[newsman] Some experts call it a retail apocalypse.
2019 marked one of the worst years in a decade for brick-and-mortar stores.
[man] Less Is Now.
[interviewer] Why do you think this idea of minimalism or simplifying
is really catching on right now?
Mm-hmm.
I think it's because we have the opportunity to have so much. [laughs]
A portion of America's definitely addicted to stuff.
Probably not in the classic psychology sense of addiction.
We just love stuff!
Monday, today, is supposed to be
the biggest online shopping day of all times,
reaching around three-and-a-third billion dollars in online sales.
Anything that you can think of, you can get on your doorstep,
now within 24 hours.
That's… That's almost like magic, right?
When you look up at the sky, you may soon see Amazon's army of new-age deliveries.
[newswoman] The electronic aircraft would have a 15-mile range
and deliver packages within 30 minutes.
[man] The consumer world understands
that if I can get you to choose before you think,
I'm gonna get you to buy things you do not need.
My senses are just being bombarded with reminders,
like, "Hey, you should buy this.
You'd be happier if you buy this." You know?
[laughing] And it's just sort of like, in so many ways,
they're trying to beat you into submission.
"Okay, I'll buy it! I need it! I need it!"
Amazon, hiring once again.
The company looking to recruit 100,000 workers
to meet surging levels of e-commerce demand.
Lots of smaller retail businesses are being lost,
and the power is being consolidated in the hands of these giants.
Stuff is contributing to our discontent in so many different ways,
because it's taking the place
of the things that actually do give us more happiness.
I found minimalism about seven years ago in the midst of a breakdown.
I was overworked. Um, I was exhausted. I was heavily stressed out.
There has to be more to life than just working.
I think immediately I got up, and I went to my closet,
and I started pulling my clothes out.
Uh, I stayed up until 3:00 a.m., and I just packed so many things.
[woman] As I started slowly releasing things,
I gained a sense of freedom.
[woman 2] Change is definitely coming. Change is inevitable,
because you can't continue to consume
more than the planet can replenish every year.
You just physically can't.
So the question is not if we are gonna change as a society,
but how we are gonna change.
'Cause we're either gonna change by design or by disaster.
It all started with one question.
How might your life be better with less?
[birds chirping]
-[man] Want some tea? -[woman] Sure.
[man] Okay.
[woman] It's in the… Yeah. Okay.
[man] Yeah, y-you know, I mean, aesthetics are important to me,
but what I care most about is having a place free of clutter.
So when you look around my place,
not everything is necessarily minimalist design.
I don't go out of my way to specifically have only minimalist aesthetics.
But to me, it's… it's clutter-free.
We often confuse simplicity with easy,
but it's actually the exact opposite.
Living a simple life, it takes a lot of work.
It takes a lot of work to be intentional. What's easy is going with the flow.
It's going out, and going to IKEA, and buying the cheap furniture
every time you think you need a piece of furniture or an end table.
It is very difficult to go through some of these stoical experiments
to see what you can live with or live without,
but, in the end, it's worth the work.
[host] People go, "Check out this documentary.
-These guys, The Minimalists." -[hosts 2] The Minimalists.
[host 3] The Minimalists are with us. Joshua and Ryan.
[TV journalist] They have books, a podcast, and a Netflix documentary,
all guiding typical consumers on how to downsize their way to happiness.
[Ryan] I don't think you can understand how Josh and I came to be minimalists
without looking at our upbringings.
Both of us grew up poor.
Our moms had issues with substance abuse, and we really never had enough.
Dude, look at this. This is hilarious.
[laughter]
Even our furniture. [chuckling] It was like…
It was like do-it-yourself furniture.
That's like our cupboard in the kitchen.
I was really a happy kid up until, uh, about the second grade
when my parents got divorced.
It happens to a lot of kids, their parents get divorced.
But I remember things really getting dysfunctional when…
uh, when my mom left my dad.
And there was just a lot of…
a lot of partying, I remember.
And, um, you know, as a kid, it looked like a lot of fun.
My mom did a good job of making it look fun.
I met Josh in the fifth grade when I moved to his middle school.
[laughs] Oh!
[Ryan] It could have been that we were both from broken homes
and didn't have much money growing up,
or maybe it was that we were the two fattest kids in our grade,
but we just hit it off, and we became best friends.
[Joshua] When we were growing up, I feel like we could've used minimalism,
because minimalism is basically the intentional use of resources you have,
and if you have very few resources, like we did growing up,
man, we could've done much better
by being more deliberate with those resources.
It's interesting, because when you're poor,
it's like, when someone offers you something, you take it.
I-I think about my household growing up, and we had so much stuff,
because we took every single thing that was offered to us.
However, we had a lot of stuff that we didn't need.
In fact, it was just clutter, and it did not add any value.
As we get more space, we fill it with more things.
As we get more things, we need more space,
so we turn to storage lockers, or we turn to bigger houses.
