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- Author: Kyle Chayka
- Full Title: The Longing for Less
- Category: #books
- Dissatisfaction with materialism and the usual rewards of society is not new, and by looking at how that dissatisfaction has cycled through previous centuries, how artists and writers and philosophers have already contended with it, I could find what was truly worth keeping. Swerving between austerity and extravagance is stressful; finding the source of our material anxiety might make it more manageable. I wanted to uncover a minimalism of ideas rather than things, not obsess over possessions or the lack thereof but challenge our day-to-day experience of being in the world.
- The longing for less is neither an illness nor a cure. Minimalism is just one way of thinking about what makes a good life, though it’s a strategy that’s particularly relevant when confronting the superhuman scale and pace of our time.
- The minimalist is ultimately a pragmatist who has to reconcile the desire for a better, cleaner world with the limits of what one person can influence. It’s often an internal, individualized process rather than an external one: Your bedroom might be cleaner, but the world stays bad.
- Minimalism is thus a kind of last resort. When we can’t control our material security or life path, the only possibility left is to lower our expectations to the point where they’re easier to achieve, which could mean living in a train car, or a camper van.
- In the same way, we might be able to hold the iPhone in our hands, but we should also be aware that the network of its consequences is vast: server farms absorbing massive amounts of electricity, Chinese factories where workers die by suicide, devastated mud pit mines that produce tin. It’s easy to feel like a minimalist when you can order food, summon a car, or rent a room using a single brick of steel and silicon. But in reality it’s the opposite. We’re taking advantage of a maximalist assemblage. Just because something looks simple doesn’t mean it is; the aesthetics of simplicity cloak artifice or even unsustainable excess.
- “The desert was spare, as usual, but very green and beautiful. I realized that the land and presumably the rabbits, quail, lizards, and bugs didn’t know that this was beautiful,” he wrote. “The observation is only ours, the same as the lizard’s opinion of the bug. The observation has no relevance, no validity, no objectivity, and so the land was not beautiful—who’s to say. It simply exists.” This is Minimalism’s most powerful and frightening insight. It has nothing to do with the aesthetic cues associated with lowercase-m minimalism, the consumer products, interior decoration, the curated items of clothing. Minimalism doesn’t need to look good. It tries to make us understand that the sense of artistic beauty humanity has built up over millennia—the varieties of colors, stories recounted, and bodies represented—is also an artificial creation, not as inevitable as we think it is. Minimalism requires a new definition of beauty, one that centers on the fundamental miracle of our moment-to-moment encounter with reality, our sense of being itself. Any attempt at elegance is extraneous. Judd left another note in his diary that winter: “A definition of art finally occurred to me. Art is everything at once.”