Why minimalism doesn't work
Use this four-question buying framework instead.
Post summary
Friday was the biggest Black Friday of all time, and Americans bought more stuff than ever. We spend $1.2 trillion each year on goods and services we don’t need.
When we own too much, we’re often guided into “minimalism.” But minimalism comes with its own set of problems.
We’re dropping some unreleased material from my book Scarcity Brain that explains:
The three types of buyers (which are you?).
Why people really buy too much.
Why minimalism can be an opposite expression of the same problem as buying too much.
The underlying reason people hoard or minimize.
A 4-question purchasing framework that will help you buy items you actually need—items that improve your life—and forgo those you don’t need.
Housekeeping
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Confession: I bought something I didn’t need on Black Friday—a truly fantastic wool shirt from Filson for a long thru-hike in the spring. (Narrator: “Michael already owns three wool flannels …”)
Early numbers suggest I’m not unique in my buying behavior. Black Friday of 2024 is projected to be the biggest ever.
But this Black Friday occurred after a shocking US Senate report on hoarding disorders in America. It found that hoarding disorders are rising and causing serious issues.
But when we own too much, we’re guided into less, or “minimalism,” without asking more fundamental questions about why we overbuy or minimize in the first place.
Hoarding and minimalism, it turns out, are just different sides of the same coin.
I learned this while reporting my book Scarcity Brain in a conversation with Stephanie Preston, Ph.D., a researcher at the University of Michigan. She’s one of the world’s foremost researchers on the deeper meaning of why we buy.
She enlightened me to the truth about hoarding and minimalism—and her thoughts changed how I think about possessions.
My conversations with Preston and others ultimately led me to create the concept of Gear Not Stuff.
Asking more profound questions about why we buy or minimize leads to the best answers—answers that can result in larger shifts in our happiness and finances, and allow us to accomplish much more with our resources, time, and during this ride we call life.
Today, we’ll cover:
The three types of buyers.
Why people hoard.
Why minimalism is an opposite expression of the same problem.
The underlying reasons people hoard or minimize.
A 4-question purchasing framework that will help you buy items you actually need—items that improve your life—and forgo those you don’t need.
Let’s roll …
The truth about hoarding and minimalism
Section summary: The pandemic highlighted two ways stress and uncertainty get projected onto our possessions.
For most of time, people owned only a few items. Those items were built to last and often handed down.
But today, we live in a throwaway economy, and people own thousands of items.
In this modern landscape, we can relate to our possessions differently. They take on roles they didn’t in the past.
To begin to understand this, consider two groups from the pandemic.
The first is pandemic buyers. Most people bought far more stuff during the pandemic.
When the pandemic kicked off, we all panic-bought necessary items like canned food, hand sanitizer, and cases of toilet paper. Brawls broke out in aisles.
But then people sheltered at home and a second phase set in. Many were anxious and bored and began buying all sorts of stuff online. Impulse buying jumped 20 percent, and hoarding disorders “significantly worsened.” Consumer spending overall increased 7 percent, and demand for all kinds of items surged.
The second group is pandemic minimizers. It was the other experience, one we didn’t hear of quite as often. Minimalism also spiked during the pandemic.
For example, at the height of the pandemic, donations to the Salvation Army doubled. The amount of non-garbage items people threw out from July through September in New York City rose roughly 10 percent. The executive director of an association representing second-hand stores told the New York Times, “Everyone has been overloaded with incoming merchandise … this is an experience our industry hasn’t gone through before.”
The question is why? Why did we have these two different reactions to possessions during the pandemic? That’s where it gets interesting.
The three types of buyers
Section summary: Research shows we all fall somewhere on a spectrum between hoarder and minimalist.
To understand how modern people relate to their items, Preston conducted an experiment.
The experiment worked as follows: Preston had participants choose from a list of 107 household items ranging from invaluable (like egg shells) to highly valuable (like a diamond ring). She let participants select as many items as they wanted.
Then, once the participants chose their items, Preston asked them to pare them down to what they could fit in a shopping cart. Once they’d done that, she pushed it further—she asked them to pare down again to what would fit inside a shopping bag.
This revealed three basic personality types around possessions: hoarders, intermediates, and minimalists.
Hoarders, no surprise, tended to grab and acquire more. In Preston’s study, these people selected a lot of items from the list—one chose 82 items. But they then had trouble pairing the items down to fit in the shopping cart or bag. Some literally couldn’t do it, and it caused them severe anxiety (one freaked out and argued that the 42 items they insisted on keeping would fit in a small shopping bag).
Then there were “intermediates.” These people were somewhere in the middle. They started with too many items to fit into the shopping bag, but not so many that their initial run of items didn’t fit in the shopping cart. And they were fine paring their items down to a shopping bag’s worth and left with a reasonable amount of useful items.
