Minimalism: Live a Meaningful Life by Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus (also known as The Minimalists) is not a minimalism book for people who want to learn how to do minimalism.
Minimalism isn’t actually mentioned that much in the book, which is instead mostly about the Five Values (capital letters theirs) they say are the most important things to cultivate to live a meaningful life: health, relationships, passions, growth and contribution.
Living the Five Values
The book briefly goes through each of the Five Values and calls each of them the “most important,” while eventually admitting that most people only focus on a couple of them at a time and they can’t possibly all be “most important.”
It goes into the ways that you might enhance your relationship to these values, such as by eating better and exercising more, for example, getting out of debt, volunteering and finding your passion in life.
It happened while I was reading this book that I saw someone comment on a post that minimalism is a hobby for the rich, and that’s kind of how I feel about this book, too.
It’s fine to be pescatarian if you have access to fresh vegetables and can afford fish.
It’s great to focus on finding your passion if you have the privilege of time, energy, a healthy body, a safety net.
And they did both get out of a lot of debt, so presumably they know a bit about struggling (even though it’s hard to feel sorry for people who got into debt when they had six-figure jobs). But it just reads a lot like oh, it’s so easy, we did it and you can, too, just make a little change every day and one day you’ll be happy, healthy, fulfilled, loved.
How the Minimalism Book Talks about Minimalism
I said the book doesn’t really mention minimalism (it’s talked explicitly on maybe 15 pages of a 140 page book) and there are definitely no tips for how to get started with minimalism in your own life.
They talk about the anchors that hold you back from having a meaningful life and how having too much stuff (especially when it comes with debt like their stuff did) can be an anchor that keeps you from the best life you could have.
Minimalism is a tool we use to live a meaningful life. There are no rules. Rather, minimalism is simply about stripping away the unnecessary things in your life so you can focus on what’s important.
They argue at the end of the book that the whole book is about minimalism in the sense that embracing minimalism in aspects of your life such as your possessions and your work, you can better focus on the more important things (aka the Five Values).
Which I suppose is true but if you’re still in the phase of overwhelming piles of stuff, this book isn’t going to help you. Five pages from the end of the book they finally mention a post on their website that’s really where you should start.
Minimalism 2.0
I feel like the Minimalism book is like minimalism 2.0. Once you’ve cleared out some of the physical and mental stuff that has kept you stuck, you’ll have time, energy and motivation to work on some of the other stuff.
It’s not to say this book is bad, I just don’t feel like it at all did what I expected it to do. With a book called Minimalism, you kind of want to it be more than a few pages exploring what minimalism is and how you do it.
But if you know that going in, and things like health, relationships, passions, growth and contribution are important to you and things you want to work on, this book should give you some things to think about.
For crafters specifically there’s nothing here unless you consider crafting your passion and want to figure out how to bring more of that into your life (possibly as a way you contribute in the world).
But it’s a quick read and it might get you thinking about how minimalism as a concept can be used to mean paring down other things in life to the most essential, most important things to you. And that’s probably worth your time to think about and take action on.