And we never really stop to question, "What is essential? What is necessary?"
Then, "How much of the stuff is actually adding any value to my life at all?"
A decade ago,
by the time I was 28 years old, I had achieved everything I ever wanted.
I was the youngest director in my company's 140-year history,
and I had all the fringe benefits of a middle manager
at a major corporation.
The luxury cars,
the closet filled with designer clothes,
the big suburban house with more toilets than people.
I guess you could say I was living the American dream.
But then, my mom died…
and my marriage ended…
both in the same month.
And these two events forced me to look around
and start to question what had become my life's focus.
You know what I realized?
I realized I was so focused on so-called success, and achievement,
and especially on the accumulation of stuff.
I might have been living the American dream,
but it wasn't my dream.
It took getting everything I thought I wanted
to realize that maybe everything I ever wanted
wasn't actually what I wanted at all.
[woman] Corporations and the drive for corporate profit
is absolutely behind the addiction to stuff that we have in this country.
The way corporations are structured in this country
is they really need to keep growing.
A corporation's primary obligation is to their shareholders,
to which they have to keep delivering increased revenue,
and that's sort of the foundation of capitalism, growth.
I-I don't think the problem has much to do with how much we're growing,
but rather how we answer the question of "where are we going?"
I think one of the biggest problems we have in our world now
is that people really aren't free to choose.
We talk about being in a free market
or a free society, but people aren't really free to choose.
Because you just have one or two large institutions
that have these artificial monopolies,
and they get to decide for everyone
what you can watch, what you can listen to.
And so, manipulation of… of our interests,
manipulation of our natural, God-given taste really is happening.
[man] Marketers are really impressive in their ability to manipulate the mind,
in their ability to create a need or a perceived need
out of something that was a want.
We live in the most advertised-to culture in the history of the world.
Think about it.
Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent telling us we need this,
and it has an effect.
[Joshua] The money spent on advertising in the United States
has increased from just over $5 billion in the 1950s
to $240 billion a year today.
And since the turn of the 21st century,
much of that spending has moved from television and radio
to digital advertising.
The result, intelligent and predictive ads
that seem to know us better than we know ourselves.
Companies have figured out how to stitch our devices together,
so they know when you pick up your tablet or switch to your smartphone,
when you change the channel on your TV
or speak to your smart device.
Using the GPS on your devices, they can track your movement
to see which billboards you pass,
which stores you frequent,
and even the amount of credit card debt you've racked up.
They map these movements
to know when it's the perfect time to message you next.
And the end goal is always the same. To get you to buy more stuff.
And one of the tricks they use is what we call deficit advertising.
They send us advertisements
that make us subconsciously feel like we are inadequate, um,
if we don't have this product.
So, "I will not be loved if I don't have this toothpaste."
"My children will not value me if I don't have this dish soap."
Everyone's gonna want this.
It's no different than the premise of working out at a gym.
It's the massaging hand sauna.
-[woman] This is gonna make you thirsty. -A perfect set for every occasion.
-You can feel it, you can see it. -[muffled] You can totally feel it.
[Annie] This bombardment of messages that we are not enough.
So think about what that does to people, just every day,
over and over, getting messages, "You are not enough.
Your hair, your clothes, your skin, your body is not enough."
Just relentless.
So then we want to go be enough.
And because we've lost these other ways of being enough…
The other ways of being enough are having a community, having a purpose,
you know, having an identity besides the brand on you.
Because we've lost those,
we misplace our desire for belonging and satisfaction
by buying more stuff.
We don't really say, "Okay, I'm gonna turn stuff into my idol."
We don't say that in our intellect.
No one intentionally does that.
But we can tell by our behaviors that that's actually what we've done.
Because you know, if you're saying to yourself,
"Well, if I just had that car, I'd be happy then.
If I just lived in that house, I'd be happy then.
If we moved to that neighborhood, we'd be happy.
If I had that couch or those new drapes, I'd be happy then."
And that means that you're worshiping at the altar of stuff.
You have officially contracted the disease of "stuffitis."
And so, it becomes a spiritual thing then,
because it's in competition with the things that really matter.
[T.K.] Everybody's selling something.
And that doesn't mean that… that selling is always bad. It's okay.
I want my grocery store to sell things that I can go buy.
I want to be able to buy food, right? So I want them to sell that to me.
It's not about looking at people and condemning them for having an angle,
or for having something they're marketing,
or for having a product that they're pushing.
It's… It's making sure you understand
that what other people are pushing is not always consistent.
It's not always compatible with what it is you need.
My shopping habits before minimalism were compulsive.
I was spending money, and it was out of control.
Shopping was a crutch. It was a place I would go to.
Some people like to emotionally eat. I would emotionally shop.
I was all about the deal.
So I was all about, um, finding, you know, that 99% off item
that I could get, you know, for a huge discount.
I would most likely buy that item
thinking this was the only chance I would get.
I would have, uh, nail clippers.
