70 THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY3, 2020
Beneath the vision of “less” as a life style lies a path to something more profound.
BOOKS
SIMPLE PLANS
The pitfalls and possibilities of the new minimalism.BY JIATOLENTINO
ILLUSTRATION BY IGOR BASTIDAS
T
he new literature of minimalism is
full of stressful advice. Pack up all
your possessions, unpack things only as
needed, give away everything that’s still
packed after a month. Or wake up early,
pick up every item you own, and con-
sider whether or not it sparks joy. See
if you can wear just thirty-three items
of clothing for three months. Know that
it’s possible to live abundantly with only
a hundred possessions. Don’t organize—
purge. Digitize your photos. Get rid of
the things you bought to impress peo-
ple. Downsize your apartment. Think
constantly about what will enable you
to live the best life possible. Never buy
anything on sale.
Recently, I spent a few months ab-
sorbing the new minimalist gospel, be-
ginning with Marie Kondo, the celeb-
rity decluttering guru, whose book “The
Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up”
has sold more than ten million copies,
and whose stance can seem twee but is
rooted in Shinto tradition: having fewer
possessions allows us to care for those
possessions as if they had souls. I also
turned to Joshua Fields Millburn and
Ryan Nicodemus, who call themselves
the Minimalists and, under that name,
run a blog, publish books, and host a
podcast that is downloaded as many as
three million times a month. I read the
blog Be More with Less, which is writ-ten by Courtney Carver, who came to
minimalism after being given a diagno-
sis of multiple sclerosis and views the
practice as a pathway to love and self-
care. Also on my syllabus were the books
“Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit
of Less,” by Greg McKeown, for whom
minimalism is a habit of highly effective
people; “The More of Less: Finding the
Life You Want Under Everything You
Own,” by Joshua Becker, a former pas-
tor who wants his readers to free up their
time and money for charitable causes;
and “Goodbye, Things: The New Japa-
nese Minimalism,” by Fumio Sasaki, who
writes with winning self-deprecation,
admitting that his simple life style might
make him seem like a loser.
As I waded through this course of
study, I felt like a dirty sponge being ir-
radiated in the microwave: I was trapped,
unpleasantly, but a cleansing fire was
beginning to rage within. I Kondoed
my sock drawer, tenderly unravelling
lumpy balls of wool and cotton and lay-
ing each pair flat. I made daily pilgrim-
ages to Goodwill. When I went home
to Texas for the holidays, I entered my
parents’ apartment as a whirling dervish
of minimalist self-satisfaction, hector-
ing them to toss out their kitchen doo-
dads and excess Tupperware. Within
hours of arrival, I had filled six large
trash bags with clothes to donate. “See?!”
I howled, irritating myself and every-
one around me. “You get rid of the things
you don’t need so that you can focus on
the things you do!”
I sounded, I imagine, like many of
the converts to what might be consid-
ered the latest wave in an intermittent
American impulse. In 1977, the social sci-
entists Duane Elgin and Arnold Mitch-
ell observed that, for several years, “the
popular press has paid occasional atten-
tion to stories of people returning to the
simple life.” Elgin and Mitchell believed
that this smattering of articles reflected
a social movement that could bring about
a “major transformation of traditional
American values.” They called the move-
ment “voluntary simplicity,” and saw it
as a potential solution not only to “grow-
ing social malaise” but also to ecological
destruction and the “unmanageable scale
and complexity of institutions.” They be-
lieved that a few million people were
practicing full voluntary simplicity, and
that as much as half the U.S. population