Goodbye, Things: The New Japanese Minimalism Summary

Minimalism is having fewer possessions and being intentional with the items you have.  

Minimalism allows us to have freedom, satisfaction, and experiences we may not have had when we are buried under our belongings.

Minimalism isn't just about throwing away stuff we don't need, but a new way of living life, where we are more aligned with the present moment, not distracted by stuff around us.

Our old-fashioned brains are totally overwhelmed with the amount of information we consume and the things we need to care for. Humans weren’t meant to pay attention to so many things at once. Yet here we are doing it and wondering why we’re stressed, depressed, and can’t stay on top of all the things we need to do.

Since there are no “updates” available for our old hardware, we need to alter our environments so we can better perform.

While you may struggle at first, it gets easier when you practice discarding stuff.

Our things are like roommates, except we pay their rent. 

Think of departmental stores as your personal warehouses. There’s generally no need to have 40 rolls of paper towels, 25 spare lightbulbs, and 60 extra cans of food. It takes up precious space and ties your money up in something you may never use.

When you think about it, being a minimalist is the natural state of things. We come into this world with nothing and only start to amass objects during the course of our lives.

Then once we have all these objects they start weighing on us, caring for them takes up our time, storing them takes up space, thinking about them binds our attention.

During our lives, we always have brief times of some sort of minimalism, most often during holidays. When leaving for a trip with only one bag or entering a clean and tidy hotel room a feeling of freedom arises. The feeling of being free from things.

Everything we have now, from small objects to our appartment is something that we wanted at some point.

We were once eager to buy the clothes that hang unworn in the back of our closet now. The jobs we now occupy once promised the start of a better life.

The simple truth is: we quickly get used to things.

When Tal Ben-Shahar, a popular Harvard lecturer in positive psychology, became Israeli national squash champion at the age of sixteen, he afterwards told people that the happiness lasted for only three hours.

In order to feel the same joy again, we always aim for more, but never arrive.