I would buy fancy ones, normal ones, regular ones, you know.
Ones that had a different little thing to go on it.
I would buy just random stuff like that,
and then I would realize, like, I'm wasting my money
on things that I already have.
I bought a scooter. A 150 cc scooter.
I thought somehow that would change my life.
I could imagine myself riding this in Atlanta.
And if you've ever been in Atlanta traffic,
the last thing you want to be doing is riding on a scooter.
I felt like I deserved it. I felt like I worked really hard,
and these beautiful items would show up and make me so happy.
And then the feeling of shame would creep up and guilt,
and the bills would show up, um, and I…
It was just a… a bad cycle.
[Joshua] You know, it's strange in retrospect,
but I didn't realize we were poor when I was a kid.
We were on food stamps and government assistance,
but that seemed totally normal to me.
Poverty was sort of like oxygen.
It was all around me, but I couldn't see it.
It was just there.
Shortly after I was born, my father's mental health took a turn for the worse,
and that's when everything started to change.
You see, when Mom married my dad,
she didn't realize he suffered from manic depression and schizophrenia,
but she found out pretty quickly.
And Dad's mental illness was only amplified by his alcoholism,
which made him mean, and aggressive, and completely unpredictable.
I guess the physical abuse started around the time I was three years old.
In fact, my very first memory as a child
is of my father extinguishing a cigarette on my mom's bare chest.
Things only got worse from there, until, eventually, we escaped.
Mom and I moved 20 miles south to a suburb of Dayton,
which sounds nice, right?
The suburbs!
But it wasn't really nice at all.
It's gonna be right up here on the right.
You see that green house right there? That's it.
-[turn signal clicking] -Oh, man.
Look at that.
It's all boarded up, and it has, like, this wrap on her.
-[car door opens] -[Joshua] Wanna take a look?
We lived in a house that was literally falling apart.
The rent was $200 a month.
Our home always smelled faintly of empty beer cans
and stale cigarette smoke.
I can still smell it now.
Cockroaches scattered every time I turned on the kitchen light.
And whenever the power got shut off,
we'd run an extension cord from next door to keep the TV glowing.
Here's the front door here.
Oh, shit.
It looks like they might have squatters. It's totally falling apart.
So when we first moved down here, I know we signed up for food stamps.
As a kid, I didn't know the difference between the white and green money we had,
because the food stamps were these white bills,
and then, you know, green money was just… just money, right?
And she would trade the…
She would trade the white bills…
for the green bills, 'cause you needed the green bills to buy alcohol.
And so, she'd buy whatever beer was cheapest.
You know, Milwaukee's Best or the bottom-shelf bottles of wine.
I'd come home each day from school… I was about six.
I would find Mom just passed out on the couch day after day after day.
It became this normal occurrence and…
I feel like I didn't realize it at the time,
but I kind of thought it was… kind of thought it was my fault, you know.
As things started unraveling, Mom's drinking got worse.
Now don't get me wrong, my mom was a good person with a good heart
and a hilarious sense of humor.
Somewhere along the way, she'd simply lost a sense of meaning in her life.
And I knew the only way for me to break the cycle,
the only way for me to find the meaning that she'd lost,
was to make a lot of money when I grew up.
I remember back when I was a teenager,
I spent most of my summers working for my dad,
painting and hanging wallpaper.
And you should have seen some of the houses we worked in.
Some of them were unbelievably fancy.
Ten thousand square foot garages,
indoor swimming pools,
private bowling alleys.
Nothing I aspired to own myself, but it was pretty impressive.
And then, one day, we started to work on this really, really nice house.
It wasn't like a multi-million-dollar nice house,
but it was something nicer than my mom or dad had ever owned.
The walls in their home,
they were decorated with the smiling faces of friends and family
that affirmed the happiness in their lives.
And the stuff in their home, it filled every nook and cranny.
I pictured myself living there.
I pictured how happy I would be if I could just own a house like that,
filled with all that stuff.
So, I turned to my dad and I asked him,
"How much do I need to make in order to own a house like this?"
He looked at me and he said, "Son, if you can make $50,0000 a year,
you could probably afford a place like this."
So that became my benchmark. $50,000.
Then, during my senior year of high school,
Josh and I, we were sitting at the lonely lunchroom table together,
and we started to talk
about what we were going to do with our lives after we graduated.
So I told him, "I don't know what I'm going to do,
but if I can find a way to make $50,000 a year,
I know that I'll be happy."
So that's what I went and did. That's what Josh went and did.
We got sales jobs and we started earning 50 grand.
But something went wrong.
I wasn't happy. I had to go back to the drawing board.
And thank goodness, I found out what had happened.
I forgot to adjust for inflation.
So I thought to myself,
"Well, maybe $65,000 a year, maybe that was happiness.
Or maybe 90,000,
or maybe six figures,
or maybe owning a bunch of stuff.
Maybe that was happiness."
