One of the values we are living by very passionately for the past few years is minimalism. Before we share our understanding of this idea, we want to share the reasons why we connected with this idea of living in the first place.
In a general sense we all know that we have limited amount of resources on this earth. We have limited amount of fresh water, limited amount of trees, limited amount of minerals, and limited amounts of other resources that we depend on daily to live comfortably. Each one of us needs a certain amount of resources from the earth to live and to satisfy our basic needs like food, shelter, and clothing and to satisfy our other comfort needs. It is obvious that as we increase our consumption we use up more resources. Furthermore we produce waste after using up these resources. Some are biodegradable, some are recyclable, and some are hazardous. Food waste and human waste are biodegradable. Some plastics, glass, and metal can be recycled and used again. And there are lot of hazardous wastes like batteries, lights, house hold chemicals, paints, electronics, phones, medicines, pesticides which are hard to recycle and reuse.
We see our consumption in two categories. First are the resources that we consume from nature to be alive, such as food and resources to meet our basic needs like shelter and clothing. The second category are the resources that we consume to make our life more comfortable. As we traveled the world, we saw that most of the people give equal importance to both categories, and are often more attached to the second category of consumption.
To make our point clear let us give you an example. We need to eat food (based on some preference) like fruits, vegetables, grains, meat etc. Without food, it is obvious that it would be impossible for us to be alive. We need clothes and shelter to protect us from extreme weather. It would be very hard to survive/be alive without these but not impossible. We can call these two basic needs. The other category of consumption is the things that we need for comfort, like electronics, cars, furniture, and all other things that won't kill us if we don't have them. It is not very uncommon when you ask someone (including us) what we need for our survival, many of us include many things from the latter category, and unfortunately the separation line got blurred and everything these days is looking like a basic need. An interesting way we checked this was by asking this question -- if we picked one item we had at home and gave it away to someone, what threat did that action bring to our life and existence? This helped us understand whether that item was for our survival or for our comfort.
We are not suggesting that we personally don't need comforts in our life, we do. We have a computer, a kindle, cameras, electronic devices, foot wears, bags etc. But we want to be aware and understand how each of our comfort item is affecting the resources around us and try to minimise those items. But one thing that we all agree is -- when we consume more, we use more resources from the earth, and produce proportionally more waste.
One thing that might have made it hard for us to separate these categories of needs is happiness. Many of us associate the emotion "happy" with when we possess comfort items like clothes, a home, an electronic appliance, furniture, a car, or something that brings us comfort directly or indirectly (buying a luxury car might also bring status in the society that might indirectly bring comfort). We, as humans, often feel that the more things we buy the more happiness we will have in our lives. But the sad truth (that we also realised from our own experience) is -- the more things we buy/possess don't make us proportionally more happy.
We did some research and came across Conscious Consumerism. This is an idea that encourages one to consume consciously. Conscious consumerism to some extent helps us to understand the story behind each item we are consuming and how it impacted a group of people, a social aspect, or the environment. We came across ideas like - bio-products (organic products), fair trade products, ethical products, environmentally friendly products, and many more ideas that are being introduced in the market on a daily basis. It is a fact that these products have an impact on the betterment of our society and the environment to a good extent. But in our personal opinion, conscious consumerism does not address our original issue of reducing the resources from the earth, but rather continued the cycle of using the same amount of resources or sometimes more for a higher price tag and be moral, ethical, and conscious about the consumption.
As we started digging deeper into this topic, we realised that the more things we possessed, the more time, energy, and money we had to spend to maintain and use them. Also the more options we had for each type of thing we possessed, the more time we spent on making a choice on which option to use at any given point in time. To give you an example, if you have two email accounts, you will spend relatively more time on checking emails compared to having one email. If you have two or more cars, you will spend more time and money maintaining them. If you want to do 10 things in a day, you will spend relatively more time and energy on that day in comparison to doing fewer things. If you have 10 people you want to socialise with on a weekly basis, you spend relatively more time of your week talking to people and the quality of the time you spend with them would be a lot less in comparison to having fewer people to socialise with in a week. At this stage the question we asked ourselves was what is a reasonable amount of everything we want to have in our lives? Whether it be about things we possessed, things we did, number of people we contacted, and everything else we did on a daily basis.
Here is how we tried to answer this question. With everything we were doing, we asked following question - "Are we doing this because we want to do it, or are we doing this because the technology, people, community, and our rights allows us to do it?" This clarified a lot of things for us.
The other important question that came out of the idea of minimising things was -- what are we going to do with the free time that will be available for us from simplifying our days?
