Tag: minimalismus

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Why it’s easier to buy things than to get rid of them

“Buy now, just one click. Delivery today. 80% off if you buy within the next 4 hours. Money-back guarantee.” An entire industry ensures that nothing is as easy and convenient as buying something. Everything is done to make sure we don’t think twice before hitting the order button.

Unless we make use of the return policy, with the delivery of the order, a new item enters our home. And one day, we realize that we can’t get rid of things as quickly as they came in. And that makes decluttering even harder.

Why is it so hard to get rid of things? First of all, we have to make decisions. Making decisions is hard. It takes energy, and it’s emotionally exhausting. Take, for example, all the books we bought because we wanted to read them but never got around to it. They now sit on a shelf or lie on the coffee or nightstand, creating a guilty conscience. What about the jeans we squeezed into at the store, bought in the hope it would motivate us to lose weight? The same goes for gym equipment and workout clothes that were supposed to help us shed those pounds. Musical instruments that we thought would reignite an old passion or help us start a new one. Getting rid of them feels like a failure, an admission that we didn’t succeed. The list can go on and on.

A good way to measure whether a purchase was worthwhile is by calculating the cost per use. For example, a rowing machine bought for €250, used eight times, then sold for €100 after two years, results in €18.75 per use, plus the effort to get rid of it. It was delivered within one business day, but it took three weeks to get rid of it, with countless messages from people who were sure they wanted it but never showed up. The machine just sat in the way for two years. On the flip side, in 2014, I bought a MacBook Air for €2,500. I kept it until the end of 2019 and probably used it multiple times every day. Now, another family member uses it daily. The cost per use is probably down to €0.30-€0.40 per day. That was worth it. At the end of the day, it comes down to how much we value the usage of an item. Ideally, we appreciate what we’ve acquired and use it. That’s good. Or sometimes, we buy something with good intentions, like the rowing machine, but hardly use it as we hoped. Sometimes, we even regret our purchase the moment we make it.

You can buy things with a click when the sudden urge hits, but then you’re tied to those things, not just in a positive way. Because even if we decide to get rid of books, the jeans, the guitar, or the rowing machine, the work doesn’t end there. Things don’t disappear with the same ease as the click that bought them. Sure, you can just give everything away. Put a box with a “free” sign outside, and someone will likely pick it up. But if you want some money back for what you’ve spent, you’ll quickly realize that the buyers won’t pay anywhere near what you spent on the item (unless you’re lucky and bought something that has increased in value or is rare to find). Some people seem to know exactly what something is worth to them and won’t go above that self-imposed price limit. The most outrageous example, which I found downright cheeky, was a family that only wanted to pay €150 for a used digital piano, arguing that they couldn’t know if their daughter would stick with it. The thing was listed for €250 on eBay.

But it’s not just the price that’s different; as with the rowing machine, it can take days, weeks, or even months to sell something, especially if it’s valuable. It takes effort. You have to take pictures, write a good description for eBay or another platform, and send emails to potential buyers. You can sell it under value to get rid of it faster (I admit I’ve done that), or you can resist the market price and try to wait for someone to buy it at your desired price. I’ve tried that too, and it rarely works.

How do we get out of this bind?

There are two problems we need to solve:

  • We need to prevent ourselves from getting into the situation of buying something we don’t need in the first place. In an ideal world, we simply wouldn’t buy new things. That’s a radical idea.
  • For all the things we already own and no longer need, we need to find an efficient way to get rid of them.

“Efficient” doesn’t mean paying to store things in a self-storage unit. Every time we get the bill, we’re reminded of how much extra we have. And if we don’t address the first issue, our apartment will quickly get filled up again, and then we’ll need a larger storage unit, and so on and so forth. Doesn’t it sound kind of ironic that we have to pay to store things we already paid for, but don’t use? (If you can store things somewhere for free, the cost might be avoided, but unfortunately, so is the reminder that you still have things lying around somewhere.)

When we start working on the second point, the first one will thankfully become easier. Because we’ll experience the pain we feel when trying to get rid of things, and we’ll remember that pain when we see something attractive to buy. It will take time, but the longer we work on decluttering, the less we’ll want to buy new things. If you remove one item from your home each day, it requires minimal energy and emotional effort. And from my experience, you’ll want to get rid of even more because it feels so good.

Positive side effect: You’ll save a lot of money, produce less waste, and help save the planet.