Whatever happiness was,
I knew, once I got there, I'd finally feel free.
I bought new cars, and electronics, and closets full of expensive clothes.
I bought expensive home decorations and furniture,
and I always had the latest gadgets.
And when there wasn't enough cash in the bank, I paid for expensive meals,
rounds of drinks, and frivolous vacations with credit cards.
As I made more money, I spent more money, all in the pursuit of happiness.
All in the pursuit of the American dream.
[man] One thing I think is unique is
when you're an immigrant, the American dream is still a good thing.
I think it's only people who grew up in the American dream
that no longer value the American dream,
because it's become the American nightmare.
[Annie] People in the US work longer hours than almost any industrialized country,
depending on which data you look at, but we work enormously long hours.
We work as long hours as people did during feudal society.
We have such short vacations, if any.
Half the country doesn't even take two weeks of vacation.
We're commuting longer hours than ever before,
and then we're spending more time alone in front of screens than ever before.
We're losing the stuff that actually makes us happy
and makes society more safe and secure,
which is community.
Um, we're losing that
and changing that time to work and buy more stuff.
[Erwin] What you don't want in your life is this endless horizon of aspiration.
"I just need a bit more of this or a little bit more of that.
I need more success, more income, more wealth,
a bigger house, bigger car, bigger this," because that's just an endless black hole.
When we get all of the things that we want,
we tend to be wrong in the predictions that we made about how happy we would be,
because the brain normalizes those things.
After a few months of that, you normalize it,
and you say, "All right, that was great at the time,
but now I have a new set of desires, a new set of dreams,"
and everything that is the ceiling today
becomes just the ground floor for a new level you're trying to get to.
And so, really what the American dream is is this sense of freedom.
Now how do you get that? Just by gathering up more money?
Nope, won't do it.
Not if you gather up yet more stuff
to go with your more money, because you're still gonna be teetering.
You just added zeros to your stupidity is all you did then.
And so, what happens is you have to learn to contract your, in quotes, "needs,"
so that you can create a buffer around your life
and create this independence to where you've got enough savings
that you can say, "Take this job and shove it," if you need to.
You don't have a bunch of debt pounding down on your head,
buying things that you don't really need
with money you don't really have
to impress people you don't even really like.
And so, what you've done there is you gave up your independence,
you gave up your freedom…
in return for some stuff
that's gonna be worth nothing in next year's garage sale.
[Erwin] You almost have buyer's remorse, and you also have this gambler's dilemma
where you gambled for this and now you have it.
Do you want to give it up even though it makes you unhappy?
So I think a part of the process for all of us
is making sure we actually are going after what we truly want.
And when we have something, to do an honest evaluation of going,
"Is this something I want to define my life? Do I really want to keep this?"
[Ryan] Chasing the American dream, it cost me so much more than money.
My life was filled with stress, and anxiety, and discontent.
It got to a point in my life where I didn't know what was important.
But one thing was clear.
I had this gaping void in my life.
So I tried to fill that void the same way many people do, with stuff.
I continued to work 60, 70, sometimes 80 hours a week,
forsaking some of the most important aspects of my life.
I barely thought about my health, or my relationships,
or things that I was passionate about.
I was living paycheck to paycheck.
Living for a paycheck.
Living for stuff.
[Joshua] It's like I was swerving from credit card purchases
to reckless spending
to accumulating debt to maintain a lifestyle I didn't even enjoy.
I had all of the stuff to fill every corner of my consumer-driven life.
Giant televisions, fine china, stainless steel appliances,
marble countertops, expensive watches, tailored suits
and more, and more, and so much more.
Then, toward the end of 2008, actually it was two days before Christmas,
I got a phone call from Mom.
She had just moved down to Florida earlier that year
to finally retire on Social Security.
But on December 23rd, she found out she had Stage IV lung cancer.
And in less than a year, she was gone.
I spent a lot of time with Mom that year down in Florida
as she struggled through her chemo and radiation.
But when she passed, I realized I needed to make one last visit.
And this time, it was to deal with her stuff.
So I flew from Dayton, Ohio, down to St. Pete Beach, Florida.
When I arrived, do you know what I found?
Stuff.
Like three houses worth of stuff crammed into Mom's tiny one-bedroom apartment.
Now, it's not like Mom was a hoarder.
I mean, I didn't find any dead cats in her freezer.
But she owned a lot of stuff.
Sixty-five years' worth of accumulations.
Did you know the average American household
has more than 300,000 items in it?
300,000!
Just take a look around at your average basement, or attic, or garage.
What do you see?
Unused sporting goods, exercise equipment,
camping gear, holiday decorations,
musical instruments, spare parts,
outdated electronics,
random cords and miscellaneous cables,
magazines, and cassette tapes, and compact discs,
tchotchkes, and knickknacks, and trinkets,
and all the things we forgot we even owned.
Boxes, and bins, and entire rooms stuffed with stuff.
We had so much. So much stuff.
My closet was out of control.
