Every little thing.
You think that you need Every little thing.
You think that you need Every little thing that's just feeding your greed.
Oh, I bet that you'd be fine without it.
Yes,
Welcome to the Minimalist Podcast, y'all.
Hello, everybody.
My name is Joshua Fields Milburn, and joining me here at our studio in beautiful West Hollywood California, is my good friend TK Coleman.
It's your favorite Coleman besides Ken and Gary.
And Hughes.
That's my Mount Rushmore right there.
Yeah, man.
That's your Mount Rushmore of Coleman.
And Adam.
Adam B., Oh man, we got a lot to talk about today, TK.
Coming up, we're talking about minimizing information clutter.
I had some revelations this weekend around this.
So I was talking to my wife just yesterday and I had spent so much time on the production notes for this and going through everything earlier last week.
And my wife goes, what are you guys talking about on the podcast this week?
You're going down to LA tomorrow, right?
And I was like, yeah, I don't remember what we're talking about.
I just feel like I'm bombarded with so much stuff that I can't.
Wait a minute.
We're talking about information clutter.
So this is, you've reached me at the perfect time to talk about this topic.
What else are we talking about here?
Oh, enjoying learning without trying to optimize your entire life, letting go of the news when it feels overwhelming, and much, much more.
Also on page three, we're going to talk about why you're terrified of empty space in your home.
And I have three items today for our added value segment, a product, a movie, and a song.
Let's start with our callers, TK.
If you have a question for the show, join the program 406-219-7839, or you can email a voice recording right from your phone to podcast at theminimalistscom.
Let us know if you're a Patreon subscriber so we can prioritize your message.
By the way, big thanks to our patrons.
Your support keeps this podcast 100% advertisement free because sing along at home, y'all.
Advertisements suck.
We need to get Bobby Brown to do that.
Then I think TK would sing along too.
Can you imagine?
We were just listening to the new edition right before the show started here.
Advertisements do suck.
Our first question today is from Erin.
Hi, Minimalists.
My name is Erin, and I am a Patreon subscriber from Philadelphia.
And I've accidentally created a really, really horrible habit.
I cling to information, wisdom, and knowledge.
So when I read a book or watch an educational YouTube video, even participate in a social interaction, I'm like a freaking turkey vulture and I'm scavenging for the key takeaways, the wisdom, the information, like all these things I think will help me get me further in my career health, relationships and life.
And it's almost like I'm trying to distill the meaning of life from literally everything, from all the minutia.
And so I fear becoming overwhelmed and apathetic about life and losing the magic of uncertainty and losing the true joy of learning which is.
It's something I've always prided myself on, and I don't like that.
All of a sudden, the optimization culture has gotten to me and I've made a habit of trying to be more, be better and cling to all this information and knowledge and blah blah, blah.
So I just really love your advice on letting go of the need to cling to knowledge and wisdom to become better and to just exist and learn for the sheer sake of it.
Thank you.
Now, first off, TK, I think we found our next Malabama here.
Shout out Aaron.
And just the bubbly personality.
What a great voice.
Amazing way to start this episode.
I hear sort of two questions here, TK.
Maybe you can help me parse this.
The first one is when does this love of learning?
Because you could tell Aaron's passionate about learning and she mentioned info knowledge, wisdom.
But when does that love of learning turn into like this, scavenging compulsively for self-improvement?
Well, the when is different for each person, but the how is the same.
The how is when people are able to successfully predict and gamify our attention span.
There has always been a distinction between what we want legitimately and genuinely versus what we can be triggered into desiring compulsively.
So if you're sitting at home, for instance, and you're thinking oh, my fridge is empty, I need to go grocery shopping, and you challenge yourself to sit down and make a list of all the things you think you need, sure the chances are high that when you get to the grocery store there will be one or two things you genuinely need that you will have forgotten to write on your list and you'll be like oh, I did forget to get lemons right.
But additional needs magically come into existence.
It may take the form of I got to get that right now, or I wish I had more money because I would get that, because that's probably better for me.
Oh, I didn't know that there were 10 different brands and the one that I get is probably not even the best brand.
I probably need those.
There is an art and a science to getting people to compulsively buy things they don't need.
And I heard somebody say about attention.
They says, you're not losing your attention.
It's being systematically taken away from you.
And so I want to say to Aaron, hey, this is not all on you.
The solution, yes, it's up to you what you do about it once you become aware of it.
But this is not all on you.
The headlines are better than ever.
The production quality is better than ever.
The podcasters, the spokespersons of the ideas, the charisma, the cinematography, the music, all of these elements, it's better than ever.
And every single day, hundreds of new YouTube videos are coming out that tell us this is the reason why you're failing.
This is why everything you've been taught is wrong.
And those are just like terrible TK examples of a good headline because I'm not even good at that.
But when you look at the real headlines, they all stir up within you that fear that you are missing something, and there's something that you haven't heard.
And no human being has thought about this before this particular podcaster said it.
And that creates a strong sense of information FOMO.
We'll talk in a moment about some things you can do to protect yourself against that.
But this is something that is happening to all of us.
The other night I was going through this um my phone and I was adding YouTube videos to my playlist.
I love creating YouTube playlists and I'm creating this amazing playlist on systems thinking.
And after a while I'm like I'm thinking to myself, cause all the videos in the playlist are like 45 to 60 minutes.
And after a while I go, wait a minute, I've been adding to playlists for about an hour and 15.
I could have watched one of the videos in an existing playlist during the same amount of time, but it felt like such a noble exercise.
It was very enjoyable. internet.
In the moment, it feels like I got to know what they're talking about.
But then after you eat it, it's kind of like, oh, that wasn't very nutritionally dense.
It's like that Snickers that I had to have in the moment, but that didn't fill me up and give me the energy I really need.
I like what you're talking about.
A lot of our practices sort of ape the form of productivity.
It almost as if it is filling me up.
It's like if I went to the gas station.
Just pulled up to the pump, it feels like I went to the gas station.
But if I didn't do anything to fill my car up, then I just didn't do anything.
I did all of the motions and oh yeah, I went to the gas station today.
I could say that and nothing actually happened.
And Erin said she's a turkey vulture and she mentioned three terms here information, knowledge and wisdom.
