7 Things I Love About Minimalism

Minimalism saves time, saves money, and makes me a better person.

Minimalism is a part of who I am. Born to a mother who was decidedly not a minimalist, the idea of downsizing and doing away with what I don’t need has always been something I do. I was making regular runs to donation centers long before I ever heard of the minimalist movement.

If you’re cruising the internet looking at minimalism articles wondering what it can do for your life, here’s what it did for mine:

1. Minimalism Saves Me Time

This isn’t a benefit of minimalism I see discussed as much by other people, but it’s easily my favorite thing about minimalism. When you own less and buy less, you spend less time shopping.

Shopping used to be my idea of a good time. When I was younger, me and a friend of mine would spend entire days at local malls, department stores, and discount warehouses, coming home with large bags full of lovely things we bought that day. We told ourselves we “needed” these things because people we wanted to be like on Instagram and Tumblr had them, but that was patently untrue. We just wanted them. And anyway, we had a blast getting them.

Now that I’m a minimalist, shopping is a pain in the ass to me. I am lightning fast when running errands. I can be in and out of a big box shop in seven minutes. I have even unlocked the mystical ability to go to the grocery store while hungry and not buy the entire store. My boyfriend, who is not a minimalist, tells me I am tyrannical in my hatred of visiting stores. I’m okay with that. When I’m on my deathbed, I’m not going to wish I’d spent more time in stores.

2. Minimalism Makes Living My Life Easier

People always mention that being a minimalist makes it easier to clean, but they forget to mention why it’s important to clean. We don’t clean our houses because God told us to and we’re going to get a slap on the wrist if we don’t; we clean our houses because it’s easier to live in a clean house.

I did not grow up in a clean house. Doing anything in my parent's house was proceeded by a prep time of anywhere from fifteen minutes to an hour, during which I had to find somewhere to make space to do what I wanted and search the house top-to-bottom for the materials for what I wanted to do (or run to the store to buy them if I could not find them). As a result, I didn’t do much that I couldn’t do in the space of my own bedroom.

I don’t have that problem as an adult. As a minimalist, I don’t own much stuff. Because I don’t own much stuff, my space in the house is typically very clean. Because my space in the house is very clean, it is easy for me to decide I want to spend the day working, trying my hand at watercolor painting again, or attempting to cook. I never have to clean up, make space, find things, or put things away. My watercolors are right there on the shelf and my desk is already clean, so I can pour some water and get started right away.

3. Minimalism Saves Me Money

I’m surprised it only came in at number three, but like many others, one of the reasons I love minimalism is that it saves me money.

Some of the ways in which minimalism saves me money are obvious. I’m no longer spending $2000 a year on clothes from the aforementioned shopping trips. Nor am I spending $2000 on the latest and greatest laptop, tablet, or phone every year. And since I became a minimalist before becoming financially powerful enough to buy my own car, I have never paid $10,000 for the privilege of driving a car off of a lot.

Some of the ways in which minimalism saves me money are not so obvious. For instance, used cars are not only cheaper when you purchase them, but they also have more affordable car insurance premiums. They are also more affordable to repair. I recently paid $1000 to have the entire heavy-duty front brake assembly on my 2009 Ford E250 replaced; the dealership quoted my mom $1000 just for a new “backup proximity sensor” on her minivan. God only knows how much it would be for her to get her brake assembly replaced. And since I’m running fewer errands and going to fewer places to buy fewer things, I spend less on gas.

Minimalism also saves me money on rent. With fewer things to own, I need less space in order for a home to feel spacious. This greatly increases the number of housing options available to me, both in terms of square footage and my budget. I usually go for the slightly-dated-but-affordable option to keep my housing costs below $500 a month.

All of these reduced costs have given me the financial flexibility I need to pursue writing as a career. If I were not a minimalist, I have no doubt I would need to keep a full-time job in project management or something similar to make ends meet. (Thank God I don’t).

4. Minimalism Makes Travelling Easier

Something every globetrotter knows is that most people take way, way too much shit when they travel.

The reason globetrotters only take a large backpack full of stuff when they travel the world is that you really only need a large backpack full of stuff to travel. Everything else is just luggage. You don’t need your hairdryer (most accommodations have one already), or your hair straightener (you want to be out having fun, not straightening your hair), or most of your makeup (it’s not worth the struggle of getting it through security), or ten dress options (two will do just fine).

Seeing how little I live with at home helped me see how little I need to travel. The amount of clothes I own can fit in a large suitcase as it is, so unless I’m traveling somewhere that’s going to get all four seasons during my short vacation, I know I won’t need more than a backpack’s worth of clothes. Combine that with my small bag of hygiene products (no makeup, no conditioner) and my computer equipment, and everything I need for a two-week trip will fit comfortably inside a gym bag. To this day, I’ve never checked luggage on a flight, and I’ve always had room for souvenirs on the trip home. Makes going on vacation a hell of a lot easier.