The idea of minimalism inspired us to do make our life more joyful not by chance or consuming more, but consuming only what we needed and being conscious about the choices and decisions we made. What this practically meant to us at a personal level was to minimise the things we possessed, and be critical about each new item we introduced into our lives. From a social and community perspective, it helped us question critically about the relationships we had with people and community, and helped us focus more of our time and energies on relationships and activities that enriched us.
Using this idea, we made a lot of changes in our lives in the past few years. We gave away most of our possessions and we have very few things that we call ours at the moment, whether it is clothes, electronic devices, email accounts (and emails), bank accounts, online subscriptions, books (most of our books are on our Kindle), toiletries, documents (most of our documents are scanned and stored online), and other things. Being on the road constantly for the past 11 months also pushed us to keep our life simple. Even our online communications and contacts with people have more quality and our relationships with them seem to have more depth. During our travel stops, when we unpack our bags, we feel joyful when we know the purpose of almost every item we are carrying with us. On the whole, this idea helped us simplify our life to a great extent and brought us a lot of joy.
For us, the free time we newly discovered helped us have space to connect with our own needs, feelings, and emotions. In the past, we kept ourselves busy to not have to deal with things that bothered us. Now we have time for that. We also have time for things that we wanted to change about ourselves, thing that we wanted to know and learn, things that we wanted to explore, things that spoke to us at a much deeper level, and to volunteer.
At this point in time, minimalism for us means to live a conscious and meaningful life using minimum possible resources from this earth. Would we be able to live this for all our life? We surely want to, but only time will tell how close we will get to this idea and stay with it. We are striving our best to be as close to this as possible and we continue to do so in future.
*** We want to provide a little more clarity about the needs we explained above. We simplified the basic needs of us, humans, to simply food, clothing, shelter, and other basic comforts so we could explain the idea of minimalism. In reality our needs are a lot more complex and diverse than just the few we mentioned above. As humans, we all have needs for autonomy, physical nurture (food, shelter, sexual expression, movement etc.,), celebration of life, integrity (creativity, meaning etc.,), play (fun, laughter), spiritual communion (beauty, harmony, inspiration etc.,), and interdependence (acceptance, community, empathy, honesty, love, respect, support etc.,). Many of these needs require us to look at life from a deeper spiritual and philosophical perspective. Luckily, now we have time to explore and understand our needs and find ways to meet them ***
An interesting fact that you might want to know: By August 2, 2017, we used more from Nature than our planet renewed in the whole year of 2017. This means that for seven months, we emitted more carbon than the oceans and forests can absorb in a year, we caught more fish, felled more trees, harvested more, and consumed more water than the Earth was able to produce in the same period. (Source: Earth Overshoot Day 2017)
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| Image source: http://www.collective-evolution.com |
In a general sense we all know that we have limited amount of resources on this earth. We have limited amount of fresh water, limited amount of trees, limited amount of minerals, and limited amounts of other resources that we depend on daily to live comfortably. Each one of us needs a certain amount of resources from the earth to live and to satisfy our basic needs like food, shelter, and clothing and to satisfy our other comfort needs. It is obvious that as we increase our consumption we use up more resources. Furthermore we produce waste after using up these resources. Some are biodegradable, some are recyclable, and some are hazardous. Food waste and human waste are biodegradable. Some plastics, glass, and metal can be recycled and used again. And there are lot of hazardous wastes like batteries, lights, house hold chemicals, paints, electronics, phones, medicines, pesticides which are hard to recycle and reuse.
We see our consumption in two categories. First are the resources that we consume from nature to be alive, such as food and resources to meet our basic needs like shelter and clothing. The second category are the resources that we consume to make our life more comfortable. As we traveled the world, we saw that most of the people give equal importance to both categories, and are often more attached to the second category of consumption.
To make our point clear let us give you an example. We need to eat food (based on some preference) like fruits, vegetables, grains, meat etc. Without food, it is obvious that it would be impossible for us to be alive. We need clothes and shelter to protect us from extreme weather. It would be very hard to survive/be alive without these but not impossible. We can call these two basic needs. The other category of consumption is the things that we need for comfort, like electronics, cars, furniture, and all other things that won't kill us if we don't have them. It is not very uncommon when you ask someone (including us) what we need for our survival, many of us include many things from the latter category, and unfortunately the separation line got blurred and everything these days is looking like a basic need. An interesting way we checked this was by asking this question -- if we picked one item we had at home and gave it away to someone, what threat did that action bring to our life and existence? This helped us understand whether that item was for our survival or for our comfort.
We are not suggesting that we personally don't need comforts in our life, we do. We have a computer, a kindle, cameras, electronic devices, foot wears, bags etc. But we want to be aware and understand how each of our comfort item is affecting the resources around us and try to minimise those items. But one thing that we all agree is -- when we consume more, we use more resources from the earth, and produce proportionally more waste.