Can you break down maybe how you would make a distinction between those three terms?
Yeah, information is data and you don't have to do anything with it in order for it to be what it is.
It's just something that is available to be considered, something available to be consumed.
It's just data that has been organized for the sake of being processed.
Whereas knowledge.
I would say the difference between knowledge and wisdom is, I would say, knowledge is a set of directions, wisdom is a sense of direction.
Knowledge is very specific.
Once you have it, you can memorize it, you can internalize it and it does help you navigate your reality.
But wisdom is different from that.
It's something that is enhanced by knowledge.
But even in the absence of knowledge, if you have wisdom, you can be able to find your way around, even if it's not the most efficient, because you have a sense of where you're going.
So you know people that are like this.
I have an older brother who has a great sense of direction.
You can put him in any new town place.
He's never been and he just has a good sense for where the highways are, how to get to places, and he's never going to be lost, even though he may not have GPS.
My wife told Totally that way.
She's my GPS.
Yeah.
And there are things that you can do to cultivate when it comes to navigating the world.
And what you want is to read things, consume things, engage things, participate in conversations that can help you cultivate a sense of direction, because they're expanding your worldview.
They're expanding your knowledge of first principles.
Whereas a lot of the more titillating stuff that we're seduced to look at It's just information or it just offers us knowledge in a way that's really sexy in the moment.
But then after the fact, you're thinking, oh, I guess that was kind of a dud, you know?
I often think of information as wisdom stunt double.
Like it can appear to be wisdom.
And I feel like I'm becoming more wise just because I'm consuming more information.
I'm doing more.
And so the amount of effort feels like i'm accomplishing something, the same way that if i step on the gas and oil slick, my tires are spinning and there's a lot of effort that's going into that, a lot of energy goes into that, but i don't get anywhere right yeah, and so let's expand on that distinction a little bit more.
The information side of things nothing wrong with information.
We all want information.
The problem is when it turns into clutter and we start tripping on it, or when we start mistaking it for knowledge.
Or think of the goal as the cultivation of insight, the ability to see deeply into things, the ability to perceive, the ability to recognize what is there to be seen, to plumb the inner depths of something.
Whereas we all have examples of memorizing the rules or reading the employee handbook, knowing what the menu says.
And you got all the information there and maybe you're serving a customer and they say, oh, can I make this modification on the salad?
And you don't know what to do.
And you see in the rookie employee would be to hide behind the information.
Like, nope, that's the way the salad comes.
That's the way you have to have it.
It's like my avocado mattress story from last week.
Right, right.
They're like, we're sorry that you screwed up our relationship.
Yes.
We deeply apologize.
And it's hiding behind the information.
That's exactly right.
And you see this even sometimes in conversations and interviews, which is why politicians might be less inclined to go on some informal podcast where someone could randomly ask them some question like
What do you think about this R&B musician?
Or what do you think about this scandal?
Because you don't have a script for that.
The script tells you to avoid those kinds of questions because the thoughts you provide about them are very divisive, very distraction, and they could scandalize you.
So the script says, avoid that.
Answer these and answer these in that way.
And when someone pulls you off script because you don't have any information to draw on, any knowledge to draw on, you don't know what to do and you get yourself in trouble.
But when you have a sense of direction...
There is the ability to manufacture perspective extemporaneously, because you have a way of looking at things that says I don't need a script.
I can take what is being given to me and I can hold it up and I can look at it.
I can observe it and I can see how it speaks to me.
I can see what strikes me as interesting.
That's the thing that we want.
And here's a way that I think you can go about getting this.
I had a friend of mine say to me I am certain that will be useless 100 years from now and no one will care about it.
But there are some things that are gonna truly be evergreen and they're gonna matter.
But it's very, very difficult to know what that is.
It's like searching for a needle in a haystack.
And so what you have to do is find a way to stay grounded in the evergreen, find a way to stay grounded in the timeless.
Nothing wrong with looking at YouTube videos and so on.
But so one of the things I do is I make it a point to say, just like with shopping for groceries, I'm going to think about what I want to know before I go shopping.
Because if I get on YouTube, every YouTuber is going to convince me that I want to know what they're talking about.
And I'm powerless to resist that because it just seems really important.
And my brain is easy to deceive.
But if I stop and I say what am I interested in, before someone dangles a piece of intellectual candy before me.
These are the questions here.
Let's write those down.
These are the topics here.
Let's write those down.
These are the things that I want to know.
Let's write those down.
Now let's go searching for those things.
And I try to you know like when I find some video, I try to keep myself away from watching things in the moment.
If I find something that I want to watch, I try to put that in the playlist so that the next time I have a listening session I pull something up that I previously decided.
That protects me against impulsive watching.
If I want to watch it now.
Nope, I'll put it in a playlist because there's a chance I might not want to watch that tomorrow.
But when I pull it up and I do want to watch it tomorrow I know that it's something that's true, to my interest.
And I also try to focus more on books, more on essays, more on articles, more on books than YouTube videos, because those tend to not only be more well-formed and substantial, but you know that if you're exercising the discipline to read a book, you're interested in that.
Part of why we can be so easily deceived by tweets, YouTube videos, shorts and TikToks, even though they claim to be informative, is they're so low cost.
You don't really know what you look like when you have a significant trade-off to make.
And it's hard to be honest that way.
And there are real artists who can use like tweets as their art form.
I see poets all the time who use Twitter as a publishing means and Instagram, same thing, right?
But that doesn't mean that every single tweet is made equally.
And I would say the same thing about books.
We obviously know as well.
I heard Naval Ravikant talk about it's better to just have read the same 100 books over and over, and over again for the rest of your life if they're the appropriate or right books.
Hundred books, right.
If they move you in the right direction, toward this knowledge and wisdom that we're talking about, because you're never going to run out of information.
And I think this is where you already answered this question.
Most of the second half of the question is basically like how do I let go of that need to optimize everything?
And I think it starts with some boundaries, whether it's the future clutter rule we use that with Before I make a purchase.
I'm going to stave off future clutter before I bring it into my life.
So if I'm at the store, I start asking these six questions.
And one of them is like, will this add value to my life?
But you don't have to ask that question only of material goods.
