I was wondering when an article like this was going to show up on the HN front page.
The follow-up article gets it right. Minimalism is at its core a "process of prioritizing your life and working towards concrete goals without giving in to distraction", NOT just blindly getting rid of stuff. It is immersion, but only in one thing at a time. It is about reducing your tendancy to over-extend yourself, and focusing on the things you really need, both intellectually and physically.
Can we all just admit that the original article, http://vivekhaldar.tumblr.com/post/2525332092/minimalism-is-... , was just link-bait intended to elicit a response and/or rise from the HN community? The original article contains so little method to it's analysis and represents such a fundamental misunderstanding of minimalism that it bears little water intellectually. Not to be rude, but I'm surprised it made it to the front page.
"Minimalism" as it is described here is just a personal version of technocracy - the arrogant belief that you actually know enough to produce explicit, precise long-term plans. Kept under control, and used for shorter terms (say a year detailed, and two more sort of general and subject to change as you learn more) it can be useful; otherwise it often is just a personalized version of the old Soviet "Five-Year Plans".
ADDED: Rereading this, I think I missed my point slightly; the problem with minimalism as described here is that it locks you in too much to your current plan; it reduces your flexibility to adjust your plans as you learn more about your problem space.
You're free to change your priorities at any time. For example, I decided to change aspects of my life so I could lose weight.
We need to be aware of value propositions and how they change. No one is saying you have to lock yourself in stone. Indeed, the minimalist approach increases your flexibility; you've invested the minimum to reach your goal, so if you abandon the goal you've lost the minimum you could invest.
> "process of prioritizing your life and working towards concrete goals without giving in to distraction"
This in itself has tradeoffs I think; sometimes "distractions" are what lead to unexpected connections and pursuits, which wouldn't have happened if you were working towards concrete, prioritized goals all the time. I know some of the stuff I'm most happy I did started out as stuff I was doing to procrastinate. (It may depend on a given person's personality and intellectual style.)
That's why we love Arc90's Readability http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/ No longer do we have to care what ugly fonts or color schemes people use when posting blog articles.
It’s not a technical problem. Safari on OS X renders the font great, it’s crisp and it looks just like Museo should look at the size you picked for the body text.
It’s a design problem. Museo is a fine font, great when compared to other free fonts. It’s also a quirky font with a lot of detail, detail that does not degrade nicely when the size of the font is reduced. Museo is a good choice for headlines or any type that’s a bit larger but a highly questionable choice for body text.
“For better or for worse, picking a typeface is more like getting dressed in the morning. Just as with clothing, there’s a distinction between typefaces that are expressive and stylish versus those that are useful and appropriate to many situations, and our job is to try to find the right balance for the occasion. While appropriateness isn’t a sexy concept, it’s the acid test that should guide our choice of font.” – Dan Mayer, http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/12/14/what-font-should-...
yes, it renders and looks fine but museo it's not the best choice for big blocks of text. Comics sans also renders great and you wouldn't use it here, right?
Since you were polite, I'll actually explain. Museo 500's tendency to block up is something I deliberately exploit. My tumblr is not often a venue for long-form blog posts; it is almost exclusively for link sharing and my photography. Small blocks of Museo "flow" very well along with those sorts of media posts. Long blocks blend together and stream past, providing only a slight interruption to the flow of media and links.
I admit it's sub-optimal for long form posts like this, but it's a tradeoff I've decided to make for the sake of the majority of my tumblr's content. I could make a script to detect when the tumblr is showing a single post, changing the font. I just haven't yet, and I don't get that many complaints. Most people are happy to see any sort of original design and deliberate typography on a blog, even if it isn't perfect.
I still think it's fairly readable. Compare it to the readability-required status of even big-name content pushers like the Chicago-Sun Times. My site is an order of magnitude easier to read, even if their body font is a bit easier in block form.
> I still think it's fairly readable. Compare it to the readability-required status of even big-name content pushers like the Chicago-Sun Times. My site is an order of magnitude easier to read, even if their body font is a bit easier in block form.
I agree. But I don't think comparing your site to a horribly formatted, but established, site is a good argument. IMO the font is not good for reading even if your site is the most accessible site in the whole world. At the end of the day I think it boils down to whether I have to squint and get distracted by the flow in order to read the content.
