Becoming a minimalist has often been touted as a positive thing, something to strive for in today’s world. There are many advantages of doing so which might be why it has caught on so quickly. Often, when people talk about becoming a minimalist they talk about doing so then travelling the world. The advantages could also be intangible in terms of greater understanding of yourself. I explain much of this and my take on minimalism and also my personal journey.
How’s it going everybody this is beat the bush it seems like becoming a minimalist it’s like a new trend out there today i’m gonna focus on the promises of becoming a minimalist what will you gain if you decide to go that route for me i am completely not a minimalist right now but i feel like i’m kind of heading there and i don’t know when it’s actually gonna stop
Every single week these days i seem to fill up my whole entire trash can and for the past month i’ve sold so much of my stuff i gained about $4,000 in cash you know you’re getting a lot more serious about it like i have because i now have a waste fund something mentally in my head that i’m willing to burn about a thousand to two thousand dollars worth of value i’m
Willing to toss this value in the trash can in an effort to get me there a little bit faster so this means if i have something that’s $5 in value or so and it takes a lot of work to list something and finally being able to sell it so sometimes it takes way too long or maybe people just don’t want it because i made an effort of listening it it’s just sitting there
And no one is willing to buy it so i’m like okay maybe it is where five dollars if i wait a whole year someone will buy it but then now i want to get rid of it right now so because i’m not really selling this thing i will never know the true value that i can actually get for this item so instead i’m gonna go okay i’m gonna throw it in the trashcan or i’m gonna
Donate it this is much faster i’m gonna trim down all the things i’ve listed for sale and if the price happens to be really low and i’ve noticed that maybe it stuck around for way too long well maybe this is something that people just don’t want at all so i’m gonna go and trim down maybe 10% of the stuff and then go okay you know what this stuff i’m not gonna sell
I’m just going to throw it in their trash can or donate and just right then and there i can go okay chop get rid of so it’s a more immediate thing i can do it much faster or else if you wait around too long it’s gonna take forever before you can actually get your way onto this minimalism thing people just wants to minimize they want to own very few items but what’s
The reason behind it there’s this marie kondo thing basically everything that you should spark joy or maybe it’s very useful i just went over the goodbye things book by fumio sasaki and this is a bit more extreme a level than the marie kondo thing his version however he’s basically cutting down to actual minimalism he has like a hundred two hundred items or so now
In these books they always try to take care to try to warn people to not look at this in terms of a competition don’t look at it like oh i’m gonna have less items than you and just because you have few items you shouldn’t be like trying to get other people to get as few items as you have and then tell them oh you know look what position you’re in just kind of like
A showing off type of thing this is more like a personal thing if you want to do it yourself do it for yourself only now before looking deep into what this whole trend is all about most people would just look at it on the surface and go oh minimalism oh you’re gonna have very few items okay yeah that’s interesting but why the promise surrounds a lot of different
Things one of them being that you can think more clearly it promises you a better life a happier life now one way to think about all this is that every single human being has a limited capacity to think about certain number of things every single day you can get fatigued if let’s say there’s something i don’t want around let’s say this mug okay every time i watch
The dishes i’m gonna come across this mug and it’s gonna cross my mind the act of this thought crossing my mind takes a non-0 time and if you have let’s say a thousand of these things crossing your mind every single day when you look at a bunch of clutter everywhere then all these tiny little thoughts it’s gonna add up more and more if those little thoughts are
Completely gone because it can very well be if you no longer own that item it’s very rare that you’re gonna go oh i remember that mug because most of time when you get rid of it you’re never gonna remember about it again when you have a whole bunch of other mugs already that you’re washing when you don’t waste these thoughts then you free up your mind it becomes
Kind of like a blank canvas you have cycles in your brain to think about other things the first benefit that you can have with minimizing of course is when you don’t have so many things that you do not use every single day you keep everything that you actually use all the things that just sits around if you do not have them they no longer depreciate under your
Hands some things to appreciate however most things depreciate all the way down to zero when you reduce the number of things that you have it makes things easier to clean so every single time that you have to do a cleaning cycle it’ll take less time and if you happen to not be cleaning because it’s so much work if you reduce a number of things suddenly you’re
Gonna find yourself cleaning again and you’re gonna always be in a much cleaner space because it takes almost no time to clean now when you minimize visual noises also reduce think of this as like when you’re in a bar and you’re trying to think about the solution of some math problem it becomes very difficult because people are talking maybe someone’s talking at