You can ask that about, am I going to watch this YouTube video?
Will this add value to my life?
Well, I don't know.
Okay, let me answer some other questions here then, right?
Is this the best use of this money if I'm purchasing something?
But what are my other resources I'm spending on this information?
Time, attention, energy.
There is also the opportunity calls, which is, is this the best use of this time?
If I'm going to watch a 60-minute video, great, okay. is this the best use of these 60 minutes?
Now, of course, that can fall into a different trap of optimization as well, as I need to squeeze every second out of every hour.
That's not what I'm talking about.
Sometimes the best use can be what we were talking about last week, the art of gazing just watching rain fall on the tree outside the window might be the best use of those 60 minutes or 60 seconds, or whatever it might be, these contemplative practices that don't require information.
I don't need more information in order to gaze contemplatively at a plant.
But I do need a level of discipline and attention, and I need some time for that.
And if I'm not careful...
Everything else, all the information, because it feels hyper urgent.
We're going to talk about news and breaking news here in a moment because it feels so hyper urgent.
It distracts me from the things that are important.
Urgent is not the same thing as important.
It can feel the same because, let's face it, if we have an emergency right now, that's extremely urgent.
The studio is on fire. yeah, that's pretty important, right?
I need to find my way out of here, right?
But there can be other things that are urgent, because it's really urgent to Professor Sean or Savvy D but it may not be urgent to me at all.
It doesn't mean they're wrong for having an urgency, but as soon as I pick up someone else's emergency and turn it into my urgency, I have to set something else down in order to juggle what they would like me to juggle.
And that is especially true with the cascade of information, the avalanche of more more more, more.
It's a type of consumerism.
And I also think there's a world in which we believe that I'm going to reach an endpoint. as though i'm going to make it to the end of the internet i will often joke sometimes i'll um if i'm watching something on the phone someone sends me something or if i download instagram i don't keep social media on my phone anymore but if i need to post something i'll download it and then i'll scroll for a minute and i'll get to a video that's so absurd i'm like what am i doing with my time here it's like the stark reminder of like this definitely isn't the best use of this time And I'll just joke like, oh, reach the end of the internet, delete the app and move on.
Because the truth is I will never reach the end of the internet.
I'm just going to reach the end for me because this is no longer the best use of that time.
Now, Aaron, I do want to send you a copy of Very, Very Simple.
It's an audiobook that TK and I both recorded together.
You can actually download it for free over at very, very simple dot com.
Over there, you can find the e-book edition there as well.
Also, it's relatively affordable on Audible and Kindle if you prefer to download to consume it on those platforms.
Or you can get the audio book for free or the beautifully designed ebook for free.
And it's really about setting up some of these boundaries with your stuff, but also with the information.
I think about the future clutter rule, but what about the Wednesday rule?
Am I gonna be happy that I spent an hour scrolling through social media next Wednesday?
Am I going to be grateful that I did?
And by the way, that's not a rhetorical question.
The answer might be yes.
And if so, wonderful.
If it's going to delight you next Wednesday that you spent 45 minutes on TikTok today, who am I to tell you not to?
But at least allows you to set up that boundary for yourself.
So check out Very, Very Simple.
It's 12 tools for a simpler life.
You can read it or listen to it in like less than an hour hour and a half for the audio book, because we did a little mini podcast with each.
And you can walk away with some tools you can actually implement in your life right now.
Now, before we get back to our callers, let's examine the question of the week, TK.
Here it is.
At what point does information stop serving you? and start suffocating you?
At what point does information stop serving you and start suffocating you?
Now, before we get pithy, let's hear how some of our patrons answered this question.
Jeanette said, the news today is suffocating.
Reading it Watching it, hearing it is depressing and infuriating.
Avoiding it is almost impossible, yet the need to protect my sanity and blood pressure is real.
TK, I agree with Jeanette.
Was the news always this overwhelming?
No, it was not.
Even if it was overwhelming, it was never always this overwhelming.
We literally do live in a very different world than what existed 30 years ago, 50 years ago and so on.
There are simply more options.
Once upon a time, when you said the word news, there were only a few things that a person could even imagine.
That was one of a handful or less television channels that they could turn to at a certain time in the day that had the news.
There was no all news, all day sort of thing.
It's like NBC, CBS, ABC, whatever it may be.
And this is the hour where I tune in because I don't want to miss the news.
You could actually miss it.
That was a thing once upon a time.
The second thing that people thought about was a paper.
And that was usually limited to the city that they lived in.
You could maybe have like the Westchester local paper, or you could have the big Chicago, sometimes Chicago Tribune right.
You've got the Herald or the Tribune.
And that's pretty much it.
And it was a really cool thing.
If you happen to be on a road trip and you go into a gas station and you're going through Omaha or something like that and you see their newspaper.
That was a big deal.
You might pick that up as a souvenir or Just to see what do they talk about here?
What's news to them?
You didn't know that in the past.
And then the third thing people would think of was a magazine like the New York Times or something along those lines, that things that had information that was kind of in the realm of what people consider to be informed.
Now you have a device that travels with you everywhere you go.
And whenever you are missing the news, it's because you are choosing to not tune in, because it's going on all the time.
That is truly more overwhelming.
And we need to figure out how we're going to manage that in a way that previous generations just didn't have to deal with.
It's breaking news all the time.
But if the news is always breaking, then the news is broken.
And we prize it in really interesting ways.
I remember Rob Bell talking about this once, where he was saying that like okay, remember 9-11.
And the day after 9-11 like, the front of every newspaper was, of course, the pictures of the towers coming down, and it was a newsworthy event.
And yet eventually, whether it's 9-13 9-14 9-15 October 14th, whatever it is, there's going to be a day where the next above the fold news headline is Kim Kardashian buys 60 million home in Calabasas.
And we treat those things as though they are the same thing.
We give them the same space and we give them the same space in our mind.
And it's always breaking news.
And it feels urgent because there's always something to be worried about, to be concerned about, to be upset at, to be frustrated by,
And man, that actually brings me to my pithy answer here, which is the news doesn't teach you how to think.
It tells you what to think about.
And so I don't I don't know.
I don't shun the news.
I don't try to hide from the news.
I don't even necessarily avoid the news.