Also when there are more than one person complaining about the font (and others who have not complained but upvoted the complaining comments) its something to think about. They might not be necessarily right just because its a relatively popular opinion, but they might be in to something.
Such a well written post deserves a better font. IMO.
Well, let me throw my voice in, too. If I didn't have Readability, I would not have read your article. Out of curiosity, I reloaded the page and tried reading it as was originally presented, but it felt taxing, and I switched back quickly.
The problem, I think, is that the spaces between letters are much smaller than the internal negative spaces of the letters. The little horizontal flairs on the sides of many letters in Museo exacerbate this issue. This ends up making it really hard for me to recognize the letters which have no internal negative space, most notably i, t, and r, since they tend to bleed into their neighboring letters at this small size.
Chrome 9 beta running on Win 7 - the text is readable, but the font doesn't make for easy scanning of paragraphs of text (compared to a serif'd font like Times New Roman).
Sorry if you feel this way. I have no control over what title someone will submit my story as. My title was the counter-claim of the article I was rebutting.
I agree that the article by Vivek is totally misinformed.
I've taken a couple stabs at minimalism (of possessions) in my life, staring when I moved from Austin to Seattle in 1995. I'm doing so again after relocating from Seattle to San Francisco a year ago.
There is absolutely no doubt that I've been happiest during those periods when I've had the fewest 'things'. I look back at the time when I downsized from a 1000 sq. ft. apartment in Seattle to 500 sq. ft. studio as the most productive and enjoyable time of my life.
Since moving here to SF, my wife and I have almost halved the space we occupy from a 1600 sq ft townhouse in Seattle to a very comfortable 850 sq ft. in San Francisco. I continue to get rid of the stuff and replace it with either 'virtual stuff' (e.g. electronic books) or just happily do without (e.g. espresso machine).
The main reason I 'upsized' from the small apartment to the large townhouse was that I felt like at my age at the time (30) I was 'supposed to'. I was the only one of my friends/work-mates that hadn't gotten married and/or had children, and bought a house. Oh, what a mistake! Now, ten years later, I'm so glad I'm back to shrinking the possessions in favor of a leaner, simpler life. For the first time since I was 16 I do not own a car. I have no debt (and with the exception of the townhouse and a couple years of credit card debt, I haven't since 1998).
I'm totally sold on continuing down this path, as she is as well. We don't plan on having children. We are both 40+ and enjoy the idea of moving around some more, perhaps even relocating overseas in time.
I'm also sold on the minimalism of possessions, but somehow I'm not as sold on the aesthetic and cultural/work-habits stuff that articles like this tie in, which I don't think necessarily have to go together. I don't want to own tons of stuff that I have to spend money on, haul around when I move, etc., but I actually like clutter, distractions, etc. The way I combine those preferences is by outsourcing the clutter: for example, instead of owning a huge library of books, I spend my time in libraries that other people own (universities, public libraries, the occasional book-heavy coffee shop). I couldn't imagine working in a minimalist environment!
I haven't made much use of it myself yet, but hacker spaces do that with offices to some extent as well. You can have a minimalist apartment, but still work in a hectic, filled-with-stuff place like Noisebridge.
I don't understand what people like KirinDave are referring to when they discuss Minimalism. Anything beyond drill-down UX exercises like eliminating information clutter in visual design seems to immediately break down. Assuming we're talking about something more general than eliminating the widgets from our blog sidebars... What ARE we talking about? I guess I could imagine it going one step higher, into a campaign to stop ourselves from reading blogs and Hacker News when we should be working, ie., the logical evolution of our collective obsession with GTD and similar systems from a couple years ago: a slightly doctrinaire insistence on techniques for productivity. Which is great, especially if you're a 'knowledge worker' (I'm not).
But I still lose the plot when we start actually using the word big-M 'Minimalism', or when we start invoking Zen. Zen is many things: spiritual practice, proto-psycho-exploration, a system of psychology, a system of ethics and epistemology—but I'm not sure it has anything to do with anything that the leading Neo-Minimalists have deemed worthy of inclusion into their morning workflows. Keeping a blog, for one, is not a very Zen thing to do. In fact, the practice of Zen is in part anathema to nearly every technique of thought that a knowledge worker employs in his job. It's a refutation of the construction of narrative, of pattern-recognition, of comprehension, and finally of cognition. It's an attempt to obliterate our own understandings of the world, to destroy our conceptions of objects, uses, signs, signifiers, others and ourselves, to be replaced with pure being and hopefully compassion. And it's DEFINITELY at odds with the all-inclusive rapid-fire content-association that is at the heart of tumblr culture. But I don't see how the practice of Zen has anything to do with the way one orders one's workspace, if one never considers what one is doing with one's mind, or one's content. I don't see what possible use, that is, it would be to invoke Zen and minimalism when describing how we choose our text editors if we allow what we're writing to remain entirely unconsidered.