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One Year of Not Buying Anything – March Report

March was not a good month for my project. On one hand, I bought a battery-operated digital radio (and a used analog one) because I couldn’t find a used one. Given the current situation, that might still be understandable. However, less understandable is the purchase of a new amplifier and CD player. There’s a little story behind this, and it’s related to the fact that I (finally) cleared out the basement:

March was not a good month for my project. On the one hand, I bought a battery-powered digital radio (and a used analog one) because I couldn’t find a used one. Given the current situation, this is probably still understandable. However, what’s less understandable is the purchase of a new amplifier and CD player. There’s a little backstory to this, which is tied to the fact that I (finally) cleared out the basement:

As you can see, it was a very successful decluttering session, and while doing so, I came across my CDs. Does it make sense to have them in the basement? No. What do I want with them down there? Hope that they’ll eventually be worth more money? Some of them really hold great memories. I’m not entirely sure that I’ll still listen to Nick Cave with The Birthday Party, but occasionally…

Well, I no longer have a CD player (which makes having the CDs in the basement even more ridiculous). A year ago, I bought a new turntable from a specialist shop (I had no idea and wanted advice) and retrieved my vinyl records from the basement. However, I wasn’t entirely happy with the amplifier I bought with it (a NAD Amp 1). So, in the living room, I ended up with two large Apple HomePods for streaming music, Apple TV, two Hi-Fi speakers for vinyl, plus the unloved amplifier and the turntable.

The turntable seemed like a good idea because Vodafone had left us offline for at least three days twice last quarter, and fairy tale records still fetch a lot of money on eBay. The Apple HomePods weren’t much use for that. However, Apple TV didn’t really work well with the amplifier either. In total, it was too much clutter and hassle. I wanted less. Back to the store. Told them about my “problems.” I ended up choosing a more expensive device that could do everything I wanted and would give me peace of mind for the next 20 years. Sold the Apple HomePods (they went within two days for the price I wanted), and the old amplifier was taken back for its original purchase price (after a year, another reason to buy from a specialist store).

What does this have to do with minimalism? Spending so much money on a Hi-Fi system? Initially, nothing at all. Sure, I could have gone the used route (if I had known more about it), and I could have listened to music with a lesser system. But minimalism doesn’t mean you have to stop enjoying life. On the contrary, music brings me immense joy. Maybe not the piece from The Birthday Party above (though I still think it’s great), but I listen to a lot of music, and sound quality is important to me. Right now, I’m very into Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3. I listen to various interpretations, from Gould/Karajan to Gould/Bernstein to Zacharias/Gewandhausorchester. And yes, a good system makes a difference. And I also learned something here: I thought I could get by with the minimal setup, but in the end, I bought twice (fortunately didn’t spend more thanks to the store’s goodwill). I also learned that there are children’s CDs available at the local public library. The first CD I played on my new CD player was Drache Kokosnuss.

I also received a new book in March. I had ordered it in February 2021, but the author had apparently missed multiple deadlines. I nearly forgot about it. Also, the bike holders I needed for the basement were only available new.

In total, I spent just under €1,000 in March, after deducting the things I sold. Overall, I’m actually quite satisfied with that.

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Why do we buy books? A plea for public libraries.

 

Please don’t get me wrong. I love books. I love reading books. I’ve read thousands of books, and that’s no exaggeration. The question isn’t why we read books, but why we buy them. Admittedly, this is a strange question coming from an author who also makes some money from it, albeit not much.

Over ten years ago, I read an article that said the number of books in your house correlates with the intelligence of children. Back then, we had about 1,000 books in the house. And we bought even more books. Every book that I found interesting, I bought, because the theory went that if I buy the book, I’ll read it and learn from it. Unfortunately, I’m interested in a lot of topics. So, I ended up buying many books that ended up sitting unread on the shelf. You don’t learn just by owning a book. And while one could argue that at least visitors might be impressed by the sheer number of books in our library, that’s probably the least important reason to buy books. Even though there seems to be a connection between books and children’s intelligence, just having books isn’t enough.

What’s worse, all those unread books gave me a bad conscience every time I saw them. “Oh yes, I wanted to read that. I should get to it as soon as possible, but right now I don’t have the time.” These unread books became a testament to my impulse purchases. I saw them as a burden. All those reminders of what I should be doing or should have already done surrounded me. On the surface, I might have been proud when a visitor marveled at the number of books I owned, but in reality, I felt guilty because I was only pretending to be a reader. The things you own end up owning you—that saying from Fight Club applies here too.

On the other hand, isn’t having your own library, however small it may be, also a place of discovery? A place where you find a book you bought some time ago because it interested you, and now it might inspire you? Isn’t it even perfectly fine to have a library full of books that you haven’t read yet?

But all those books were money. Some of those books became worthless just a few years after I bought them; I couldn’t get a penny for them on the used book market. They were relevant when I bought them, but they weren’t anymore—for example, books about certain technologies or books by politicians, etc. When I bought most of these books, I had much less money than I do now. It hurt my bank account. I could have considered these book purchases as an investment in my future. But most of them didn’t pay off (though some books did).

Today, with digital books, it’s even worse. Perhaps we don’t see the unread books every day, as they sit somewhere on our hard drive. But every now and then, we remember them.

