treasuring the things still in your possession or do they weigh upon you as stubborn things that wouldn’t wash away?
Leo: I don’t think about them much. The things in my possessions are just things. They are there because I need them, not because I love them. I have a T-shirt because otherwise I’d be cold, not because it’s beautiful and gives me joy. Going outside and playing with my kids gives me joy. Minimalism is a way for me to let go of thinking about things so much.
Q: Do you feel that digital entities (mp3s, eBooks etc) constitute clutter in the same way that physical objects do? Should we try to save virtual real estate as well as physical space?
Leo: A few years ago I moved from organizing all my files into folders, to forgetting about them and using search to find what I need — this includes mp3s, documents, emails. Search eliminates the need to organize, though you can purge if you’re using up too much space.
More important than worrying about digital files is being aware of digital buying. If you buy things mindlessly because it’s easy — apps, music, movies, ebooks — that’s mindless consumerism. That’s something you should become aware of.
Q: I converted to minimalism as a personal preference but I find myself thinking more and more about the green benefits of reduction. How relevant is the environmental issue to you?
Leo: It’s at the heart of minimalism. Environmental problems have become so overpowering because we have let corporate consumerism become more important than how we treat each other, how we live with nature … than living in general. Minimalism is striking back against that. When you let go of corporate consumerism, you let go of the need to overconsume, to buy horrible amounts of things and waste so many natural resources.
Concordia Co-op Bookstore
We’re proud to announce the Concordia Community Solidarity Co-op Bookstore as the latest stockist of New Escapologist. Thanks to Larissa and Lizy for welcoming us.
Galerie Monastiraki
Our stint at Expozine found us made useful local friends including a few retailers.
Galerie Monastiraki in Montreal’s Bohemian and artist-friendly Mile End is the newest stockist of New Escapologist.
Special thanks to Billy for accommodating us.
Defining the Bohemian
The next issue of New Escapologist is dedicated to Bohemia. Since there’s a bit of consternation about what we really mean by ‘Bohemia’, let’s try and nail the thing:
Bohemia is a state of mind: a threadbare but vibrant Utopia in which one can prioritise the tenets of creativity, love, merriment, experimentation and arousal of the senses. The people who believe in Bohemia and practice Bohemianism are called Bohemians.
What often comes to mind is the archetypal Bohemian of history: the Nineteenth-Century starving artist, living in a drafty Parisian garret, prone to flights of Romantic fancy and fits of over-indulgence. This is a fair image but these attributes are symbolic of the above-mentioned tenets and Bohemians can be found throughout the Twentieth Cenury (the Surrealists, the Dadaists, the Hippies, Jack Kerouac, the Beat Generation William S. Burroughs, George Orwell in Paris and London and possibly the Punks) and surely in the present day.
An Escapologist’s Diary. Part 19.
This weekend, Samara and I attended the Expozine small press fair in Montreal. Sam was selling her colouring book, Shanti’s Book of Panties and together we sold copies of New Escapologist Issues One, Three and Four.
It was a brilliant experience. I’ve never seen so many dealers and consumers of independent media under one roof. I’m told it is the biggest event of its type in North America. Almost everyone to whome we spoke was enthusiastic about Expozine and indie media in general. A journalist called Jeremiah had a very positive outlook, explaining that many of the big, exciting cultural movements – the Surrealists, the Beat poets, John Lennon, the Merry Pranksters, movements in jazz – began as single events such as this one. These happenings become legend. A nice outlook, I thought.