I simply don't seek it out anymore.
I find it because it seeks me out anyway.
If something's going to happen, I'm going to find it's going to find its way to me.
Whether it's basketball news or political news, I don't find myself reaching for it anymore, because it reaches for me just fine.
And when you try to avoid it, you really experience the power of that, right?
You realize, man, I'm trying to be ignorant of things and I can't be even if I try.
I do this every election year after voting.
I will try to see how many days I can go without figuring out who won the presidency, or and it's almost like It's impossible
I certainly couldn't go a month.
Yeah, I probably couldn't go a week.
Usually it's spoiled for me in a couple of days, even if I set the expectation with friends and family.
I don't want to know.
Please, no spoilers.
I haven't seen the final episode yet.
And that's what it feels like.
But then everyone's like, oh, no, no, no.
Did you?
It's like spoiler alert.
Like I.
It's going to find its way to you is basically what I'm saying here.
Sunny said, information stops serving me when I'm constantly thinking about questions to ask the internet every few minutes.
I always feel like I have to reach for the phone to get an answer right away.
It's annoying spending so much time on the phone just to find arbitrary factoids that didn't enrich my life in the slightest.
TK, are we addicted to factoids?
No, I think we're addicted to ease and the factoid phenomenon is just one manifestation of that.
I think the question to ask here is what would you do, and what have human beings done throughout history, if the answer were not so easy?
What would you do if the answer wasn't so accessible?
What would you do if you encountered a word and you didn't know the meaning of that word and you couldn't just pick up your phone?
Human beings have found a way to figure that out for more time than what we've had the internet.
You do things like maybe you go grab a book.
You'd grab a dictionary.
You'd ask someone.
You would freaking wait.
And oh my gosh, the transformative power of having to wait on something that you want or even need.
I need to know the meaning of this word.
And there's no one around that can tell me.
And there's no dictionary in the house.
I guess I'm going to have to make myself read this book and somehow hang on to that thing that I don't understand and see if I can gather enough understanding from the context, see if I can figure it out, or just fricking wait two days.
I think that does something to the mind and it makes you a different kind of person.
But when you have a device that is rescuing you from the inconvenience of having to think, of having to perform your own calculations, of having to come up with a word, of having to rearrange that sentence, of having to know what to say.
It's convenient, but it's also dehumanizing in the sense that it compromises your ability, that you have to do these things for yourself.
Remember what Erin was saying earlier when she called in?
She said, I feel like I'm always trying to distill the meaning of life.
And what she was talking about is all of these sort of factoids.
And I think about Alan Watts.
He talks about the meaning of life is to be alive.
And I find that to be fascinating.
It's like it's almost a tautology.
Right.
But we're always seeking some sort of completion through information.
If I just get enough information, I'll be complete.
Whether I reach the end of the Internet or I finish this book or I read 100 books that are on my book list, then I'll be complete, right.
No, then you'll reach the horizon and there'll be a new horizon.
There will always be a direction in which you want to go.
And it may not continue to be the same direction.
But I think that's the allure of these factoids.
It's a type of information consumerism.
Whereas purchasing things, I feel like it's going to fill the void.
Literally, in my home, it's going to fill some of the empty space.
But really, I'm telling myself it's going to fill this void inside me.
But information... that goes immediately into me, right?
And so that must fill me up.
And I get it.
I enjoy reading.
I enjoy consuming.
But when we are always consuming the factoids, seeking them out and maybe even becoming addicted to seeking information because it just becomes habitual.
Maybe that's a better way to put it.
It's like we're habitually searching for more information because Under the guise that it's going to complete us.
And so it doesn't work.
And just like buying more stuff doesn't work.
So we try to get more and more and more.
And then that doesn't work.
We try to get better information.
And we never feel complete.
We feel like Aaron did a moment ago, where it's like I'm a turkey vulture who's filled with information.
But it may even be getting in the way of the wisdom.
Moni says, information feels overwhelming when I can't hear my own inner voice anymore.
I deleted Instagram recently because I received so many tips for how to live my life that I stopped listening to the voice within.
Two weeks after deleting it, my mind was finally quiet enough for me to realize it was time to end the relationship I was in.
I finally listened.
Now there are no outside suggestions and weak moments anymore, and I am very much attuned to my needs and desires.
TK, this is why you're considering getting rid of your smartphone.
I know you talked about that recently, but where are you with that?
Yeah so um, i'm i'm pretty much locked in man the.
The phone that i want, after a whole lot of research, is the light phone too, because that's the one that meets the various needs i have of not having any downloadable apps, no social media access, and it's one of the few that doesn't have a camera.
And i i don't want a camera because i want my phone to be boring, i don't want it to be entertaining, i just want it to provide me with minimal communication capacity.
I want to strip it away of my ability to entertain myself, precisely because of the problem that's being described here.
And because I have to make this prefacing remark this is no opinion about what anybody else needs to do.
But just in terms of being honest about the combination of my own weaknesses and the way that I'll need to live in order to be the person I want to be.
I need to make my smartphone boring.
So I'm ditching the smartphone.
I'm getting a plain phone so that I can't meet any of the needs I have in life by reaching for a device and getting some of that fake soothing, that fake healing.
I heard an addiction expert say that addiction is based on the effort to avoid an encounter with legitimate pain.
I want to create more space for me to encounter my legitimate pain, my legitimate wounds, the areas where I need healing.
I need to reclaim my ability to be more bored more often, so that I can see what I'm really made of and what life's really about.
And that's going to be worth the inconveniences of no smartphone.
Talk about those inconveniences real quick, because.
I think for some people, it's just too inconvenient.
But that's kind of the point.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
You talk about this a lot.
When you say, in any area of life where you know you have weaknesses, one of the best things you can do is introduce friction.
Now that seems absurd on the surface, because we all know what it's like to be able to override the friction that we create.
You put up website blockers on your computer.
I'm going to stop myself from looking at this.
But you're the one that put it up, right?
You can get around that if you work hard.
Yeah.
It's going to take you 15 minutes of hard work to do the thing you know you don't want to do in your sober moments.
Or it's going to take you having to leave your home and walk to the car, or get up out of your bed and go to the kitchen.
It's just enough time to give yourself some pause.
