25/03/14 - on minimalism

the past few months have seen my minimalism reach new extremes.

minimalism is something that's vaguely been a goal of mine since four or five years ago, and something i started actively pursuing maybe two or three years ago.

my switch to gentoo in november seems to have been one of the initial triggers for a bigger shift in my mentality. i've been travelling more, and shorter trips, which means i've felt the inconvenience of too much luggage more than ever before. thanks to having enabled the searchmysite engine on searxng, i discovered onebag.com, which introduced me to even more minimalist travelling (i always travelled with relatively little compared to the average person, but i've now learned i can do with much less).

the digital minimalism that comes as a natural result of compiling everything locally, and constantly seeing the number of dependencies that get dragged along with every bit of software that i install, seems to have acted as a strange reinforcement to my material minimalism.

and as i've progressively gotten rid of more and more things, my house has started to feel too big. and this is what really gave me pause.

has this philosophy that i've played with for years really gotten now to the point where it would actually influence my choice of apartment?

and if so, is that a good thing? is that something i'm happy with?

would i actually move in pursuit of less but better?

i've also run into the roadblock of hobby-related odds and ends. i've accumulated way too many hobbies in the last decade, maybe partially the result of me having gifted kid syndrome, and dropping one hobby for another as soon as i started to plateau. [1]

most hobbies, of course, have an appreciable amount of paraphernalia without which the hobby cannot be practiced.

and so i have a dozen ink bottles, a box full of nibs and pen holders, at least twenty sharpies, easily forty coloured pencils, a japanese calligraphy kit and the necessary rice paper, microcontrollers, a bag of transistors, a set of mechanical keyboard switches, multiple sets of keycaps, half a dozen rubik's cubes in all shapes and sizes, something like twenty kilograms of 3d printer filament, and more; all gathering dust in one place or another.

i find it the hardest to get rid of these things, because they are all hobbies i still enjoy to some extent, even if i rarely practice them. "what if one day i want to draw, and i no longer have my coloured pencils?" a voice in the back of my mind whispers. "what if i get rid of these pen nibs that i had such a hard time finding, and then afterwards find that i still wanted to use them?"

i of course know, rationally, that i haven't touched half of these things in years, and the possibility of maybe wanting to take the hobby up again in future is fairly slim.

when it comes to my apartment, i know i could, and even should downsize. even when i came to see the place before renting, one of my first thoughts was "this is too big for me". and now that i have progressively less things in the house, it's begun to feel something more like a museum than a home.

and yet it's so nice - i'm the first tenant, so everything is new; my landlord is amazing, calling me his son, and even bringing me food from time to time; for as big and as nice as the place is, my rent is dirt cheap; the location is amazing, and convenient; and although it's not in the contract, i told the landlord i was planning on staying for two years, and i would really hate to go back on my word.

at what point does it stop being about the actual benefits that i get from minimising, and become nothing more than dogma to a philosophy?

how far am i willing, or better still, how far ought i to go in pursuit of an ideal?

how much of my discontent with my current lifestyle is a simple case of "other side greener"?

what is it that i'm chasing?

contact me at: tsukaj@tilde.club