When I was a child and a teenager, I had a different relationship with books. We didn’t have the money to buy many books. But I had a library card. And I spent a large part of my time in the library. There, you could find books, records, tapes, sheet music, and videos. I’m not sure when or why I lost that connection to the library. Recently, I rediscovered the public library:

  • We need to return to conscious decision-making. Not every wish, not every book we see, needs to arrive in the mailbox the next day.
  • In Hamburg, I pay €40 a year for a library card, and I can borrow as many books as I want (maybe not all at once, but are you really able to read 10 books in 4 weeks?). You can’t find everything you want in a library, but at least I can find at least 95% of the books I want to read. You can also request that a book be acquired. But you have to be patient. Someone else may have borrowed the book you want to read. But why should a book be so urgent that you need it immediately?
  • Our library also offers digital books and magazines, at no extra cost. It’s very convenient, and sometimes you can even start reading something right away.
  • If you have children: In the past, we bought many books for our kids (books can’t be bad, can they?). Some books you might still want to buy because they are read frequently over several years (like The Very Hungry Caterpillar, which is still a favorite even after reading it 100 times). But many other books are not that important. For the kids, I pay €3 a year, and I could probably even just use my own card for them. But I wanted them to experience the library themselves with their own card. The first time we went to the library, it was like paradise for them. We spent hours there. And we still do.
  • Which of the books you’ve read would you buy again? Which books hold important memories for you?

In the end, it’s about conscious decisions. We can buy anything we want, and it will be delivered the next day, with Amazon Kindle or PDFs even the same moment. Everything is just a click away. But books can also create clutter if bought without a real need. The need could, of course, be to have a place where you can rediscover old purchases. A public library, however, helps you slow down and spend less money. And if you fall in love with a book and want to read it again and again, you can always buy it.

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Not buying anything for 1 year – January report

The first month of 2022 is almost over. How did it go in terms of avoiding new purchases? This month went quite well, with two exceptions:

  • To protect our nearly 170-year-old wooden floor, I bought a mat (see photo below). I couldn’t find one secondhand.
  • The second item wasn’t supposed to be new, as I bought it used on eBay Kleinanzeigen. But it turned out to be brand new: an Oculus Quest 2. I had researched the VR headset on Amazon but didn’t buy it because of my anti-consumption vow, and when I found a used one nearby, I bought it. The seller had bought two and now needed money. But why on earth would I really need a VR headset?

I’m working on a new book project that will include a chapter on the metaverse and VR. I also wanted to try Horizon Workrooms for virtual meetings, maybe even in a classroom setting. However, I’ve realized that very few people I know own such a device, so virtual meetings will be challenging. Of my current 60 students, only one owns a headset—actually, it’s her partner’s. That’s already an interesting insight for the book, as it seems the network effect is not so easy to achieve here. Thanks to the headset, I also discovered that I still enjoy boxing after all these years, and I lose 100 calories every 10 minutes. But overall, it doesn’t feel good to have bought it.

However, I didn’t buy the Quest without selling something else. After barely using it for a few years, I sold my Ableton Push 2 on eBay (a piece of it is also visible in the photo). I sold it for the same price I paid for the Quest. I’ll probably sell the Quest after the book project is done. I sold my previous Quest for the same price I paid for it, so I hope this device won’t cost me any money in the end. The Ableton Push 2 cost me a lot of money since I only used it three times. So I paid about €200 per use. If I factor in the money I got back, it’s about €66 per use.

Other than that, I didn’t buy anything else this month, either new or used. To be honest, I had considered buying a Network Attached Storage (NAS), and although I could easily justify that I needed it for my work, I decided against it and stuck with my low-cost Open Media Vault solution using a Raspberry Pi. It’s not a particularly beautiful solution since all the parts are exposed, but it’s a low-maintenance option. Digital gadgets pose a challenge to my goal. Maybe I’ll write an article about that too.

The total result: €25.41 spent in January.

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Managing Finances and Budgets Better with Sub-accounts

I’m writing this article because I often find in conversations that managing one’s finances is a topic many struggle with, especially among students and pupils who haven’t learned it at home. So, I’ve written an article that I can always share:

I’m a big fan of budgeting, which means I plan relatively precisely how much money I want to spend on what each month. To make sure I don’t run out of money before the end of the month, I set aside money for different purposes at the beginning of the month into (virtual) envelopes. For example, for:

  • Household
  • Subscriptions
  • Mobility
  • Savings
  • Vacation

My experience is that if you don’t budget, you end up spending more money than you intend to. Especially when it comes to saving, I find it important to set aside the savings amount right at the beginning of the month, rather than saving whatever is left over at the end. Budgeting also makes decisions easier. For example, if I want to learn a new instrument like I did last year, I can determine how much I’m willing to spend on lessons, equipment, maintenance, etc., in order to stay within budget.

In the past, this was quite a complex process. You could use paper envelopes for different categories, plus a checking account, plus a savings account, etc. Or you could keep a household ledger. That requires a lot of discipline and can be time-consuming. Managing everything from one checking account still feels tricky to me.

How does it work exactly?