So I had a closet full of clothes. I had a dresser full of clothes.
Photography equipment, bicycle equipment.
Skin care products, beauty products.
Shoes, purses.
I'd open the closet, stuff would fall out.
I don't know why, but I had three soccer cleats,
even though I don't really even play soccer. [laughs]
You know, things people had given me throughout the years,
whether those be cards, or objects,
or tokens that I'd kept from different events we'd gone to.
But it was just a never-ending, uh, you know, turnstile
of, uh, "I need this. I need that."
[woman] It's so easy to buy things
that we think are the solution to our problems.
I remember when I had babies, and I really wanted them to sleep well,
and I thought I just needed the perfect sleep device in order to make that happen.
So I had probably four different types of swaddles,
multiple different types of zip-up sleep devices.
There are… If you go on Amazon, you can find there are dozens and dozens
of different types of mechanisms to get babies to sleep.
Pieces of equipment that you can buy.
But the reality is that getting babies to sleep is just really hard,
and we can fall into this trap of trying to buy our way out of the hard times.
And it's… it's often not very successful and very expensive.
[T.K.] I actually think the best way to know if you have too many things
isn't by waiting to see if you run out of room to keep them,
but asking yourself if you've run out of purposeful things to do with them.
When you've run out of purposeful things to do with things,
even if you only have one thing, you already have too many things.
The reason we are so depressed and so empty when we have so much
is that if you get more of the wrong thing, it becomes less.
There are deeper things that… that fulfill us.
Our need for meaning, our need for progress,
our need for intimacy.
The reason the message of minimalism is so powerful
is because we're bingeing on all the wrong things,
and we're dying of hunger for the things that really matter.
But, of course, most of us aren't hoarders, right?
No.
We just hold on to a lot of stuff.
We hold on to a lifetime of collected memories.
I know Mom certainly did, and I had no idea what to do with any of it.
So I did what any good son would do.
I called U-Haul.
I called U-Haul, and I asked for the largest truck they had.
In fact, I needed one so large I had to wait an extra day
until the 26-foot truck was available.
As I waited for that U-Haul to arrive, I invited some of Mom's friends over
to help me sort through her stuff.
I mean, there was just too much stuff to go at it alone.
Her living room was stuffed with big antique furniture,
and old paintings,
and more doilies than I could count.
And her kitchen was stuffed
with hundreds of plates, and cups, and bowls,
and ill-assorted utensils.
And her bathroom was stuffed
with enough makeup, and face creams, and hygiene products
to start a small beauty supply business.
And it looked like someone was running a hotel out of her linen closet,
which was stuffed with mismatched bath towels,
beach towels, and dish towels.
Don't even get me started on Mom's bedroom.
I mean, why did Mom have 14 winter coats stuffed into her bedroom closet?
Come on. She lived in St. Pete Beach.
So anyway, there I was attempting to finish packing all of Mom's stuff
when I looked under her bed.
I noticed these four boxes, these old printer paper boxes.
Kind of heavy,
sealed with excessive amounts of packing tape.
I noticed each box was labeled
with just a number written on the side in thick black marker.
And I stood there…
looking down…
wondering what could possibly be inside those boxes.
Turns out it was my old elementary school paperwork.
Grades one through four.
As I opened those boxes, my curiosity ran wild,
and I thought to myself, "Why was Mom holding on to all that stupid paperwork?"
But then all these memories came rushing back, and it was obvious.
Mom had been holding on to a piece of me.
Mom was holding on to all the memories inside those boxes. Right?
But wait a minute.
Those boxes had been sealed for more than two decades.
It was clear Mom hadn't been accessing any of the memories inside those boxes,
which helped me understand something important for the first time.
Our memories are not in our things.
Our memories are inside us.
You see, Mom didn't need to hold on to those boxes
to hold on to a piece of me.
I was never inside those boxes.
But then I looked around her apartment, I looked around at all her stuff,
and I realized I was getting ready to do the same thing.
If I'm being honest with myself,
I was just gonna selfishly cling to most of Mom's stuff.
But, of course, I wasn't gonna get any real value from it
as it sat there locked away in perpetuity.
But the truth is that, by letting go,
I realized I could add value to other people's lives.
So I donated most of her stuff to her friends and to local charities,
finding the stuff a new home.
And the few items I was able to sell,
I was able to take that money and donate it to the two charities
that helped Mom through her chemo and radiation.
You see, I realized I could contribute beyond myself
if I was willing to let go.
When I finally returned to Ohio,
I returned with just a handful of sentimental items.
An old painting, a few photographs,
maybe even a doily or two,
which helped me understand that by having fewer sentimental items,
we're able to enjoy those sentimental items much more.
I get far more value from the few items I kept
than if I were to water them down with dozens or even hundreds of trinkets.
Ultimately, I had to let go of what was weighing me down
before I could move on.
To move on…
I had to take an inventory of my own life.
Turns out I had an organized life.
