72 THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY3, 2020
writing tends to center on phenomena
that conjure aspiration, emptiness, and
emotional distance: as a journalist, he’s
covered luxury cryptocurrency, the blandly
appealing life-style magazine Kinfolk,
and the streetwear brand Supreme. “The
Longing for Less” revisits earlier essays
and reporting on the Minimalists, the
Japanese philosopher Shūzō Kuki, and
Marie Kondo.
His dual response to the all-white
apartment is one of the only moments
in “The Longing for Less” when Chayka
acknowledges his attraction to superfi-
cial minimalism, but that attraction pulses
throughout the book. The writing has a
careful tastefulness that occasionally con-
forms to what Chayka, in a different con-
text, calls the “house style of the non-
place and the generic city.” The table of
contents is presented as four pristine
boxes, with high-toned, one-word chap-
ter titles—“Reduction,” “Emptiness,” “Si-
lence,” “Shadow”—arranged in a perfect
grid. Each chapter is subdivided into
eight sections, and Chayka suggests that
“The Longing for Less” might be wan-
dered through in the manner of an art
exhibit, that the blank spaces between
contrasting examples will generate un-
expected lessons. (Chayka’s reporting on
Supreme, which was published by Racked,
was also organized by a gridded table of
contents, guiding readers to consider-
ations of “Hype,” “Japan,” and “Fandom,”
among other subjects.)
Nonfiction forms that rely on the
generative potential of white space, like
poetry and the lyric essay, require a dis-
tinct forcefulness of voice and vision to
succeed; in its absence, this kind of man-
nered subtlety can be frustrating. Most
of the sections in “The Longing for
Less” end on a glancing note of epiph-
any, such as “Simplicity doesn’t have to
be an end point—it can lead to new be-
ginnings,” which is the last line of a
paragraph two-thirds of the way through
the book.
In a way, Chayka’s book replicates the
conflict he’s attempting to uncover—be-
tween the security and cleanliness of a
frictionless affect and the necessity of
friction for uncovering truth. He does
have moments of productive discomfort:
outside the concert hall where John Cage
débuted “4'33",” he wanders for four and
a half minutes of silence in honor of
Cage’s blank composition, and finds him-
self disappointed by the mundane sounds
of leaf blowers and airplanes, before be-
coming unexpectedly attuned to the gen-
tle sound of a hidden stream. He goes
to the Guggenheim to hear Erik Satie’s
proto-minimalist composition “Vexa-
tions,” an experiment in extreme monot-
ony, and it proves intolerable, creating a
jarring awareness of the often inadequate
here and now. But Chayka best conveys
the unnerving existential confrontation
that minimalism can create in his cap-
sule biographies of figures such as Julius
Eastman, the composer who used min-
imalist structures as a means of assert-
ing personal dissonance. In the nine-
teen-eighties, Eastman began living, on
and off, in Tompkins Square Park; he
wrote music on the subway and gave his
compositions away in bars. Explaining
the titles of his pieces “Crazy Nigger”
and “Evil Nigger,” Eastman said, “What
I mean by niggers is that thing which is
fundamental, that person or thing that
attains to a ‘basicness,’ a ‘fundamental-
ness,’ and eschews that thing which is
superficial or, what can we say, elegant.”
True minimalism, Chayka insists, is
“not about consuming the right things
or throwing out the wrong; it’s about
challenging your deepest beliefs in an
attempt to engage with things as they
are, to not shy away from reality or its
lack of answers.” I suspect that some re-
cent converts to minimalism have al-
ready come to this conclusion. Under-
neath the vision of “less” as an optimized
life style lies the path to something
stranger and more profound: a mode of
living that strips away protective barri-
ers and heightens the miracle of human
presence, and the urgency, today, of what
that miracle entails.T
he self-help minimalists say that
keeping expenses low and purchases
to a minimum can help create a life that
is clear and streamlined. This practice
can also lead to the conclusion that there
is not only too much stuff in your apart-
ment but too much stuff in the world—
that there is, you might say, an epidemic
of overproduction. If you did say this,
you would be quoting Karl Marx, who
declared that this was the case in 1848,
when he and Friedrich Engels published
“The Communist Manifesto.” Com-
paring a “society that has conjured up
such gigantic means of production andof exchange” to “the sorcerer who is no
longer able to control the powers of the
nether world whom he has called up by
his spells,” they contended that there
was “too much means of subsistence,
too much industry, too much commerce.”
Hence, they suggested, the boom-and-
bust cycle of capitalism, which brings
the periodic “destruction of a mass of
productive forces”—as, perhaps, we
experienced in 2008, before the rise of
Kondo and company.
Today’s most popular minimalists
do not mention Marx. Sometimes they
address the importance of freeing one-
self from the dictates of the market. In
“Goodbye, Things,” Sasaki writes about
the importance of figuring out your
minimum required monthly income,
and encourages readers to consider the
environmental consequences of their
life styles. Millburn and Nicodemus
write about the joy that comes from
choosing to earn less money, even if
they avoid discussing the more com-
mon situation of having your wages kept
low against your will. But they also as-
sure their audience that “capitalism is
not broken”—we are. They insist that
there’s “nothing wrong with earning a
shedload of money—it’s just that the
money doesn’t matter if you’re not happy
with who you’ve become in the pro-
cess.” Even these sincere prophets of
anti-consumerism are hesitant to con-
clude that the excessive purchasing of
stuff may be a symptom of larger struc-
tural problems, or that a life built around
maximum accumulation may be not
only insufficiently conducive to happi-
ness but actually, morally bad.
The worst versions of life-style min-
imalism frame simplicity not as a wor-
thy end in itself but as an instrument—a
tool of self-improvement, or of high-
end consumption, or of self-improve-
ment through high-end consumption.
It is a vision shaped by the logic of the
market: the self is perpetually being im-
proved; its environment is ready for pub-
lic display and admiration; it methodi-
cally sheds all inefficiencies and flaws.
This vision also forgoes any recognition
that the kind of salvation so many peo-
ple are seeking can happen only at the
level of the system rather than at that
of the individual. (As Chayka puts it,
“Your bedroom might be cleaner, but
the world stays bad.”) The difference