I share some details about my budgets here. Every month, I set aside money for the following areas:

  • Mobility: €100. I don’t own a car, and I get around by walking, cycling, sometimes using Cambio, occasionally taking an e-scooter or Moia, and I also use the HVV (Hamburg Public Transport) or the train. I don’t want to spend more than €100 a month on all of this. Most of the time, I stay well under €100, but when I have to make a longer trip, like to Berlin, it’s good to have a reserve. When e-scooters first came out, I initially spent a bit too much on them; of course, it was new and fun, but then I realized I was spending too much on them.
  • Health: €50. I have health insurance with a deductible, and I set aside money for that every month. In addition, I pay for anything the insurance doesn’t cover. If there’s any money left over at the end of the year, great, then it goes into my investment account.
  • Subscriptions and Membership Fees: €70. This includes Apple Music, my membership with D64, etc. I find it important to keep subscriptions separate because even if each one costs only a few euros a month, it adds up over the year.
  • Household Account: I won’t reveal the exact amount, but we try to stay within budget here. Ideally, you have a shared account with the other household members.
  • Vacation Fund: I am currently saving for this with Growney.
  • Pocket Money: €200. Yes, I pay myself pocket money 🙂 I use it, for example, to buy fish sandwiches. But I also try not to spend it all so that I can treat myself to something more occasionally. I also financed my flute this way.
  • Savings: I won’t disclose the exact amount, but I diversify my savings across different platforms—Growney, EstateGuru, Scalable, my financial advisor, and a solid reserve (3-6 months of salary) in a high-interest savings account.

In addition, there are areas for which I prefer to have separate accounts:

  • A small business account, through which I handle everything related to my side business (teaching assignments, book royalties, Google AdSense for income, web hosting, etc., for expenses). I like to keep this separate because the tax office will eventually want a piece of it, and it’s also easier for me to manage the taxes this way.
  • A property account, where everything related to my real estate is handled, such as rent, loans, management fees, property tax, etc. Occasionally, something needs to be repaired, and it’s always good to keep this separate from other budgets to avoid confusion.

If I had everything in one account, it would be complicated to keep track of. Sure, it’s possible, but I prefer to pay for the ability to keep everything separate and have things run automatically. Yes, it doesn’t sound particularly minimalist with multiple accounts, but I try to keep the effort as low as possible so that I don’t have to spend too much time on it.

Current accounts with sub-accounts

As I mentioned, some neobanks now offer current accounts with sub-accounts. N26 was, in my opinion, quite ahead with their Spaces. It’s a really good idea, especially because it encourages people to start budgeting their money. But for everything to run automatically, these Spaces need to have their own IBANs. Initially, they didn’t have them, but now they do. Unfortunately, the money didn’t always arrive reliably in my sub-accounts. And the support wasn’t very helpful. I don’t see why I should pay to be treated poorly. Even though N26 was the only one of the candidates to offer me an overdraft right away, which can sometimes be quite helpful.

bunq was my favorite for a long time, partly because they offer features that were really helpful, such as virtual credit cards. This allowed me to assign a unique virtual credit card to each sub-account. It was a great feature because I didn’t have to move money around all the time; I could book things like MOIA directly from the Mobility account. Unfortunately, like with N26, I ran into the problem that money didn’t always reliably show up in the sub-accounts after the German IBANs were introduced. When Google sent me a message that a payment had been returned, and bunq then told me that I wasn’t cooperating because I wasn’t getting Google to release more information, that was the final straw for me. I had already been frustrated with bunq’s overcharging, then the really rude support – no, I don’t want to pay for that, no matter how good the account is. So, I left quickly.

Now I’ve ended up with Vivid and am testing their offer. Like bunq, Vivid also offers virtual credit cards, but you have to pay €1 for each. I think it’s worth it. Vivid also doesn’t offer a debit card, which is a shame because you still need one often, something that both bunq and N26 provide. The signup process wasn’t entirely smooth for me, with lots of problems. BUT: The support is incredibly friendly AND actually helpful. Let’s hope it stays that way and that I’m not treated condescendingly like I was at N26 at some point. N26 also had great support in the beginning.

Vivid has the downside that its interface has too many bells and whistles I don’t need and can’t hide. I don’t want a stock rewards account, and the cryptocurrency features aren’t something I need, especially since you don’t have your own wallet. I would find that really interesting. But the Vivid account solves my problem of wanting to budget and automate things. However, I still have my salary transferred to a classic account with ING. Eventually, I would like to only have one account.

I also find Tomorrow interesting and would love to use them, but unfortunately, they don’t offer IBANs for their Pockets, which are similar to the Spaces at N26. When I asked, they said it was on their radar, but they couldn’t say when it would come.

What I don’t understand: Why aren’t direct banks doing anything about this? DKB offers an additional account, and so does ING, but more than one isn’t possible. Both banks responded with corporate blah blah to my inquiry. Both offer free current accounts and could finally make money from current accounts. But something is stopping them. I find it completely incomprehensible.

Conclusion

In conclusion, it can be said that no bank completely solves the problem. While direct banks offer very friendly support, they fail to launch accounts that enable proper budgeting. And the neobanks mainly suffer from poor and unfriendly support (except for Vivid), as well as bugs or missing features that don’t occur with the larger banks. I believe there is a real opportunity to solve this problem, but maybe not enough people see it as an issue that they can’t manage their finances without budgeting 🙂 Or when you think of overdraft fees, maybe these are just too good a source of income for banks to want to help customers manage their money more wisely.