We did some research and came across Conscious Consumerism. This is an idea that encourages one to consume consciously. Conscious consumerism to some extent helps us to understand the story behind each item we are consuming and how it impacted a group of people, a social aspect, or the environment. We came across ideas like - bio-products (organic products), fair trade products, ethical products, environmentally friendly products, and many more ideas that are being introduced in the market on a daily basis. It is a fact that these products have an impact on the betterment of our society and the environment to a good extent. But in our personal opinion, conscious consumerism does not address our original issue of reducing the resources from the earth, but rather continued the cycle of using the same amount of resources or sometimes more for a higher price tag and be moral, ethical, and conscious about the consumption.
As we started digging deeper into this topic, we realised that the more things we possessed, the more time, energy, and money we had to spend to maintain and use them. Also the more options we had for each type of thing we possessed, the more time we spent on making a choice on which option to use at any given point in time. To give you an example, if you have two email accounts, you will spend relatively more time on checking emails compared to having one email. If you have two or more cars, you will spend more time and money maintaining them. If you want to do 10 things in a day, you will spend relatively more time and energy on that day in comparison to doing fewer things. If you have 10 people you want to socialise with on a weekly basis, you spend relatively more time of your week talking to people and the quality of the time you spend with them would be a lot less in comparison to having fewer people to socialise with in a week. At this stage the question we asked ourselves was what is a reasonable amount of everything we want to have in our lives? Whether it be about things we possessed, things we did, number of people we contacted, and everything else we did on a daily basis.
Here is how we tried to answer this question. With everything we were doing, we asked following question - "Are we doing this because we want to do it, or are we doing this because the technology, people, community, and our rights allows us to do it?" This clarified a lot of things for us.
The other important question that came out of the idea of minimising things was -- what are we going to do with the free time that will be available for us from simplifying our days?
The idea of minimalism inspired us to do make our life more joyful not by chance or consuming more, but consuming only what we needed and being conscious about the choices and decisions we made. What this practically meant to us at a personal level was to minimise the things we possessed, and be critical about each new item we introduced into our lives. From a social and community perspective, it helped us question critically about the relationships we had with people and community, and helped us focus more of our time and energies on relationships and activities that enriched us.
Using this idea, we made a lot of changes in our lives in the past few years. We gave away most of our possessions and we have very few things that we call ours at the moment, whether it is clothes, electronic devices, email accounts (and emails), bank accounts, online subscriptions, books (most of our books are on our Kindle), toiletries, documents (most of our documents are scanned and stored online), and other things. Being on the road constantly for the past 11 months also pushed us to keep our life simple. Even our online communications and contacts with people have more quality and our relationships with them seem to have more depth. During our travel stops, when we unpack our bags, we feel joyful when we know the purpose of almost every item we are carrying with us. On the whole, this idea helped us simplify our life to a great extent and brought us a lot of joy.
For us, the free time we newly discovered helped us have space to connect with our own needs, feelings, and emotions. In the past, we kept ourselves busy to not have to deal with things that bothered us. Now we have time for that. We also have time for things that we wanted to change about ourselves, thing that we wanted to know and learn, things that we wanted to explore, things that spoke to us at a much deeper level, and to volunteer.
At this point in time, minimalism for us means to live a conscious and meaningful life using minimum possible resources from this earth. Would we be able to live this for all our life? We surely want to, but only time will tell how close we will get to this idea and stay with it. We are striving our best to be as close to this as possible and we continue to do so in future.
*** We want to provide a little more clarity about the needs we explained above. We simplified the basic needs of us, humans, to simply food, clothing, shelter, and other basic comforts so we could explain the idea of minimalism. In reality our needs are a lot more complex and diverse than just the few we mentioned above. As humans, we all have needs for autonomy, physical nurture (food, shelter, sexual expression, movement etc.,), celebration of life, integrity (creativity, meaning etc.,), play (fun, laughter), spiritual communion (beauty, harmony, inspiration etc.,), and interdependence (acceptance, community, empathy, honesty, love, respect, support etc.,). Many of these needs require us to look at life from a deeper spiritual and philosophical perspective. Luckily, now we have time to explore and understand our needs and find ways to meet them ***
An interesting fact that you might want to know: By August 2, 2017, we used more from Nature than our planet renewed in the whole year of 2017. This means that for seven months, we emitted more carbon than the oceans and forests can absorb in a year, we caught more fish, felled more trees, harvested more, and consumed more water than the Earth was able to produce in the same period. (Source: Earth Overshoot Day 2017)
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