And you might say, If the whiskey was here, I'd totally drink it.
But I don't feel like going to the liquor store.
And that can work in your advantage.
So it's about trying to tip the scales in the direction of how you want to behave.
But inconveniences are things like...
Hey, you have no camera.
You can't participate in those moments where someone's like oh, get a picture of that, or you see something cool.
You got to figure out what your relationship is going to be.
To cool things, you see, and this instinct, you have to capture it for other people.
You got to figure out what you're going to do with that when it comes to paying for parking.
Smartphones are incredibly inconvenient.
I generally don't pull out my wallet ever when I'm paying for things.
My wallet is often not with me unless I'm driving.
Sometimes I'll just grab my license and my insurance card and put it in my pocket.
But I use that phone for everything and it's so fast and it's so convenient.
I'm taking my ability to do that away.
That's gonna be pretty inconvenient.
And then just all the fun things.
There are some YouTube or there are some apps YouTube would be one of them are incredibly valuable to me and I'm not addicted to them.
They don't do any harm and they're going to get punished.
They're going to be the kids that are like why can't we play with you, just because the other ones are being bad?
And I'm going to have to look at them and say sorry Spotify, sorry Pandora, you know.
Sorry YouTube, you can't be on my phone because you're the casualty of war for this bigger spiritual battle that I'm fighting.
What is the thing you struggle with most with a smartphone?
Because it doesn't seem like it's as typical for the average person.
But there is a type of information clutter in this.
Stolen moments.
It's the capacity to pick it up and not even have a reason for why I picked it up.
I'm becoming increasingly aware of this, like it was described here.
I can be reading a book.
I could be doing something that I enjoy.
I could be watching a movie with Michelle.
But every five minutes, there's the itch.
I just want to pick it up.
What are you looking for?
Are you expecting a text?
Who's reaching out to you Saturday night?
Right.
You know what I mean?
Like, like your only emergency is sitting next to you.
Like if they need you, like they're in big trouble, right?
Like what are you picking it up for?
But I got to pick it up.
And then I pick it up and I run through the cycle.
Check the text.
Nothing there.
No dope in me.
Check the Gmail.
Nothing there.
No dope in me.
Check Instagram.
Nothing there.
Facebook.
Nothing there.
Let's repeat the cycle.
Text, email, Facebook.
Hey, let's go on YouTube.
Nothing.
It grabs me there.
Let's, I have an ability to be in line and it's like, oh man, like I'm in this coffee shop and I want a coffee.
I'm itching and that's three people in line.
And I'm such a victim of some, you know, cosmic injustice that I got to wait.
Let me look at my phone and rescue myself from this boredom.
It's like, I don't want that.
Like, I want to be unable to do that because I know who I was before that.
And I want to see who I am now without that.
Just last night, I went to Sprouts to get some groceries online.
All of the machines were down, express lanes, all of that.
I had like 10 items.
It took me like five minutes to get my items in my cart.
And the line is like 25 people back.
And I deleted a lot of apps from my phone.
I still have the smartphone right now, but it's pretty boring.
And so I really can't do anything with it.
And so I just had it in my pocket and I'm just in line and I turn around.
And the guy next to me, I'm like, this is crazy, ain't it?
He's like, yeah, I know, man.
This is crazy.
What happened?
I was like, yeah, well, I went up there to the express lane and they say the computers are down.
He's like, wow.
He was like, that is crazy.
And then there's a lady next to me and she's holding like, you know, five things in her hand.
And I said, I bet you were thinking, I don't need a cart because I'm going to hold it.
She's like, right.
That's exactly what I was thinking.
And now I got to hold it for 30 minutes.
And it's like, hey, did I become best friends?
Do we exchange numbers?
Will we ever see each other again?
No.
But that was human, man.
Yeah.
That was human.
I need more of that.
Yeah.
There's two things you're making me think of.
One is the searching, the sort of casino of slot machine.
All right.
Another text, another Gmail, even it's not even social media.
It's like any sort of burst of dopamine.
And then if I get nothing, it's like, oh, but the opposite for me, I have the opposite problem.
And maybe it's because I'm more popular than you, but maybe because I actually get notifications and DMs.
DMs are open.
Um, no, uh, the, it's the volume also.
Now I feel like I have something to do and it could be something like this morning, right before we were about to record the podcast.
I have like six text messages and I'm like I want to respond to all of these right now.
And I feel like a bad human for not responding.
I have to stop myself saying, well, no.
The reason that so many people text you so much Josh, is you've set this expectation that you're going to respond so quickly.
And so for me, it's also about putting distance between the response.
So I'm not simply... reacting, I'm taking time to thoughtfully respond.
And not everything requires a response.
Not everything requires a notification.
Not everything requires that I go seek it out right now and find the information so I can extinguish any fear that I might have.
No, sometimes sitting with that fear and you realize the fear itself is unfounded.
Jay said, information feels like clutter.
Oh wait, real quick, before we do that, You decided for Lent, you're rage quitting social media?
I am filled with rage.
A protesting society.
LeVar Coleman over here.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
No social media for Lent.
So when I get the light phone too, which isn't even out for a couple of months, the phone I want, when I get it I won't even have the option of doing social media on my phone.
Anyway,
And so what I'm trying to do is have a permissionless mindset.
I don't like the idea of being like oh, i figured out how i want to live and what i want my relationship to the phone to be, but the smartphone i mean that, but the phone that i want isn't available until this date, so i have to wait on something else to be the man that i want to be.
I hate that way of thinking right, and my philosophy is no, there's always a way to take steps towards the person you want to be without completely giving your agency over to something that you're waiting on permission for, And so this is my way of saying all right, in the interim, I'm going to take this away.
I'm going to give myself the opportunity to practice it and start cultivating some good habits now, while it's a little bit easier to do it.
And let's just see how that feels.
It's also important to me that I do more long form thinking and long form reading.
And one of the things I've noticed is that the kind of like mental code switching that you need to do to be on your smartphone, it's very antithetical to the kind of focus that you need for deep thinking and deep working.
So that, even if I'm not doing anything bad on the phone, I'm cultivating a way of processing information.