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What is minimalism? And how does one start with it?

I will be compiling everything about minimalism in the coming weeks and months, based on my experiences, mistakes, and insights so far. The article will be updated continuously.

What is minimalism?

In addition to being an art movement, minimalism has developed into a lifestyle in recent years. There was even a documentary on Netflix about the topic, narrated by authors Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus. On Prime Video, there was the documentary My Stuff – What Do You Really Need, in which the protagonist brought all his belongings to a storage unit and was allowed to take out only one item each day. The fact that he had to run through the city naked in the snow to get to the storage unit at the beginning should not be interpreted as representative of the minimalist movement. Even German television produced a report on the subject, from NDR, titled How Many Things Do We Really Need?

In Germany, minimalists Christof Herrmann and Verena Schürmann are particularly well known, alongside a few others. Depending on who you read, you may come across very alternative lifestyles, but also people who want to live with fewer things, while still leading a relatively normal life. I count myself among the latter group. Of course, there have always been people living in a minimalist way, not always because they wanted to, and certainly, they wouldn’t have called it that themselves. However, the conscious reduction to fewer material possessions seems to be a trend of recent decades. One of the pioneers, even though he probably wouldn’t see himself as such, is Dieter Rams with his design credo “Less, but better.”

For me, minimalism means, on one hand, that I only buy what I truly need. Of course, the line between needs and desires isn’t always clear, and I focus on what truly fulfills my life— and those are not material things. On the other hand, minimalism for me means surrounding myself only with things that make me happy and/or have high utility. Naturally, I’m not perfect, and I’m not always consistent. For example, I’m writing these lines on an Apple MacBook Air M1 with 16 GB RAM and a 2TB SSD. Is that really absolutely necessary? Certainly not. I could be writing these lines on an old used Linux computer. I could also question whether this blog is necessary at all. But I’ve significantly reduced my gadget collection over the last few months. Since 2007, I’ve gone through stronger and weaker phases of minimalism; back then, I even tried not buying anything new for six months. But I wasn’t always strong.

What are the benefits of minimalism?

There are quite a few benefits, and here are probably the most important ones:

  • The less you have, the less you have to clean. You spend less time tidying up or looking for things.
  • When you have less, things look tidier right away. That’s incredibly calming.
  • The less you have, the less you have to take care of. Every item comes with additional costs, whether it’s the space it takes up or the time it requires.
  • You save your family a lot of time. If something happens to you and your family has to empty your place, they’ll be grateful if there aren’t thousands of things cluttering the apartment.
  • You’re helping the environment. Because everything that isn’t bought doesn’t have to be produced, doesn’t consume raw materials, and won’t later end up in a landfill, polluting the environment. Now, that’s a good argument!
  • You save a lot of money. Often, the things we buy aren’t really worth as much as we pay for them, something we realize when we try to get rid of them.
  • Getting rid of things is a topic in itself, because it’s often associated with effort. You don’t have that issue if you don’t buy anything in the first place 🙂 In the last few months, I’ve sold quite a bit on eBay/eBay Kleinanzeigen, and aside from the fact that in most cases I got far less for the items than I paid, it was often quite annoying. Even though I met a lot of nice people.
  • You need less space, possibly fewer pieces of furniture, and ultimately, a smaller apartment.

My “wardrobe” is a good example of how little you really need. And there are certainly people who have even less.

What are the disadvantages of minimalism?

Living minimally is just as unconventional in society as, for example, not drinking alcohol.

When I sold my car in 2011, friends and acquaintances told me that I was selling my freedom. In reality, I gained freedom because, as stated in Fight Club, the things you own actually own you. A car requires maintenance, parking, washing, etc. Okay, I have an advantage – I live in the city. But even with other examples, like not having a TV, questions arise. Many people won’t understand this, maybe because they’d have to question their own behavior. I can definitely say that it’s always a conversation topic, just like when I don’t drink alcohol at a business dinner. You easily get suspected of being a recovering alcoholic.

What’s the difference between minimalism and frugality?

Frugality is about learning to live with little money and saving enough to either reduce work hours or eventually stop working altogether. There are obvious overlaps with minimalism, but not every minimalist is necessarily part of the FIRE movement (Financial Independence, Retire Early). On the other hand, every frugal person will have to live minimally to achieve their goals.

I live somewhere in between. I haven’t resorted to eating from the trash, and I don’t constantly calculate how much interest I’ll lose by buying a sandwich at 50. But I don’t buy pointless things anymore, as you’ll see in the next section.

How to start with minimalism?

In my opinion, there are two main tasks:

  • Emptying your home
  • Changing your consumption behavior

For the first point, there’s a lot of literature available, such as Marie Kondo’s books. Kondo focuses mainly on asking what really makes you happy about the items in your home. She also has her own tidying technique. Some of it I use too, for example, how to fold T-shirts. It really does make things easier. But I wouldn’t label Marie Kondo as a minimalist. A good question to ask when decluttering is whether you would buy the item again. Another common question is what to do with something that hasn’t been used in years. Often, you delay the decision, so the items neither go away nor have a proper place. In reality, it’s not necessarily the things that weigh us down, but the decisions we need to make about what to do with them. Making decisions is exhausting.