But really, I was just a well-organized hoarder.
And if you would've looked beneath the surface,
you would have found a lifetime of unchecked consumption.
As companies continue to innovate,
our ability to show restraint is getting more and more difficult.
Outsourced labor
combined with advancements in shipping, manufacturing, and logistics
has dropped the cost of consumer products to an all-time low.
And now, with one-click purchasing, same-day delivery,
and a society that has normalized credit card debt,
we've dug ourselves into a hole.
The average American carries four credit cards in their wallet
and the average credit card debt for indebted households
is more than $16,000.
Each year, we spend more on shoes, jewelry, and watches
than on higher education.
[Denaye] I remember when I was a kid, there was something called layaway.
We'd go to the department store and pick out our school clothes,
and my mom would put it on layaway,
which meant she would go and make payments once a week for several weeks
until she paid all of it off when she had all the money paid in.
That's when we got to bring home the stuff.
This concept does not exist now. If you want the stuff,
you put the credit card down and take it right away.
And I think that functional change in the way that we buy
has made a difference in what our expectations are
and a sort of sense of entitlement about what we should have,
and when we should have it, and if we should have to wait for it.
[Dave] America, sadly, has gotten increasingly emotionally immature.
"I want it, and I want it now,
and I deserve it because I breathe air."
This is a four-year-old child in the cereal aisle
throwing a fit because they can't have Froot Loops.
And yet it's a 54-year-old woman I'm talking to or man I'm talking to,
'cause he can't buy this little item he wants,
'cause he doesn't have the money.
Guess what? You're never gonna have the money for everything you want.
[T.K.] The kind of debt that creates the most problems in our society
comes from a felt need to keep up with appearances.
Placing unnecessary burdens on yourself in order to maintain some kind of image.
If I can't afford a BMW,
but I go into debt in order to acquire one,
I'm doing that because I-I want the… the social rewards, right,
of… of being seen as a certain kind of person.
Once your basic needs are met,
the way that we as humans determine what is enough
is relative to the people around us.
Um, and so, that's where the saying "keeping up with the Joneses" came up.
We judge our furniture, our clothes, our car
based on the people around us.
It used to be that the people around us were of similar socioeconomic background.
So we were like, "It's cool. We all got the same stuff."
But now, with the onslaught of television and social media,
they have what's called the vertical expansion of our reference group.
Now I'm comparing my hair to Jennifer Aniston's.
Now I'm comparing my house to Kim Kardashian's.
I think that we are more stressed and discontented today than ever before,
because we know so much more, or we think we know so much more,
about what's going on inside of the house of our neighbors and our friends.
And the comparison is so much stronger than in generations past,
and we're constantly comparing our lives to other people's lives.
And when we do that, it rarely measures up.
This generation, more than previous generations,
we have to learn how to manage our attention,
because there are so many people competing for it
and telling us, like, "Look at this, and you'll be happy!"
"Buy this, and you'll be happy!"
And you have to step back from all of that and say, "No, no, no.
I first need time
to come up with my own ideas about what's gonna make me happy."
For me, it all started with that one question.
How might your life be better with less?
By answering that question, I was able to identify the purpose of minimalism.
Not just the "how to," but the more important "why to."
I realized, if I simplified my life,
I'd have more time for my health, my relationships,
my creativity, my finances,
and I could contribute beyond myself in a meaningful way.
You see, I was able to understand the benefits of minimalism
well before I ever cleaned out a walk-in closet.
And so, when it came time for me to actually declutter, I started small.
I asked myself another question.
What if you removed one material possession from your life
each day for a month? Just one. What would happen?
Let me tell you. I got rid of way more than 30 items in the first 30 days.
Like way, way more.
It became this kind of personal challenge, discovering what I could get rid of.
So I searched my rooms and closets, my cabinets and hallways,
my car and office,
rummaging for items to part with,
retaining only the things that added value to my life.
Pondering each artifact in my home, I'd ask,
"Does this thing add value to my life?"
The more I asked this question, the more I gained momentum
and embracing minimalism got easier by the day.
The more you do it, the freer, and happier, and lighter you feel,
and the more you wanna throw overboard.
For me, a few shirts led to half a closet.
A few DVDs led to deep-sixing an entire library of unused discs.
A few decorative items
led to junk drawers who shed their adjective.
It's a beautiful cycle. The more action you take, the more you wanna take action.
Once I started to get rid of stuff,
it was just like the momentum just took over.
It was a snowball that I could not stop.
I was ready to throw out as many things as possible.
[Rechna] When you open up those drawers and look at what's in the back of them,
I don't think I even realized
half the stuff that we had hidden away in closets and in drawers.
[Victor] It… It really helped by focusing on just one part of the house,
instead of just thinking,
"Oh, wow, I have 35 years of things in my house that I need to get rid of."
[Michael] We got rid of our storage rental.
A huge storage rental that we'd been paying for for years
and didn't really even know what was in there, gone.