You already and you just cannot think this is the same thing with visual noise where you have a whole bunch of things maybe a bunch of stuffed animals like this set it’s too noisy for minimalist audio noise getting in your ear if this is keeping you from thinking clearly visual noise is also gonna keep you from thinking clearly as well so you know to me this is
Like pretty straightforward and very very reasonable now one of the benefits usually cited is that when you have less things you also need less space you think of this as renting space for those things if you have like let’s say this couch right i actually have to pay for the spot that this couch is sitting in how much am i paying every single month for this now you
Cannot realize how much savings that you have unless you actually move to a smaller spot because eventually you have less stuff so if you happen to have just a lot of empty space and you never actually move well you’re not going to be saving money in that case a lot of the times these minimalism videos talk about doing more important things in life in my video i
Talked about early retirement and like not getting in the commute not working to do more important things in life and people always ask what’s more important what’s so important about your life that you need to get rid of all this stuff minimize visual noise what are you gonna actually do what is it exactly in these books they talked about the more important things
As in building relationships with friends and fam sometimes they talk about spending more money on experiences right because experiences does not take up space this is arguable to me because you could actually have a lot of noise in terms of experiences maybe you’re doing every single new thing possible as a human being all these new things maybe you’re gonna go
Knit something maybe you’re gonna milk a cow or something just all these different little things that yes they are new experiences but do you necessarily want to do every single thing conceivable as a human being well i think might be the true benefit here is quite intangible you cannot actually put a price tag on this because i think that once you’re a minimalist
Once you have a lot more cleared off of your brain and you’re able to think more clearly possibly if you use this time properly and kind of meditate on things right then maybe you can use this time to generate more wealth maybe you can have a breakthrough maybe you can have a new perspective on life how much is that worth a new way to look at life in general this
Might transcend over actual monetary value because if you wake up the next morning or maybe you’re meditating and you’re just sitting in an empty living room with no couch air or something and then you know you come to this realization of life in general oh my gosh what am i doing why am i buying all this stuff what i have been doing my whole life has been wrong
All this time because you come to this new realization that material goods is not everything this i myself have struggled with because i still like material goods i still like things i still like like a brand new camera or like a brand new car so as you get closer to it i feel like you might kind of warm up to it more and more you might come to a realization so it
Probably depends on the person what you do with this minimization minimizing is a tool to help you as a person get to somewhere else you can definitely become a minimalist maybe you have 100 items at some point in your life and perhaps you might just actually squander this away you’re gonna have this very bearing lifestyle but then if you don’t do anything with it
It’s really up to you then it could also be considered that you’re wasting it because you actually did not come to a new realization but i feel like once you put yourself in that position it might be hard to actually avoid so where is the proof that minimization is actually the way it’s just my own gut feeling and i personally am slowly crawling there and then you
Might look at all the famous minimalist because they’re popping up left and right maybe due to the minimization that is the reason how they’re able to get more creative to create more that becomes a wealth driver for them you might go oh this might be a little weird because in an effort to become a minimalist maybe you have a new perspective on life and then maybe
Due to this you gain a lot more wealth and yet at that point even though you’re a minimalist you actually don’t need to buy all that much for yourself so you have more wealth and yet you don’t actually need it even though you’re able to obtain it later on when you minimize you start with a clean sheet of paper it allows you to focus on what’s important to you
Imagine this video is not even here the gadgets that you bought where you have to find a whole bunch of other accessories in order to go with the original thing that you bought imagine that not being there all of a sudden the work that you need to do this research that you have to do to buy those accessories is completely gone imagine you no longer want that voice
Controlled internet digital assistant that you want to buy all of a sudden you don’t have to go and research a whole bunch of different ones you know all that it’s off the table then you know you free up your mind to do other things i hope all these ideas spells out why you should actually consider minimalism you can kind of see that financial independence retire
Early being frugal being anti-consumerist and minimalism itself of course all these things they have a similar taste to all of this all of these generally get you to reduce your burn rate get you to consume less and allows you to have more time to yourself thanks for watching this video i hope this was some food for thought don’t forget to give me a like push
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Transcribed from video
Promises of Minimalism By BeatTheBush