Additional tips:

  • Sell/donate anything you haven’t used or worn in the last year.
  • Sell/donate anything broken that you can’t repair.
  • Do you really need three can openers? The expensive food processor you never use?
  • Get rid of books that you don’t love.
  • Use public libraries.

If this already sounds difficult, it gets even harder with the second point. Our consumption habits are the biggest problem. If we don’t get them under control, our home will quickly be filled with clutter again. It’s also not made easy for us to resist. And I have my biggest weaknesses with certain things. For example: When I see a new gadget that I think might help me, I’m usually quick to head to Amazon… but now, I close the browser as soon as I realize it. I used to be constantly looking for the next tool that might help. But now, I don’t believe in tools anymore. With every impulse to buy something, you should quarantine that desire. Is the urge still there after one day, seven days, or 30 days? For example: When the Apple AirPods Max were released, I ordered them. I eagerly awaited them. And then I barely used them. I thought I’d use them all the time, but unlike the AirPods Pro, which I’ve been using daily for over a year, the Max were often empty. I didn’t need two pairs of headphones. It was a total mistake to fall for the advertising. And after six months, I lost 200 Euros when I sold them. For maybe 20 uses. That’s 10 Euros per use. An expensive hobby. And surely everyone has examples like that.

When is it done right?

There’s no one-size-fits-all answer to this. You can only answer this question for yourself.

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Minimalism and Frugality – How to Retire After Just 5 Years of Work

The provocative title correlates with the extremes discussed in Jacob Lund Fisker’s 2010 book Extreme Early Retirement. And by “extreme,” I don’t mean the author’s suggestions themselves, but rather some of the thought-provoking ideas he presents. Fisker’s book represents, according to him, a philosophy that he formulated long before the current waves of frugality, FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early), and minimalism took off (by the way, I had written about living outside of consumerism back in 2007). Instead of just preaching, Fisker actually practiced what he preached. On an average income, he saved 75% of his net salary, learned how to live with little, and then stopped working—or worked only intermittently. One could also distill this down to the well-known wisdom that you don’t get rich by earning a lot, but by saving as much as possible.

This will not be a short blog post, sorry, because such a philosophy cannot be summed up in 150 words.

Reference to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave

Fisker starts with Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. To remind you (a better summary is certainly provided on Wikipedia): In a cave, people are imprisoned and have spent their entire lives shackled. They can only look at a wall; they cannot see their fellow prisoners or themselves, and they cannot see the exit behind them. On the wall, they see shadows cast by a fire burning between them and the exit. The shadows that the prisoners see become their reality, and they try to make sense of them.

If someone manages to escape the cave, they would first have to adjust to the daylight, which would be painful, but after a period of adjustment, they would no longer want to return to their old life. According to Socrates, the cave represents the sensory world that people typically perceive as normal. The ascent out of the cave represents the transition from the world of fleeting sensory objects to the idea of the Good, enabling rational action. For Fisker, those who are wage slaves and trapped in their culture are the prisoners of the cave, and by “wage slaves,” he means those who are dependent on a salary. They may switch jobs, but they cannot escape the labor market itself, and like the prisoners, they lack the imagination to leave, as they are focused on the wall.

The wall does not show who they are, but what they own. You see someone driving a Mercedes convertible, but not the debts they incurred or the stress that comes with it. Everyone looks busy, because that’s important, just as it’s important to take on debt, since the most successful people are those with the best credit scores. They are better at getting into debt than others. You work and pay off debts, a cycle known as “earning a living,” yet in reality, you have no time for actual life. The chains represent obligations and debt, but mostly the lack of imagination that other possibilities exist. The best prisons are those without visible bars. Either you win the lottery or earn enough to become financially independent, according to the perception of the prisoners. And if things aren’t going well mentally, you buy yourself something nice and go shopping.

How Do You Escape the Cave?

The core question in Fisker’s book is how to escape the money-earning-and-buying cycle and lead a more interesting life. For example, by learning a skill that saves you from hiring a service, building things yourself, earning money in alternative ways, and interacting with people.

Modern wage slaves, according to Fisker, live lives of material excess. They are consumers with multiple TVs, several streaming services, kitchen appliances, gadgets, phone contracts, vacations, and sometimes even time to play with their toys. It’s become incredibly easy to spend money. Instead of opening a can with a cheap can opener in 30 seconds, we work for 30 minutes to afford a designer can opener that does the job in 30 seconds. Many things that we used to do ourselves have become so distorted that we buy gadgets or services to do them for us. This is convenient, because, as Fisker points out, we’re too busy with the work that we need to do in order to pay for all of this. This is the first thing that must change. Once you can do things yourself, you no longer have to depend on someone else to do them for you. But this only works if you earn enough money. Once you lose your job, you’re lost.