I remember going through my CD collection,
and I couldn't even remember if I had a CD player in my car.
That was the one thing that made me think, "That's probably a reason
for me not to hold on to these CDs anymore if I don't even know if I can play them."
As I began to get rid of things,
one at a time, I just felt so much freer.
There was freedom.
When I started going through it, I got rid of 14 pairs of pants.
I couldn't believe how high the stack was.
And so, I actually, you know, went through and counted them,
and I'm like, "14 pairs of pants sitting in the closet!"
[Michael] We put our house up for sale,
because we just wanted to really start fresh
and just grab life, you know, and…
and really be free.
It was a very freeing feeling, um, to just get started,
and so I… I ran with it.
[Joshua] Over the course of eight months after my mother died,
I deliberately jettisoned more than 90% of my material possessions.
Although, if you visited my home today, you probably wouldn't walk in and say,
"Oh, my God!
This guy's a minimalist!"
No, you'd probably just ask how we keep things so organized,
and I'd just tell you that my family and I, we don't own much,
but everything we do own adds real value to our lives.
Each of our belongings,
our clothes, our car, our kitchenware, our furniture
has a function.
As a minimalist, every possession serves a purpose
or it brings me joy, and everything else is out of the way.
With all that clutter cleared, I…
I finally felt compelled to start asking deeper questions.
Questions like, "When did I give so much meaning
to all these material possessions?
What is truly important in my life?
Why have I been so discontented?
Who is the person I want to become, and how will I define my own success?"
Now, these… these are tough questions with difficult answers,
but they've proven to be more important than just trashing my excess stuff.
And if we don't answer these questions carefully, rigorously…
then those closets that we just decluttered
will be brimming with new purchases in the not-too-distant future.
So, as I let go…
and as I started facing some of life's tougher questions…
my life got simpler.
The people around me noticed something was different too.
My best friend, a guy named Ryan Nicodemus,
whom I've known since we were fat little fifth-graders…
-he came to me one day and said… -[thunder rumbles]
[Joshua] "Why the hell are you so happy?"
So I told him about this thing called minimalism.
And he said, "What the hell is minimalism?"
And so I said, "Minimalism is the thing that gets us past the things,
so we can make room for life's most important things,
which actually aren't things at all.
You know what, Ryan?
I think you might benefit from this minimalism thing too, because…
Well, because you've got a lot of shit."
[engine turns over]
[Ryan] That's when I remember really…
really looking at what you were doing different with your life.
Like, I had to find out, like, "Okay, what is Josh doing differently?"
Because my life was so out of control. I needed to make a change.
You obviously had made some changes, so that's…
I remember that's when I invited you for that really fancy lunch at Subway.
-Yeah. [chuckles] -And, uh, we sat down and…
had… had our sandwiches,
and I just remember asking you, like, "Why the hell are you so happy?"
And, you know, if it wasn't you
-who told me about minimalism… -[Joshua] Uh-huh.
[Ryan] If it was anyone else, I don't know if I would have been so quick
to be willing to try it out.
As we were sitting there, having our lunch,
he talked about how he'd spent the last several months simplifying.
Clearing the clutter.
Making room for life's most important things.
So me, being the problem solver that I am,
I decided to become a minimalist right there on the spot.
I looked up at Josh, and I excitedly announced,
"All right, man, I'm in. I'll do it! I'm going to become a minimalist.
Now what?"
You see, I didn't want to spend several months
slowly paring down, like he had.
I mean, that was great for him, but I wanted faster results.
So, we came up with a wild idea called a packing party.
We decided to pack all my belongings as if I were moving.
Then I would unpack only the items I needed over the next three weeks.
So Josh came over, and he literally helped me box up everything.
My clothes, my kitchenware, my towels, my TVs,
my electronics, my framed photographs and paintings, my toiletries.
Everything. We literally pretended like I was moving.
So after nine hours and a couple of pizza deliveries,
there Josh and I were, sitting in my second living room,
staring at these boxes stacked halfway to my 12 ft. ceiling.
Everything I owned,
everything I had worked so hard for over the last decade,
it was all sitting there in that room.
Just boxes stacked on top of boxes stacked on top of boxes.
Now each box was labeled really well
so I'd know where to go when I needed a particular item.
Labels like "junk drawer,"
"living room number one,"
"kitchen utensils,"
"junk drawer number seven."
I spent the next 21 days unpacking only the items I needed.
My toothbrush, my bed and bed sheets,
some clothes for work,
the furniture I actually used,
a tool set,
some kitchenware.
Just the things that added value to my life.
After three weeks…
I had 80% of my stuff
still sitting in those boxes.
Just sitting there, un-accessed.
You know, I looked at those boxes…
I couldn't even remember what was in most of 'em.
All those things I brought into my life to make me happy…
they weren't doing their job.
So that's when I decided to let go. And you know what?
I started to feel free for the first time in my life.
I got my time back.
