On the importance of minimalism
This is an entry from my journal.
Minimalism seeks to approximate frugality in the face of abundance. It works with the understanding that the human condition is optimised for conditions of scarcity and is geared for a life of incessant struggle. Where there is plenty, where there is no attendant incentive to be sharp and alert, the likelihood of moral degeneracy is high.
Morality pertains to the features of a person’s behavioural patterns. It couches them in terms of normative outcomes, else standards that are considered and are known to be benign for the individual and for people at-large. In its most basic conception, morality is the codification of the lifestyle that is frugal and rigorous.
That is so due to the formation of prescriptions on what to do, what to avoid, and what to maintain as an attitude. In their essence, those are rules for how to live well.
Morality is thus not exclusive to religiosity. Religion is an effective tool for instilling morality. It is central to social reproduction: to a society that perpetuates itself in both biological and cultural terms. But religiosity is not an irreducible part of being moral and, indeed, religion can be corrupted when it becomes a business, a means of tribalism that is detached from the moral imperatives that the society has in common, a mere instrument in the hands of imperialism, and so on.
What must always be there is the spirit of restraint, of not yielding to the plenty when they are available, and of remaining focused on the longer-term demands of living.
This we all know without reference to some holy book or school of philosophy. We experience it every day in the modern world. Some examples:
- You can buy chocolate right now. Not just one, but as much as your budget can afford. There is more variety of sweet than you can eat on a single sitting. And the entirety of it is available on demand. Yield to it and you suffer. Not only will it bring disease, it will also make you sluggish. Sluggishness shall cloud your judgement. Your future choices will thus lack attentiveness to longer-term downsides. The ability to determine what is beneficial to you will be degraded. Which in turn will condition yourself to yet more mistakes that harm you. There is no friction, no difficulty in you getting the sugar, so no struggle, no sharpness, no alertness. It is a vicious cycle.
- You join social media, including those you think are more ethical due to their permissive copyright license or terms of service. They are equally bad for your mental health because they expose you to the abundance of information. Your sense of space and time is skewed until it is completely messed up. Events that are distant feel proximate. Dangers that are remote appear imminent. Yielding to the abundance of this kind of information will once again cloud your judgement, with all the disastrous consequences that always—always!—follow. Same idea for emotions that are decoupled from the friction of human interaction: you get oodles of them and, again, there is no effort involved, until the point where you are not really interested or inspired by them.
- You set up your computing environment to notify you about things that are happening. There are bells and whistles everywhere. Each part of the interface shouts for attention. In that environment there is an abundance of stimuli, without even accounting for the contents of what you are exposed to, which will further compound the problem. Yielding to this kind of plenty shall inevitably affect your attention span. You will lack focus, you will not be able to concentrate, you will feel disempowered and eventually jaded.
These are only a few of the many realities of modern life. The common in their multitude is the reduction in friction. They make it very easy to acquire that which is otherwise desirable. Food, friendship, knowledge are all important to us. Though they are benign only inasmuch as they are relatively difficult to get. They lead to decadence as soon as the challenge is removed.
This is true even for trivial things. Think of how easy it is to drink a fresh juice that consists of an apple, an orange, and a carrot. Try eating those instead and you will notice that the task is much more demanding. That extra difficulty is exactly what you need to not overdo the consumption. Chew on a raw carrot and tell me if you can have many of those. Then have a carrot juice and notice how many you just consumed. When it is trivially easy to get the juice, you can drink the equivalent of many fruits/vegetables, far more than what you would have eaten. Chewing, then, is the friction you want in your life so that it keeps you in check, notwithstanding other benefits it has. Generalise those insights for everything and you already know how dieting in a spirit of frictionlessness is deleterious.
It extends beyond goods that can be purchased or items that are anyhow at your disposal. It covers expectations as well, for they too engender behaviour that is akin to the aforementioned. The expectation of ample choice, the sense of entitlement, shall already make you sloppy or condition you to pursue ends that will lead to that eventuality.
Friction forces you to focus. Scarcity keeps you honest with yourself and true to the boundaries of your abilities. It continues to bring to the centre of your conscience the moment of crisis (“crisis” is the Greek word for “judgement”). You have to judge how to proceed, to reason about the available options and make an educated guess of what will be beneficial to you long-term.
It necessarily is about the longer-term because you are readily aware of the fact that you will be living with the consequences of your actions. Those who are decoupled from the results of their deeds are dealing with the same problems as those who do not have enough friction in their life. Indeed, consequences are “friction” in this regard: they force you to think, they remind you of the limits.
A moral life, the actual living and embodiment of it, not virtue signalling, is what maintains vitality. Think of what happens if you are lazy: you are not trying to make things happen to the best of your ability, so your brain is not firing on all cylinders, which means that your body is not sufficiently active, your attention is not channelled anywhere in particular, your energy dissipates, your mind becomes blurry… All result in an experience that is in rapid decline.
Same idea for every pattern of behaviour that is not consistent with the rigours of struggle: it kills you before your time, it kills you even if it keeps your body around by snuffing out that which is vital in you.
Minimalism is not relevant in a life where scarcity is its defining feature. People cannot overdo it willy-nilly even if they would otherwise be inclined thus. But in a world that offers you everything in spades, minimalism is how you begin to preserve your vitality.