The second step is questioning your consumption. “What do you do for a living, and what brands do you buy to express yourself?” is a question from Fisker’s book. From my own experience, it’s almost impossible to buy a black cardigan that doesn’t have a huge BOSS, Joop, or some other brand logo on it. These brands cost extra, but we get loans so we can spend even more money, because consumption is equated with success. If a new iPhone has only 3 percent more features, it gets bought, and the old one ends up in the trash (fortunately, Fisker’s logic here is not entirely accurate, because most iPhones and other phones are then resold to someone who has no problem with a used phone). But he is right that many perfectly functional things end up in the trash just because they are no longer fashionable (which reminds me again of the Rams shelf, which still looks modern after 60 years).

What’s worse, according to Fisker, is when you finance your consumption with credit. Then you are not only a wage slave, but also a debtor. You pay off a house or an apartment for 30 years (I find this exaggerated in Fisker’s book because not everyone does that), save for retirement, and then try to make up for the lost years and ruined health in the final years of life. You see how questionable consumer loans are in the following advertisement I saw yesterday in Hamburg:

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Digital Minimalism

I’ve been blogging about minimalism for 15 years. Digital minimalism is another form of conscious consumption. And apparently, the topic strikes a chord, because otherwise, Der Spiegel wouldn’t have locked an interview about it behind their paywall (“How to Break Free from Your Smartphone”):

Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism contrasts with his other bestseller Deep Work in that it doesn’t focus on work and productivity, but rather on our entire lives and the impact technology has on them.

Daniel Levitin’s The Organized Mind showed how easily our brains can be distracted, while Newport presents the opposite side: the attention economy, which primarily benefits those who can successfully market our time to advertisers. Those who think this is a modern phenomenon are mistaken—this started with the introduction of penny newspapers in 1830, where the readers were no longer the customers, but the advertisers in a newspaper.

According to Newport, the unconscious use of social media leads to exhaustion, anxiety, depression, and, above all, a waste of life’s time. Arguments such as social media helping us stay in touch with friends and family are countered by the point that this is not high-quality interaction—more “connection” than “conversation,” as Sherry Turkle distinguishes. When relationships are less digital (or when digital communication is used only to facilitate traditional communication), they are actually strengthened. The time we spend on Facebook and similar platforms is not only spent on lower-quality conversations but also on mindless scrolling through updates that give us the illusion of connection while leaving us feeling lonely.

However, Newport doesn’t advocate for completely abandoning technology. Instead, he encourages us to adopt a different attitude toward it, and he even paraphrases Dieter Rams’ phrase “Less, but better.” This leads to what he calls a digital declutter. Ironically, it was Steve Jobs, who was focused on mindfulness, who ensured that we carry around with us the symbol of constant connectivity in the form of the iPhone. His original goal was simply to have one device for both phone and iPod. The fact that the iPhone could also access the internet wasn’t even mentioned until late in the original keynote. We weren’t prepared for it. And suddenly, there was an app for everything:

 

We didn’t have time to think about what we truly wanted to get out of these new technologies (and even if we did think about it, like I did back then when I didn’t want a Blackberry, we later found too many reasons why a Blackberry might actually be a good idea). And since then, the door has been wide open for those who want to shape new habits in us:

Nir Eyal’s bestseller Hooked describes this mechanism in great detail. Fairly, Eyal also wrote the antidote to it. However, Eyal’s approach is not as elegant as Newport’s; it deals more with the symptoms, even though it sometimes touches on the causes. Where Eyal says that you can take back your time, Newport suggests you first consider what you want to fill it with. The mechanisms both describe, however, are the same.

Every post for which we might get a like or retweet is, for us, the same as using a slot machine—it triggers a dopamine release. The goal is to regain our autonomy and join the attention resistance, as Newport puts it. Digital minimalism, for him, is:

A philosophy of technology use where you focus your online time on a small number of carefully selected and optimized activities that strongly support what matters to you, while ignoring everything else. (my translation)

To this, he quotes Thoreau in Walden:

The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.

This, of course, applies not only to social media & co. When someone buys a new sports car, they also need to consider how much life energy goes into working for that car and whether it’s worth it to drive a sports car in exchange for that time. The profit gained from something must be weighed against the cost of the life energy needed to obtain it. Conversely, technology should be considered optional, as long as its temporary absence doesn’t cause the collapse of one’s (work) life. Can I no longer live a meaningful life without an app, or does the app simply provide some added value that I could get elsewhere? This is in stark contrast to FOMO. To truly understand which technologies are genuinely valuable, Newport suggests a 30-day break.

As I write this, I am on the 8th day of my digital break. Newport really makes this break seem appealing, and I even started it before I had finished reading the book. During the reading, I paused my Facebook profile and deactivated my Twitter account (dangerous, because after 30 days, it is permanently lost). Instagram is deleted, as are Telegram and WhatsApp. These many ways people could contact me had already been annoying. Then, I even uninstalled email. These exact steps were already suggested in Make Time, but for Newport, it’s not about dogmatically banning all these apps, but rather about understanding what you truly miss.