Which is not to say that I think these Neo-Minimalists are a sort of religious hypocrite for not practicing Zen in all walks of life. The people whose blogs I see reflecting the practices of Neo-Minimalism seem like interesting, intelligent people, writing about the same sort of thing we have been writing for years: technology, culture, memes, funny videos, food, beer. I just don't understand what they could possibly think all the fuss is about in any realm beyond what window manager they've decided to use.
I've heard a couple people talk about getting rid of all the things they don't use, which seems nice, too. But it's a housekeeping exercise. You can't possibly expect me to believe that only having five shirts in your closet will make you a different person, or even a different worker. What is the _there_ here? I haven't heard anyone discuss eating the same thing every day. Or listening to the same music. Or paring down their vocabulary. What does one do? What is there besides being able to create uninterrupted expanses of negative space (which I concede are very nice) and then appreciating their aesthetics?
I mostly agree with you except for this
"You can't possibly expect me to believe that only having five shirts in your closet will make you a different person, or even a different worker. "
stripping away everything that you don't actually use in your day to day life has a remarkable psychological effect.
Less shirts helps your mind? Really? Really? Not even close to convinced.
There are a ton of thunguses in one's life that can be ditched to remove the maintenance of. There's a lot of validity in that particular concept.
But when one wants to develop a fuller life than virtually living - things become useful towards that goal. Let me give some examples.
* Musical instruments. iPad instruments just don't cut it.
* Older books. There are a ton of out-of-print and hard-to-find books that just aren't online, especially in the non-tech fields.
* Gardening requires tools.
* Any variant of a construction trade requires tools.
* Travelling longer distances in a place without a densely connected public transport requires (bike | car | skateboard | etc), which requires maintenance tools.
* Cooking & baking requires a multitude of tools; hosting people for dinner requires kitchenware.
* Offline gaming usually requires game boards & misc accouterments.
I could go on, but those examples are from my own life. The existence of a monk is simply not pragmatically livable for people who fancy dealing with the physical. I like some of Christopher Alexander's writings as he searched for a pattern language in architecture. He considered highly complex systems where people engaged in their environment and lived and hypothesized the idea of the "Quality without a Name", and he had this to say about it, "It is a subtle kind of freedom from inner contradictions". What I see the Minimalism people striving for is this freedom, and they are seeking this freedom by removing as many pieces from the system as they can so that the contradictions go away. I - obviously - don't think that this is the complete solution.
While environments and ourselves do mutually shape each other, I believe that a complete solution is to work towards being consistent and uncontradictory with the things we have both in our heads and outside of them. Sometimes that's getting rid of things, sometimes that's adding things, and other times that's simply changing things around.
Why is it that your definition of minimalism is paucity? The movement's canonical definition is: the right amount of things for your goals. If you are a cook, a well-appointed kitchen is the Right Thing to have. Anything less is just a conceit, and itself a violation of the goal-oriented thinking we've been talking about.
There is this idea of zen and asceticism that has crept into the conversation and honestly I'm not sure what reputable source people are drawing it from. No one is saying you should be living on a tatami mat and with 256kb of storage. No one worth listening to is saying you should avoid owning a pet or enjoying an occasional drink with an umbrella in it.
A lot of people, particularly in our affluent western world, simply say "yes" to the do-I-want-more-stuff proposition. They don't ask, "Do I need this? Does it serve a purpose?" I think the world would be a better place if people made a habit of asking that question and not being afraid of saying, "No." Even if the answer is "Yes," the conscious consideration of utility has benefits.
