The Longing for Less (Kyle Chayka) -- 4/5
The book is a deep dive on the core philosophies, history and rationale behind trends like Marie Kondo, Sweetgreen's design ethos, and activities over things. Kyle Chayka words it more eloquently (but with some unnecessarily big words)...
My goal with this book is to seek a bypass around the superficial minimalist style, the careful blankness of the cavalcade of design products. I want to find the fundamental, essential quality that imbues the Eames house with life: the appreciation of things for and in themselves, and the removal of barriers between the self and the world. Such is my working definition of a deeper minimalism.
Notes
Americans in particular are addicted to accumulating stuff.
In the twenty-first-century United States, most of us don’t need as much as we have. The average American household possesses over three hundred thousand items. Americans buy 40 percent of the world’s toys despite being home to 3 percent of the world’s children. We each purchase more than sixty new items of clothing a year, on average, only to throw out seventy pounds of textiles per person. The vast majority of Americans—around 80 percent—are in some kind of debt. We’re addicted to accumulation.
Minimalism is our answer to the physical and psychological excess
It’s defined by the sense that the surrounding civilization is excessive—physically or psychologically too much—and has thus lost some kind of original authenticity that must be regained. The material world holds less meaning in these moments, and so accumulating more loses its appeal in favor of giving things up and isolating yourself, whether literally—becoming a hermit or nomad—or through art. No single English-language word quite captures this persistent feeling of being overwhelmed and yet alienated, which is maybe why “minimalism” has become so widespread.
Chayka focuses on four qualities that form minimalism: reduction, emptiness, silence, shadow:
The first of these common qualities is reduction, the pursuit of simplicity through throwing things out and moving apart, favored by figures from the Stoic philosophers to today’s decluttering advocates.
The second is emptiness, the austere visual style of Philip Johnson’s American modernist architecture and Minimalist art like Donald Judd’s, which inspired the current minimalist decorating fads but also have more powerful ideas about the control of space. The third is silence, the desire to buffer our senses from the chaotic world but also the radical possibilities of sound that can be found in the works of composers like Erik Satie, John Cage, and the lesser-known Julius Eastman.
The final chapter is about what I call “shadow,” the acceptance of ambiguity and the randomness of life or fate that emerges from Buddhist philosophy and Japanese aesthetics, which Westerners have increasingly adopted over the past two centuries and which form the deepest root of the minimalist trend.
Minimalism draws its roots from the Stoics and Franciscan friars among others. The Franciscan friars in particular took minimalism of physical property to the 'minimum'
This slight materialist hypocrisy, Seneca was taken up by early Christians and posthumously converted from Paganism. He would not have been extreme enough for later saints, however. For Saint Francis of Assisi, who established the Franciscan order of friars in the thirteenth century, there was no such thing as too much austerity. He had his followers vow poverty and wear rough gray robes. His hagiographer Thomas of Celano recalled that Francis “detested those in the Order5 who dressed in three layers of clothing or who wore soft clothes without necessity.” Self-abnegation was next to godliness and materialism literally Satanic.
What the Stoics, Francis, and Thoreau have in common is a strategy of avoidance, especially in moments when society feels chaotic or catastrophic. It’s a coping mechanism for those who want to fix or improve the status quo instead of overturning it. Its orientation is toward survival. The minimalist is committed to the protective cultivation of the self in difficult situations—recall Sonrisa Andersen cleaning her room. Yet the withdrawal is paradoxical. 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.
Richard Gregg wrote a relevant critique of 'gadgeteering' in 1936. Most of the arguments relating to telephones and cars are only more incisive when thinking about the internet and social media.
In the 1920s, the American philosopher Richard Gregg traveled to India to study with Gandhi, then formulated a theory of nonviolent resistance that decades later inspired Martin Luther King Jr. Gregg followed that up with an essay in 1936 called “The Value of Voluntary Simplicity” in which he critiqued the “vast quantities of paper and ink8 devoted to advertisements” and the way that industrialized countries seemed to depend on an ever-increasing demand for material goods, which only new kinds of mass-manufacturing could satisfy. “We think that our machinery and technology will save us time and give us more leisure, but really they make life more crowded and hurried,” he wrote. “It is time to call a halt on endless gadgeteering.” Rather than smartphones, Gregg was critiquing telephones and Henry Ford’s motorcars. The greed of traders in the newly ascendant stock market had also helped cause the Great Depression. The solution to this hurried life was Gregg’s “voluntary simplicity”: a “singleness of purpose, sincerity and honesty within, as well as avoidance of exterior clutter, of many possessions irrelevant to the chief purpose of life.” Voluntary simplicity emphasized “psychic goods” instead of owning physical things: art appreciation, friendship, and love, for example. We had already achieved material abundance, Gregg thought, so why continue the race to accrue even more? Possessing so much stuff as a consequence of wealth causes nervous strain because we’re forced to make so many different decisions every day—a conclusion that now seems prophetic for the twenty-first century.
Chayka makes a good comparison between junk food and Marie Kondo: the value of cleaning up your room is in seeing how much stuff you have, just like eating healthy is mostly about seeing how unhealthy junk food is.
Kondo promises the illusion of choice. You decide what stays in your house but she tells you exactly how it should be folded, stored, and displayed—in other words, how you should relate to it. When you pull everything out of its nooks and crannies, you realize just how much stuff you own and how much of it you don’t really need. It’s like learning what actually goes into junk food: Being forced to think about what you include in your life is enough to instill the habit of cleanliness forever. Kondo boasts that none of her clients has ever relapsed. “A dramatic reorganization of the home causes correspondingly dramatic changes in lifestyle and perspective,” she writes.
Another analogy of Kondo to Freud is especially apt: ritually thanking each object allows one to get rid of physical and psychological burden
The confessional HGTV-reality-show format was Freudian: Kondo drew out repressed feelings in the form of hidden mountains of clothes, papers, and books. The excess stuff symbolized familial tension, a couple’s fight over dish washing, and a woman’s grief for her late husband. Under Kondo’s watchful eye, clients picked through the piles, handling each object and ejecting those that didn’t spark any joy after gently thanking them. As the objects disappear the psychological burden also dissipates: The clients are happy once more. “All this life that we lived and the dreams that he had, and now they’re in a pile on the floor,” the bereaved woman cried while sorting through her late husband’s possessions. But after the ritual: “I can’t believe there’s room on the carpet!” Finally, she could create her own craft studio. Feelings, encoded in things, are banished in favor of empty space.
The big downsides of minimalism are the loss of personality or quirkiness, the amount of money required to be simple, and the maximalist excess that goes into minimalist experiences.
But as Kondo conceives it, it’s also a one-size-fits-all process that has a way of homogenizing homes and erasing traces of personality or quirkiness,
In order to succeed, all of these types of places need to make multiple groups of people feel comfortable at the same time. Minimalism is a perfect fit because it allows for just enough character to make a space interesting but not too much.
The veneer of minimalist style becomes like an organic food label, expensive green juices, or complex skin treatments being sold as a “no-makeup” look. It’s another class-dependent way of feeling better about yourself by buying a product, as Spartan as the product might be. It takes a lot of money to look this simple.
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.