5. Minimalism Makes Me Interesting

Something you don’t realize until you decide to stop shopping is how much of a big deal shopping is in America.

You don’t have to visit the local mall every weekend in order to spend your life shopping here. Eighty percent of the businesses in any given city or suburb are either a store or a restaurant. Drive around a city and eighty percent of the ways you could spend your time will be shopping options.

Once you give up shopping, you realize how little to do there is in an American city. Unless you’re in an unusual place like Portland or Asheville, there’s not going to be much to do other than shop for one thing or another.

Since none of the traditional shopping options are alluring to the minimalist, we devise other ways to spend our time. We take up hobbies (mine are watercolor painting and traveling in my camper). We learn to cook. We become suddenly fascinated with the idea of visiting local parks and national forests. We learn to sing. Color comes back into our lives, a color we hadn’t known was missing.

6. Minimalism Makes My Life More Fun

Because I don’t want to go out shopping or spend money, I’m not enticed by an offer to “go to Microcenter and look around.” I don’t care what new virtual reality headset is on display there. I don’t want to walk around the local bookstore and sniff the spines of the books that lay there. (That’s not to say I don’t read. I simply find ways to do so for free). And most of all, I definitely don’t want to go walk around Target.

Once you lose your taste for being in stores, stores begin to seem really ugly. They’re always lit by garish fluorescent lights and have laminate tile flooring in an unappealing off-white and use dated music to mask a dull background hum of shop activity. They’re really not that fun.

You may disagree. Ask yourself: when you’re on your deathbed, are you going to wish you spent more time at Target?

Thanks to minimalism, I’m more interested in spending my time in ways that are, frankly, more fun. Instead of going to Microcenter, I want to go to the local park with my friends and read a book in my hammock or throw around a football. If it’s too late for the park, I want to go to a bar and have a few drinks with them while we have long conversations about nothing. If we can’t be in the same place, I want to play Fortnite together.

That’s not to say I never go shopping or that I never enjoy it when I do. My boyfriend and I just spent the last two days visiting bookstores and video game shops around town. I got about forty-five discount books and a copy of Assassin’s Creed Black Flag for my Nintendo Switch. But those shopping trips are only fun if they happen infrequently and we actually do read the books and play the video games we bought. If not, those shopping trips were nothing but a waste.

7. Minimalism Makes Me A Better Person

This is another entry I don’t see often on listicles about minimalism, but it’s the most important. Minimalism makes me a better person.

Before I was a minimalist in earnest, I paid attention to the things people had. I took note of whether their laptop was a MacBook, a Windows, or another brand, and I took note of how old it was. Not consciously, of course — I wasn’t a total prick — but it did affect how I saw someone. When someone had the newest, latest, greatest MacBook, I was suitably impressed.

After I became a minimalist, I stopped doing that. Since I no longer secretly wished to have the newest $3000 Apple hardware, I no longer cared whether others did or not. I don’t notice whether someone has a smartwatch or AirPods anymore. I don’t even know when new tech products come out unless my Apple fanboy dad or Google fanboy best friend tell me.

Same with clothes. Once, I was able to tell you what was fashionable or stylish. I could accurately guess how much someone’s outfit cost and where they bought it. I knew all the different kinds of haircuts and which kinds of people wore them. To me, your sense of style told me who you were as a person.

Now, I have no idea what’s fashionable. Hi-low dresses must be out of style now because I never see the college girls in my town wearing them anymore and they are really easy to find at consignment shops. Sometimes I see college students with weird, high-maintenance hairstyles and wonder where they find the time for that.

In any case, my judgment about what’s fashionable is a lot more simple than it used to be. As long as you don’t have a mullet or a rat tail, your clothes fit and match, and your shoes don’t have holes, you’re fashionable enough for me.

Because I’m not paying attention to these things about people, I’m able to appreciate them for who they are. The blonde guy with ripped muscles who makes faces at women isn’t sexy, he’s a creep. The woman who wears brand-name backpacks and shoes to class isn’t sophisticated, she’s vain.

And the guy who’s wearing a cotton polo and khakis isn’t lame, he’s studious. The girl who’s hair is always up in a messy ponytail isn’t lazy, she’s focused.

With each passing day, I find I see less of who people are on the outside and more of who they are on the inside. That’s a skill that’s worth a hundred Apple MacBooks.

All this to say, if you’re considering becoming a minimalist, I highly recommend doing so. Like building a gym habit or becoming an avid reader, it’s something I’m sure you won’t regret.

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