I'm not sure of the origins of the zenny/ascetic minimalist idea either, but it certainly is present, and not a figment of my imagination (http://cultofless.com/ is an example, so is http://www.farbeyondthestars.com/minimalist-freedom-how-to-l...). And that's really the sort of thing I am talking about. It's not immoral to have stuff, and I feel this "stuff is immoral" vibe floating around from some proponents of Minimalism). Some stuff is worth keeping, and lives that deal in physical things simply need physical stuff. Be prepared, as the Boy Scouts say.
People making passing references to Zen as a mental stance, if not a religion. Like I said in my essay, sites like http://cultofless are basically publicity stunts and personality cults. They're out there more to get attention for the authors than to provide any real advice.
As for Everett Bogue, for someone espousing minimalism he sure has a lot of books to sell you.
Possessions don't automatically make life simpler.
Possessions that you use regularly, value, and are worth more than the trouble they bring you might make life simpler. Possessions that are merely things you're storing "in case you need them", and are moving from one place to another, certainly don't make your life simpler.
I've known many people (including myself) who have found themselves in a position where they wanted or had to move and discovered in the process that when it came down to it, they could happily live without half of the stuff they had accumulated over the years. I did that in my most recent move, and a year later I do not miss any of it, and am still getting rid of things (30+ computer science books recently, and am now moving onto the photography equipment that just gather dust in the closet).
The few possessions I don't use regularly also happen to be the ones that are the easiest to move. Not to mention these sorts of things tend to already be in a box in my closet, practically packed and ready to go.
Aside from the negligible space they take up, they certainly aren't having a negative effect on my everyday life, so removing them would have no tangible benefit. In fact, their loss would deprive me of the artifacts of what's been a fairly interesting life so far. Any bulky items (eg small appliances, furniture) that would create any sort of hassle have already been given away to friends who would find them useful.
But I'm not sufficiently self-absorbed to call this a 'movement'. In the words of BSNYC^, it's just a matter of categorizing my things under 'Shit I Need' and 'Shit I Play With'. There's nothing complicated about that.
It's a matter of balance. I like having more than 5 shirts because I don't want to do laundry every week and, in fact, not having to do laundry all the time makes my life simpler. On the other hand, if you have so many clothes that deciding what to wear becomes a difficult task, or you need to build an expansion on your house to store them all, then you have probably gone to far the other direction.
Snow chains are great if you do things that require them. I used mine just today. But, we all know that guy with the monster 4x4 truck who never actually goes into the woods.
Not necessarily true. The article argues the inverse and I would tend to agree. Observe a woman's routine for dressing up for work or a social event; it's an adventure. From the selection of clothes and shoes to the handbag. Need I say more?
I think there are basically two reasons why one maintains a minimal set of possessions.
One is dumping out most of your stuff because while part of you would still like to have them you think you'll be happier that way. (And because others are doing it also so there must be something on to that.)
The other one is having learned to not need that stuff any longer.
The argument isn't "What is minimalism." The argument is, "What are these people doing that they call minimalism?" Vivek's criticisms are mostly valid for his perception of the movement, and I think he's a reasonable guy, so I tried to update and correct his perception.
This is not a sisyphean task unless Vivek has a very strong motivation to ignore my explanation.
But seriously, this is why I don't especially care for minimalism: '[a]t its core, Minimalism is about being aware that every decision you make is a value proposition, and that you need to judge how the consequences fit with your goals.'
Focus is good, but an excess of it results in tunnel vision. It also leaves little room for whimsy or humor.
Another way to think about it is when you do something all the time it becomes a second nature. You don't always have to ponder hard on every decision you make, some decision becomes default choice.
I don't know about minimalists not having a sense of humor (actually first time I heard this) but I agree you are less likely to do things just for shitz and giggles; but I don't know if thats such a bad thing. Some people just don't enjoy doing things for shitz and giggles. I guess it boils down to personal taste and preference?
The follow-up article gets it right. Minimalism is at its core a "process of prioritizing your life and working towards concrete goals without giving in to distraction", NOT just blindly getting rid of stuff. It is immersion, but only in one thing at a time. It is about reducing your tendancy to over-extend yourself, and focusing on the things you really need, both intellectually and physically.
Can we all just admit that the original article, http://vivekhaldar.tumblr.com/post/2525332092/minimalism-is-... , was just link-bait intended to elicit a response and/or rise from the HN community? The original article contains so little method to it's analysis and represents such a fundamental misunderstanding of minimalism that it bears little water intellectually. Not to be rude, but I'm surprised it made it to the front page.