Choose Minimalism to Make Life Easier on Yourself
Making more time for what you value can have many benefits including an enhanced level of fulfillment.
--
Even living a minimalist life has become overcomplicated. There are many different interpretations — many of them not practical for the average person.
Back in 2005, Professor Kasser conducted a study on minimalism and its impact on wellbeing. He found that “despite age, gender, geography … voluntary simplifiers reported significantly higher levels of life satisfaction, more experiences of pleasant emotion and fewer experiences of unpleasant emotion.”
One publicized example of minimalism is podcast host and writer James Altucher. He is one of my favorite writers, although not everything he says is practical. James has practiced minimalism many times in his life and this is the most extreme example he wrote about:
“I have one bag of clothes, one backpack with a computer, iPad, and phone. I have zero other possessions. Today I have no address. At this exact moment I am sitting in a restaurant and there’s no place for me to go to lie down”
This is not practical minimalism advice for a lot of people.
You might have a family, a career you love, or parents you want to be close to. Living out of one backpack with no fixed address could be more like torture than a beneficial minimalist approach to life — let alone making life easier on yourself.
My experience has been different. In 2018 I wrote about the “The Power Of Only Doing One Thing” and to date, it’s one of my most shared articles. The basic idea I experimented with was to selectively go into each area of my life and choose one thing. This minimalist experiment seemed to strike a chord with people because it was simplistic in its approach and easy to test.
For me, living a minimalist life has been a journey into self-discipline and learning to say no to people politely (even to an event ticket and the opportunity to meet one of my biggest heroes).
The minimalist lifestyle has allowed me to find more time to write, work four days a week, make more than $25,000 a month (while investing that money and seeing the magic of…