And my brain has gotten very used to that and I need to break that and take all the costs associated with that so I can get back to that point where it's like I can think deeply for, you know, 90 minutes with no need for stimulation, or read something difficult that I only understand, 60 of what I'm reading for hours and not need any stimulation.
Yeah.
Cal Newport wrote about this recently with respect to their students, apparently, I think at USC.
We'll put a link to this article in the show notes if you want to check it out.
He wrote this article that went out in his newsletter.
The USC filmmaking students are having trouble watching movies for homework.
Now, remember when we were kids, when I was a kid, that would be the best homework in the world.
Go home and watch a movie.
Right.
Or even when they showed us boring movies in class.
It was better than listening to the teacher, right?
Like, wow, yeah, I'll watch Macbeth.
You know what I mean?
Let's do it.
Yeah.
But now it's like the most compelling movies, because our attention span has been hijacked by our new habits.
It's really difficult to watch a really great movie.
And I find that even like if I watch a Terrence Malick film, he's my favorite director.
It requires some celebration that maybe your average film doesn't.
And it's like reading a long, difficult essay or a long novel even.
It requires some of that brain movement that you don't get through scrolling social media.
At the same time, I find tremendous value in social media.
I don't have it on my phone because –
I think the value will be extracted at some point.
And so I have access to social media on my computer.
I can go there when I seek it out.
But I find if it stays on my phone, it tends to seek me out.
And so I'm looking forward to hearing about the 40 days without social media.
Because we did the year off social media.
And we're still doing social media as The Minimalist, at The Minimalist on all platforms.
We post videos and stuff there.
But from your personal use, I think you and I are pretty similar here.
I don't know that I've posted anything on social media this year so far, just because I don't find it particularly compelling.
If I am compelled to do so, I will.
It's just when you remove yourself from something for a while, from a habit, it ceases to be as compelling.
If you stop drinking for a month, all of a sudden it's like Okay, I don't feel that same tug that I did on the first day, where it's like I got to have a drink or I got to smoke the cigarette or whatever it is.
These habits that we build up over time.
If you build up that distance, it's easier to let it go and to not pick it back up.
Yeah.
How about you, listeners?
At what point does information stop serving you and start suffocating you?
Let us know your thoughts in the Patreon community chat.
Let's do one more from Jay.
He says, information feels like clutter when all the experts do not seem to agree.
Now, TK, I agree that it can be really frustrating and confusing.
All the experts don't agree about this thing and they're arguing about it.
But maybe you can make the case for why.
We don't want all the so-called experts to always agree about everything.
Yeah, I think we have been very spoiled by the seeming ease of consensus, especially those of us who grew up in an age where mainstream media was small enough and unified enough to have a single narrative.
It's kind of like your parents never arguing in front of you.
It's comforting when you're a child and you never see mommy and daddy argue or disagree.
But at some point You grow up and you realize that, even though I never saw mommy and daddy argument, nobody is paying me like a million bucks to believe that they agreed on everything because mommy and daddy are human.
And the reality is, humans don't always see eye to eye, no matter how much they love each other and respect each other.
So I appreciate the way they handle their conversations, but I know the disagreements were there.
100% certain of that.
In a similar way, when you have human beings who have researched something and gone deep enough, the number one thing you know is what you cannot know.
And there are all sorts of philosophical principles that every discipline is based on that are debatable.
There are all sorts of high-level things that are debatable.
And sometimes things get distilled and packaged up very neatly, because this is what you guys can understand.
This is all you need to know.
We don't want to confuse you.
So when you see experts disagreeing, I think it can be good for you because, number one, that's more reflective of how it really is, even if the walls come crashing down on the illusion of how they've painted the picture for us in the past.
And it also cultivates critical thinking.
That's harder.
That's less comfortable.
I'd love to just be told what to think, told what to do.
But unfortunately, it means that we have to do our own research with a greater amount of things.
And I can be sad, but I still think it's healthy for us.
I think that's the downsides of monarchy.
And we are in monarchical thinking a lot of the time.
Just tell me what to believe and I will believe it, especially if you're handsome or pretty or charismatic.
I'm much more likely.
Even if you have the worst information, I'm much more likely to believe it because of the way that you presented it.
And oh, you eat at this restaurant?
Okay well, I think that you're handsome or pretty and you're a star and you have the star power and this charisma.
So I should also eat at that restaurant and wear these clothes.
It's a shortcut.
I get that.
And sometimes it's a useful shortcut, especially for really basic things like oh yeah, that person trusts this.
So therefore, I will trust it.
We have an added value segment at the end of every episode of this podcast where I'll talk about a product or a movie or a song or something that has added value to my life.
But it's not a recommendations segment.
It's like this has added value to my life.
It may or may not add any value to your life.
At all.
I'm just letting you know what adds value to my life, not trying to sell you anything, but just trying to acknowledge that, as a minimalist, I still find value in some things.
It's not the spirit of renunciation, it's accepting that yes, some things do add value to my life and I can share that with you.
All right, I already gave you my minimal maxim, TK.
By the way, if you're listening to this, you can find this episode's maxims in the show notes over at theminimalistscom.
Slash podcast.
And every minimal maxim ever, all the way back to...
2010, TK.
Every Minimal Maxim ever at minimalmaxims.com.
We'll also deliver our weekly show notes directly to your inbox every Monday.
If you sign up for our free email newsletter at theminimalistscom, we'll never send you spam or junk or advertisements or noise or information clutter, but we will start your week off with a dose of simplicity.
Every week I've been writing these short essay is the one I did recently.
It was about my personal design philosophy around minimalism and how minimalism doesn't eschew beauty.
It sort of refines it in a way how clutter can be suffocating.
But decluttering, minimizing can sort of free up the airways in your home.
So I already gave you my minimal maximum TK.
I'm sure you got something pithy for me.
At what point does information stop serving you and start suffocating you?
My epithet maxim is being informed is not the same thing as being in vogue.
I'm not an anti-news guy.
What I'm against is poorly formed, arbitrarily constructed conceptions of what it means to be informed.
The word news is a little bit like the word love.
And this is an observation I've heard you make often.
I love my mom.
I love chocolate cake.
I love basketball.
Those are three very different subjects of love, three very different kinds of affinities.