At the opposite end were the minimalists, who tended to acquire less. These people didn’t select many items from the initial list—one guy chose nothing. In fact, these people were mildly overwhelmed with the list itself and the thought of having too much caused them anxiety. When asked to pare down, they did so quickly and easily and ended up with an exceedingly small amount of items. But they left a lot of useful, life-enhancing gear on the table.
Preston says every one of us lies somewhere on the spectrum of “hoarder” and “minimalist.”
Problems with minimalism
Section summary: Hoarders and minimalists are driven by the same phenomenon: A desire to relieve stress and find control in a chaotic world.
Culturally, we tend to ask, “How can I be more of a minimalist?”
We live in a world where it’s easy to have too much. And when everyone can have more, taking on less is now seen in some circles as virtuous.
Think of reality TV shows that profile hoarders versus those that profile minimalists. The hoarders are positioned as impulsive and gross. Meanwhile, the minimalists are framed as righteous, enlightened souls who border on Godliness.
But Preston found that it’s much more complicated than that.
Through deeper analysis, she found that the hoarders and minimalists are often powered by the exact same premise.
Preston explained that both hoarding and minimizing can be “driven by a kind of perfectionism where you want to do everything just right. There’s a sort of anxiety, but it’s different from the hoarders. Hoarders have anxiety that they’re going to make a mistake and need something. But (minimalists) are more of a kind of anxiety around disorder or have so much they can’t escape.”
Whether it’s continuously buying and keeping way more than we need or going all-in on minimalism, “The behavior (helps people) find a sense of control,” Preston said.
Consider those two different groups from the pandemic: Buying and minimizing both gave both groups a sense of control and relief at a chaotic, high-stress time.
One pandemic minimizer said, “I feel much calmer” after culling and organizing.
Use the four-question purchasing framework
Section summary: This purchasing framework will help you buy gear, not stuff and improve your life.
We all know overbuying is a bad idea. It leads to clutter and debt and can be wasteful.
But we often don’t consider that blindly aiming for less—“minimalism”—can also have downsides.
Minimalism looks good in the photos we share online, but it doesn’t solve the underlying problem we thought it would. That underlying problem is often psychological—stress, boredom, or feeling like you don’t have control. It’s likely better to introspect and solve the root of the problem rather than projecting it onto possessions.
Of course, every behavior lies on a spectrum. The point at which any behavior becomes problematic is when it causes problems in your life.
In the case of having too much, it could be that you buy so much your house becomes a cluttery mess or you accrue credit card debt. With minimalism, it could be that you get rid of so much and become so obsessive about less that you forgo items that would improve your life or get stressed out if things are out of place.
Preston told me this: “In America, with everyone overworked and overstressed and having cheap, abundance goods everywhere, we see that many of us get caught in a loop of using stuff to assuage how we feel.” It could be buying a lot of it, a bit of it, piling it, minimizing it, or organizing it. “But you get caught in a cycle that ultimately ends up hurting your quality of life.”
This is why I focus on gear, not stuff.
Gear has a clear purpose of helping us achieve a higher purpose. It’s possessions that allow you to complete tasks and reach goals that improve your life. You can and should buy gear because your life will be better for it.
And so, before I buy, I ask myself:
Why am I buying this in the first place?
Is it possible I’m just bored or stressed, and online shopping is relieving that?
What do I intend to accomplish with this item?
Do I already own something that can serve the same purpose?
And that is why I’ll be returning that Filson flannel. I forgot to run that four-question framework before clicking buy, and thank God for online returns.
Have fun, don’t die, buy gear, not stuff.
-Michael
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This explains the fundamental thought processes behind my wife and I's buying habits perfectly. I grew up living in the same house my entire childhood and I err on the side of hoarder; she grew up moving houses every 1-2 years and errs on the side of minimalist. This led to a lot of frustration in the beginning of our marriage when it came to material possessions, but I really think we both have finally come to a healthy middle ground by learning from each other. Also, I made a lot of money when I opened my eBay store to sell collectables, which made both of us very happy. Haha. I feel so much better after systematically getting rid of and selling things I never used. And she feels better because I encourage her to buy things that could absolutely improve her quality of life! Sharing this article with her, thank you!!
When my first wife passed away, I emptied out her closet (large walk in). There were many items with tags still on them. I don’t want to leave the same exercise to my children when I am gone. Since I retired, I assessed my belongings (stuff vs gear). I found I was over stuffed…literally. So I have gone room by room eliminating stuff and I still have too much stuff. So I will repeat the exercise again and eliminate more stuff. My current wife is a big believer in donating to charities that serve women and children so that is where much of it goes.
My Amazon shopping tip is to put something in your cart, leave it for a few days, and then reassess the need.