In fact, I only bought my last phone because I wanted the best camera and didn’t want to carry around another camera. I enjoy listening to music. And occasionally, I like to make calls. So, here’s what my home screen looks like now:

Of the slot machines, only Signal, Apple Messages, and Safari as a browser are installed. Everything else is either essential (for example, banking—no longer possible without a phone) or helpful (e.g., the Corona app). Additionally, I’ve now set the Do Not Disturb mode as the default. Only my favorites can still call me, but their messages won’t come through either. However, this isn’t just about distraction.

Solitude (better translated here as seclusion and not as loneliness) requires the ability to be undisturbed and not have to react to everything, or the freedom from input from others. Seclusion demands that we come to terms with ourselves when we are alone, allowing for deep thinking. Our desire for social interaction must therefore be complemented by periods of solitude. How much this already occupied me 14 years ago is shown in this blog post from 2007.

But Newport goes even further. It’s not just about stopping certain activities; as mentioned earlier, you must also consider what to do with the time and attention you’ve gained, so you don’t fall into a void. The smartphone allows us to quickly escape such moments. Most systems already track how often that happens:

(On that day, I made several changes to the configuration, which is why the value was so high.)

Newport suggests writing letters to oneself, engaging in real conversations (instead of chatting, liking, or commenting), joining an offline group, or doing something non-digital with your hands. I’m out when it comes to crafting, but at least I can play instruments. The point is to deliver your best, quoting Rogowiski:

Leave good evidence of yourself. Do good work.

Not using Facebook and the like should therefore not be seen as a sign that you’ve become some kind of eccentric. It should be viewed as a bold act of resistance against the attention economy. This has become increasingly difficult, as we now carry a full-fledged computer with us at all times and actively have to seek ways to limit its possibilities. Still, my reMarkable is one of my favorite work tools. I can’t check emails on it or quickly look something up. And more and more, I’m only using that device when I sit on the couch in the evening.

Furthermore, Newport’s approach means that you need to carefully examine where you still want to gather information. I reactivated Twitter after a week, but unfollowed almost everyone because I only want to follow those who truly provide valuable content. And that’s a very small number. A kind of information diet, so to speak.

I’m not at the point yet where I want to have a Light Phone or leave my smartphone at home most of the time (the Light Phone isn’t available in Germany yet). For now, the camera in my phone is still too important to me (I used to always carry a Fujifilm X100, whose battery was always dead at the critical moments). But after just a few days of digital break, I can already hardly imagine going back to Facebook or spending the first minutes of my day reading through feeds.

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Essentialism by Greg McKeown

On one of the first pages of the book Essentialism, McKeown quotes Dieter Rams, “Less but better.” It’s hard to find a better definition of Essentialism. I am reading this book in an armchair next to the 606 shelving system designed by Rams in 1960, and when I look up from the book, I see a poster of the film Rams, which I had co-financed a few years ago through Kickstarter. I can report firsthand that it’s not enough to surround yourself with objects by Dieter Rams if you want to dedicate yourself to Essentialism. 🙂

The Essentialism defined by McKeown is based on the following core principles:

  • If you don’t set priorities in your life, someone else will do it for you. Therefore, we must learn to say “No” so we can truly make a contribution. While we don’t always have control over our options, we do have control over choosing between them. It’s about not just recognizing that you have a choice, but also celebrating the possibility of choosing. If it’s not a clear “Yes,” then it’s a clear “No.” Instead of asking how to do everything at once, the question should be asked: which problem do you want to have? Some people require more “maintenance” than others, but they steal your time and turn their problems into yours.
  • The question an Essentialist should constantly ask themselves is: “Am I investing myself in the right activities?” It’s not about getting things done (as in GTD), but about getting the right things done. A lot is less important than it initially appears. The most important and difficult things should be done first.
  • We are not designed to have so many choices and make so many decisions for ourselves. This ties into Barry Schwartz’s observations in his book The Paradox of Choice.
  • We should reflect on what we truly want, best by asking three questions:
    • What deeply inspires me?
    • What am I particularly talented at?
    • What fulfills an important need in the world?
  • McKeown suggests an iterative process: Explore, Eliminate, Execute. For Execution, it’s important to withdraw to focus. “The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.” The Latin origin of the word “decision” comes from “cis” or “cid,” meaning to cut or even kill. Stephen King said, writing is human, cutting is divine.
  • The most important asset we possess is ourselves—our mind, our body. We must invest in them to get the best out of ourselves. What is the obstacle preventing us from achieving what we really want?
  • The Greeks had two words for time: Chronos, the time we measure, and Kairos, the time we feel when we live in the present. The Essentialist lives time in Kairos. Multitasking is not the problem; the belief that we can multitask is. The most important question: “What is truly important in this moment?” Occasionally, when overwhelmed with many competing tasks, you must pause and see what is really important.

Overall, the points are not new; they are more of a re-compilation of what already exists. What’s nice is that McKeown brings in various historical examples to illustrate his points. At times, the book repeats itself. Still, a recommended read.