Joshua Becker is half of the team behind becomingminimalist.com. He also wrote Simplify and Clutterfree with Kids, which I’ve read, as well as The More of Less.
In The Minimalist Home: A Room-by-Room Guide to a Decluttered, Refocused Life, Becker’s message is that by removing things that distract us from what we truly love, we can better focus on living meaningfully. He guides the reader through each room, providing practical tips and checklists.
“My definition of minimalism is ‘the intentional promotion of things we most value and the removal of anything that distracts us from them.’ As I sometimes like to say, minimizing is actually optimizing—reducing the number of your possessions until you get to the best possible level for you and your family.”
First, Becker states, is to set goals for your home; then set goals for your life. The book seems to be a guide for our homes, but is truly also about what we can accomplish with our life. Minimalism is not the end goal, but a path toward a life of passion and purpose to pursue the things that matter most.
“Minimizing forces questions of values, meaning, and mission in life. Some initial de-owning and de-cluttering decisions are easy to make, but before long we realize that we’re not sure what we want to keep until we know what we want to be doing with our time.”
For each object, we should ask “do I need this? Does this align with my purposes?” We have to overcome the endowment effect: just because we own it doesn’t mean it’s important! It’s fairly easy to just let it stay because it’s already there. We have to deliberately move it if it’s not needed or adding value, which can be difficult.
THE CLOSET (as an example)
Becker discusses how fashion trends come and go, but we each tend to have those few outfits we always wear. What if we cleaned out everything but those? Getting dressed would be a relief, not having to sift through so many options. He encourages us to be comfortable with our own iconic style.
I’m trying this and so far, I agree that it’s a huge relief to not see so much visual clutter. I feel most comfortable in jeans and a tshirt. If I need to look nicer, I have a few slacks and tops or dresses I like. The rest is either from my office days or the wrong size.
VALUES
“We, as a society, waste so much time and energy and money accumulating material possessions that we don’t even realize how much good we could accomplish if we freed up those resources for better things. With our homes minimized, our lives are packed with potential to a far greater degree than we could ever predict.”
I especially love how Becker relates each project to a larger strength, like family time (living room), cleanliness (kitchen), gratitude (play room), living with intentionality, etc. He is not promoting sparseness at all. We should keep whatever we need because those items represent the crux of our life.
“If you’re monitoring your weight on a scale or taking vitamin supplements kept in your bathroom, you’re pursuing the value of health. If you’re storing medical supplies that you can grab when a child wakes up sick in the night, you’re prepared to bring relief. If you’re bathing an infant, or perhaps a disabled spouse or elderly parent, you’re giving comfort while serving a basic human need. If you’re teaching and modeling a simple approach to health and beauty for your kids, you’re helping to start them out well in life. If you’re going through the routine of washing your family’s clothes week in and week out, they may not thank you but they owe you. Let me say it: thank you for caring and thank you for making the most of these spaces in your house by keeping them tidy and uncluttered.”
Inspired, I sat down one Sunday with more scrapbooks than I knew we had. I started with the ones I made after high school or college trips. So many of my photos were of landscapes, with the mountain in Wales indistinguishable from the mountain in Israel. I kept some pictures of people, taking them out of the album and putting them in an envelope, and let the others go. Many of our very old family albums had one or two pictures on each page, so that was easy to compress with my envelope technique. What began as a stack about 4 feet high ended up the size of one shoebox.
“Most of our stuff we could get along just fine without if we had to. Even the sorts of things we often put in storage—collections, keepsakes, and mementos—aren’t terribly important when weighed against relationships and intangibles such as faith, hope, and love. We don’t need a catastrophe to prove this to us. We can give ourselves that same freedom by eliminating the excess from our homes—all the way to the back wall of our storage space. And then we can use that freedom to cultivate things that really are worth giving our lives to.”
“In a society that consistently paints more and more accumulation as the basis for happiness, owning less requires intentionality, courage, and perseverance. You have to overcome your own inertia, make challenging choices, and establish new habits to minimize and stay minimized.”
“Becoming minimalist modeled for my children the beliefs that personal belongings are not the key to happiness, that security is found in character, and that the pursuit of happiness runs on a different road than the pursuit of possessions.”
I hope I’m showing SG the same beliefs.
HOBBIES
It can be possible to spend more time handling our stuff than actually working on our hobby! For many reasons, I have not been creating art lately. I realized that the room is so cluttered that it does not actually inspire me to get to work. Most of the time, I ignore the mess. I got to work on that, shelving paints and tools so I know where things belong. There is now at least space to work on projects.
There are anecdotes between book chapters by fans of minimalism who write about how this way of living has brought about unforeseen benefits. One person started spending more effort on interpersonal relationships; one expanded her creativity. The benefits of moving beyond “stuff” and focusing on what we could do with our time is very motivating.
One of my favorite sections is about how to get children to help with decluttering their rooms and toys. Becker also has a guide for how long to keep paper records and how to move through some of the emotion of going through sentimental items. Y
Becker closes the book with a list of how to Maximize the Rest of Your Life. “See your Potential,” “Allocate Resources,” “Look for Greater Purpose,” and “Get Moving” are some of his steps here.