I got my life back.
And as I changed my life,
I was focused on community, not consumerism.
Giving, not taking.
People, not stuff.
It just made us really, you know, reassess our lives,
reassess our goals and our commitments.
Friends, and family, and colleagues have acknowledged a profound change in me.
It's given me the opportunity
to be that person that I used to just talk about being.
Because of the way that my values have really been reorganized,
I am grateful for every single second.
Really, I began to find myself again.
And for that, I am so thankful.
Minimalism…
it changed my life.
This emotion washed over me. You know, it was really overwhelming.
And it was this feeling of great abundance, you know.
Like an abundance where everything is fine.
You have everything that you need, all is well.
And I don't think I'd…
I get emotional thinking back to it, right.
[sniffles] Um…
I don't think I had that feeling since I was maybe four or five years old, so…
This just deep knowing, you know, that all I wanted,
you know, all I was searching for, all I needed…
I already had it.
[Ryan] A little over a year after my packing party experiment,
something unexpected happened.
My boss called me on a Friday morning
and told me to drive down to Cincinnati that afternoon
to meet him at the company's Human Resources office.
I walked into the conference room and saw my boss
and someone from HR sitting on the other side of the conference table.
My boss shook his head.
"We've eliminated your position
with the latest round of cuts," my boss said.
"This change, it's effective immediately."
After seven promotions in less than a decade,
I was laid off with no notice.
And then I was surprised by my next thought.
"Isn't this the best thing that could have happened?"
It was like a huge weight had been lifted off my shoulders.
I knew it was time for me to move on,
and this was the nudge I needed.
My entire perspective had changed.
And then I thought to myself, "There might be some people out there
who would find value in my story.
Who would find value in our story."
So Josh and I, we decided to do what any two 30-year-old dudes would do.
We started a blog.
That was a decade ago.
And you know what? Something amazing happened.
Fifty-two people visited our website in the first month.
I realize that might sound unremarkable at first,
but Josh and I, we were excited.
And then other remarkable things started happening.
Fifty-two readers turned into 500, 500 turned into 5,000
and now we have the privilege
of sharing our message with millions of people every year.
It turns out, when you add value to people's lives,
they're pretty eager to share your story with their friends and family
to add value to their lives.
It's fitting that we're back here.
Not just in Dayton, but here at Press, at this coffee shop,
because this is where it literally started for us.
Even back when we were in the corporate world,
you and I would meet here, and this was our place for creation.
It was almost like we required this extra space outside of the corporate world,
outside of our cluttered personal lives,
to come here, to figure out how to create, how to simplify our lives.
To take this sort of feeling that we were experiencing
and get it down onto the page.
[Erwin] I think we should all be allowed to Etch A Sketch our life and say,
"I thought this is the life I wanted, but it's not,
and so I'm gonna start over again."
If you have a longing, and a dream, and a passion inside of you,
why hold on to what you used to do and who you used to be
and… and lose who you want to become?
No matter where we're at on our journey towards less,
we are always going to be pulled in that direction.
The direction of comparison, the direction of being overwhelmed by the media.
And the truth is we have to constantly refocus ourselves.
We make life unnecessarily complicated
because we overlook or underestimate
the… the sense of direction that can come
from just taking a little time to sit alone with ourselves,
to sit in the quiet and say,
"I'm not gonna get my ideas about what a good life is
from external sources of stimulation.
I'm gonna listen to that inner voice and see where that's guiding me."
[Erwin] If people could just make a decision to be fully alive,
if they could just get rid of everything that's sucking the life out of their soul,
that's when you're gonna find your passion.
But your passion will never be about yourself.
Your passion will always be about some good you can do in the world.
That's why Josh and I are right here right now.
We really hope we can add value to your life
by encouraging you to let go.
To imagine a life with more.
More time, more meaningful relationships,
more growth, and contribution, and contentment.
A life of passion,
unencumbered by the trappings of the chaotic world around you.
What you're imagining is an intentional life.
Not a perfect life.
Not even an easy life.
But a simple one.
And to get there, you might have to let go of some stuff that's in the way.
♪ Clearing space I found a moment taking shape ♪
♪ Collect the memories We put them into frames ♪
♪ The beauty of our day-to-day ♪
♪ Hung on walls inside this home we built The life that we had made ♪
♪ You kept my childhood In a box beneath your bed ♪
♪ My teenage years Upon some shelves inside the shed ♪
♪ My crayon portraits on your fridge ♪
♪ You saved every souvenir ♪
♪ 'Cause you were scared You would forget ♪
♪ You kept all of my stuff ♪
♪ As if your love wasn't enough ♪
♪ But I always knew your love for me Was something glorious ♪
♪ Glorious ♪
♪ Want to make my life A monument to you and me ♪
♪ The everlasting us The unrelenting we ♪
♪ And when my body turns to dust ♪
♪ Remember that my love for you Was something glorious ♪
♪ Glorious ♪