But yet I use the word love to encompass them all.
In a similar way, we use news to talk about wars and rumors of war, but also to talk about what Nicole Kidman's up to and who won the best podcasting award at, And we talk about all these different things under the guise of news.
And so what I encourage people to be careful about is not so much being against news, but letting someone else inform for you, in a way that bypasses critical thinking, what it means to be informed, because that's the important part.
So I'm going to use this time to give you three questions to ask yourself that can allow you to indulge the news healthfully, but protect yourself from some of the obvious concerns that get raised around them.
The first is what do you give yourself permission to ignore?
Now, this is a question that you have to have an answer to, because the very nature of our finitude demands that we ignore the overwhelming majority of information that comes at us.
And so you can either ignore it passively and unconsciously, or you can ignore it mindfully and intentionally.
You can think ahead of time about what you're going to ignore.
The second thing is what are your standards for being informed that aren't reducible to merely citing a product or describing your habits of consumption?
So, for instance, if you say, TK, what does it mean to be informed?
And I say, I read Newsweek every week.
Well, I haven't given an actual standard.
I've named a product, which means I've been successfully engineered to equate their product with being informed.
Or you say, TK, what does it mean to be informed?
Oh, I watch the 10 p.m. news every night.
Okay, I haven't described what it means to be informed.
I have assumed a definition of what it means to be informed without making it explicit, and I've described a habit of consumption.
Many of our concepts of what it means to be informed are reducible to naming products describing habits of consumption.
But no, what does it actually mean for you to be informed?
I know about the things in my industry.
I educate myself about things that I have some influence in.
I study things that are related to my craft.
I study things that are related to my country and maybe the economic policies thereof.
Just know what that is for yourself.
Now can I just say real quick, the way I would phrase that is what do I need to subtract in order to actually be informed?
Because right now, information feels like, well, I need to add more in order to be informed.
But just like I was talking about my minimalist design philosophy, my minimalist information philosophy is similar.
It's addition through subtraction.
I'm able to focus more on what is essential.
That's right.
A beautifully crafted chair that's in a beautiful room by itself. is what curating is.
Decorating is putting a thousand trinkets all around it that are trendy and maybe, in the news metaphor, it's newsworthy, but it kind of gets in the way of the beauty that was already there.
So what is essential and then removing that, which is not essential.
What was the third thing you had?
The third thing is is what role does history and philosophy play in my conception of what it means to be informed?
Or to put it another way, to what degree does my concept of being informed involve engaging materials that were created before I was born?
If your concept of being informed is all about current events and contemporary happenings, then you are the least informed because you have no historical and philosophical context for how to contextualize the things that are before you.
I would never trust anybody who knew everything about what was going on, but they knew nothing about what came before them and what set the stage for why we are here today.
You've got to know the discussions that have been had before we got here, the solutions that have been tried and the first principles that have already been established.
Imagine going to a doctor and the only thing they know about you is that you're sick, but they don't care at all about your family history.
They don't care all about your parents or any hereditary information about you.
And also they never took the time to go off to school and study a bunch of biological principles and chemical facts that had nothing to do with a particular human being.
What a horrible doctor.
All they know is what diseases people have today, but they wouldn't have the ability to treat it, because the ability to treat it means you've got to draw from something that isn't hot, that isn't trendy, that isn't contemporary.
It is boring.
What role did those things play in your conception of being informed?
That is almost the end of page one.
We still have an entire switchboard of callers to talk to.
But first real quick, for right here, right now, here are a couple of things going on in the life of the minimalist.
First off, It's the 10th anniversary of minimalism.
10 years ago, minimalism hit Netflix.
Before that, we put it in theaters, 400 theaters in the U.S., Canada, Australia.
And we're taking it back on the road this spring.
Nicodemus and I are going to four of our favorite states.
We're going to be in Ohio, back in our hometown of Dayton, Ohio.
I cannot wait to get back to Dayton.
And so we'll be at the Neon Theater there, one of my favorite theaters ever.
I used to live two blocks from this theater.
It's just downtown Dayton.
What a beautiful place.
I cannot wait to get back.
And then we'll be in California.
We'll be in Ojai.
We're doing a retreat up there called Simple Haven.
I think there might still be a few tickets left to that as well.
So three days with the minimalist sunshine, mountains, trees.
We're connecting and collecting at the Ojai Art Center together, 30 of us for three days.
On the third day, we're doing a screening of Minimalism at the Ojai Playhouse.
So if you don't want to come to the full three-day event but you're anywhere in Southern California, if you want to travel in, we'll be at the Ojai Playhouse.
It's my new favorite theater.
David, who owns a place, just has the best sound system.
It's so well curated, like indie business.
I just love what they've done there.
We'll also be in Franklin, Tennessee.
Uh, we're going to be down there with the Ramsey folks doing some stuff with them.
And then we're doing a screening there at the Franklin theater.
I've never done a tour stop in Franklin, but I love this theater there at the Franklin theater.
So you can see us there.
And then we're going to finish this tour in Missoula, Montana, where Ryan is now the Roxy theater.
I used to go there all the time when I was living in Montana.
And so you can join us At any of those events, we're going to have a Q&A.
We'll have a live talk.
We also have a little surprise for everyone as well.
Something new that we've been working on together.
Also, a meet and greet after the event as well.
So you'll definitely get your money's worth.
You can grab your tickets right now at theminimalists.com slash tour.
And you can also find the information for the three-day Simple Haven event there as well.
Speaking of live events TK, did you know that folks can now listen online to all 23 of our Sunday symposiums?
Between 2022 and 2025, we did 23 live events here in Southern California.
We're currently taking a break, but we recorded all of those and you can find them all if you're one of our true fans, on Patreon patreoncom.
Slash The Minimalist.
You can listen to all, I mean, what is that, 23?
They're at least an hour each.
So Probably somewhere around 30 hours of live events and some of my favorite things we've ever done.
I'm so glad that we were able to capture those together.
Me too.
And I'm glad we stopped at 23 in honor of Michael Jordan.
It was Larry Marketing.
All right.
Much more coming up, TK.
But first, here is a quick minimalist tip from one of our listeners.
Hello.
Hello.
My name is Lara.
I'm from Kassel in Germany.
And as an overthinker, I want to share with you a decision-making method that I learned from my behavioral therapist a few years ago, as I quite often struggle to make big decisions.
I'm calling it the paper oracle, but I just don't know the original name.
For this method.
You place two pieces of paper, a few steps apart on the floor, one specific option written on each and big, bold letters.
To make this a bit easier to follow, I will use a random example.
The first option could be, I work for the minimalists in America.
The second option could be, I live in Kassel and work as a teacher.
The first step now is to go to the piece of paper with the first option for example, working in America for the minimalists to stand in front of it and say your arguments that are in favor of this option aloud.
Then you go to the other side of the room in front of the paper with the second option to live in Kassel and work as a teacher and repeat the whole process.
After you finished your arguments for the first and second option, you change sides again and repeat the whole process with your arguments against those options.
Your reasons can be rational or not, but it's important to state them all.
Even if it's something you think is silly or dumb, it still matters.
In the last step, stand in between both pieces of paper and move between both options.
Your body will then tell you on which side you want to be.
This method is my last resort as an overthinker and it works every single time, at least for me.
Hope that helps and thank you for your great work.
Well, I love that insight there.
I think it's really useful.
It reminds me of something that Nicodemus does.
And he taught me, and I don't know where he got this from.
I'm sure it's some life hack from ancient times or something.
But he will take, you have two decisions, right?
Like, do I want to buy the house in Missoula or in Ojai, California, right?
Or do I want to move to Ojai or move to Missoula?
Okay.
Yeah.
So I write those two things down on a piece of paper and I put them in a jar or a hat or somewhere where I can pick it out of there pretty easily, right?
And so it's 50-50 odds right now, right?
And you reach into the hat and you pull it out.
Don't look.
Which one do you hope is in your hand right now?
And that gives you like – it breaks down all the reasoning.
For me, overthinking – is not done by more thinking.
Jed McKenna talks about how our minds are terrible for thinking.
And what he's really talking about is this process he has called spiritual autolysis, which is writing down your thoughts, which is why I write.
I write every day is to get the thoughts out of me.
It's a much better way to organize my thoughts.
But sometimes you just know, you reach in there, you know, I hope it's oh, hi.
But then you open it up and it's miserable and you're like, oh, okay, cool.
Or vice versa, right?
You kind of know.
And then you can just not even look at the paper anyway.
You know which one you hope you pulled out of the hat.
And that's the decision for me.
To your point about getting beyond the kind of discursive thinking that leads to confusion.
One of the most common forms of self-deception is to make this subtle leap step by step from according to the following pattern.
You start by saying, I want to do X, but I can't afford it.
I can't afford it, therefore I can't do it.
I can't do it, therefore it's not possible.
It's not possible, therefore I don't want X. And then you become blind to it.
And then you think about what you want and your mind learns to just take whatever X is and remove that from the pictures.
That's not even a thing.
Saying I want X is like saying I wanna jump to the moon.
Why would I even say that?
It doesn't even matter if I want that.
And if I take my desires that are in the category of I wanna jump to the moon, it's very easy to convince myself that I don't want that, because they're in a category of such deep irrelevance that it doesn't even mean anything to talk about them to me.
And so they're gone.
And we can deceive ourselves into thinking that we don't care about things that we're very passionate about because we've accepted the premise that they're not possible.
Yeah, it reminds me of Vijay Edgecombe, who grew up in the Bahamas.
He's a rookie, might be rookie of the year in the NBA this year, basketball player.
But he grew up and didn't have a basketball hoop there.
And you hear about guys.
In South Sudan same sort of thing happens, where they don't have access to a simple basketball court.
Every hood in America has access to a basketball court, even if it's a janky rim.
And but you have access to it.
And so in the Bahamas you see like pictures of like they take the milk crate, cut the bottom out, put it up on a wall.
And that's how they learn.
Now he's one of the best basketball players in the world.
Because he didn't say, well, I don't have a basketball hoop, so it's not possible.
I guess I'll just dismiss that dream altogether.
It's like, no, okay.
Maybe it's not possible that way.
But how might it be possible?
I always do this with my daughter.
Like, okay, I know you can't do it, but what if you could?
And it opens up her mind in a different way.
Okay, but I know you can't do it, but what if you could?
And what if you can't do it?
And we just played a game where we allowed ourselves to want it anyway.
Do you want to?
You want to be Superman?
Yeah.
Because, like your wants, tell you something about yourself, and wanting is an incredibly difficult art.
It's okay to admit that you want something, even if it turns out to be true that you can't have it.
Lara, thank you so much for that insightful comment.
For anyone else who has a listener tip or insight about this episode or any other episode.
You can send a voice memo right from your phone to podcast at theminimalistscom so we can feature your voice on the show.
Up next, page two and page three.
But first, let's take a quick information break.
We'll be right back.
All right, y'all.
We'll see you on Patreon for the full two and a half hour maximal edition of episode 530, which includes answers to a bunch more questions like
How do I decide whether to keep a dining table I rarely use because it represents family connection and tradition?
We apply that to all these other objects of nostalgia as well.
Also, how can someone get more involved in minimalism?
Plus a million more questions and simple living segments over on the Minimalist Private Podcast on Patreon.
We had a whole AI discussion today.
It was really fascinating because I came to TK with this quandary of Hey man, I've got some mixed feelings about some AI stuff that I'm witnessing going on right now in my own life and maybe you can help me sort through that.
And he did so.
You want to check that out?
On patreon, the link is in the description.
When you subscribe, you can listen to our private podcast episodes on apple podcast, spotify or your favorite podcast app.
Plus, you'll gain access to all of our archives, all the way back to the very first episode in 2015, and that is our minimal episode for today.
On behalf of ryan nicodemus tk, coleman Audio, Ben Spire, Jeff and Dave Tomcat, Professor Sean Savvy D and the rest of our team.
I'm Joshua Fields Milburn.
If you leave here, just one message.
Let it be this.
Love people and use things.
Because the opposite never works.
Thanks for listening, y'all.
We'll see you next time.
Peace.
Every little thing you think that you need.
Every little thing you think that you need, Every little thing that's just feeding your greed.
Oh, I bet that you'd be fine without it.
