Sale price is fool's price.
And this might shock you, but I've saved many, many tens of thousands of dollars.
I don't buy anything that's on sale, not because I'm allergic to sale price.
And if I get to the register and they're like, Oh, this is 10% off.
I'm not going to be like, screw you.
I'm paying full price.
But my point is that I don't let the impulse of sale price determine whether or not that thing's going to add value to my life.
Because here's the truth.
Money has to be considered.
We save 100% if you just leave it at the store.
Hey, guys, how you doing?
Hope you're having a good week so far.
My name is Dr. Rangan Chatterjee, and this is my podcast, Feel Better, Live More.
What if the biggest source of stress in your life is not your job inbox or finances, but the simple fact that you have too much stuff?
This week, my guest is Joshua Fields Milburn, co-founder of The Minimalists, whose documentaries, books and podcasts have inspired millions of people around the world to to reconsider their own relationship with possessions and success.
Joshua grew up with very little money in a home marked by addiction, violence, and instability.
And, as a young man, became convinced that the solution was to be found in acquiring more more income, more status and more material comfort.
By the age of 30, Joshua had everything he thought he wanted.
The big job title, the nice car, the large house, all the visible signs of having made it.
And yet inside, he was anxious, overwhelmed and deeply unhappy.
Then in the space of a single month, his mother died and his marriage ended.
Those two events forced him to pause and ask some uncomfortable but essential questions.
What am I actually doing with my life?
Whose values am I living by?
And is this endless consumption really what life is all about?
That period of questioning led Joshua towards minimalism, not as a trend or an aesthetic, but as a practical framework for living with greater clarity and intention.
In our conversation we discuss How external clutter is often an outward reflection of internal clutter.
Why products so often promise fulfillment, but ultimately deliver dissatisfaction.
The difference between healthy consumption and harmful consumerism.
Practical rules that make decluttering simpler, including the 30-day minimalism game, the 1990 approach to clothes and why a sale price can often become a fool's price.
How identity clutter keeps us stuck when we cling to things, roles or labels, not because we need them, but because we're afraid of who will be without them.
And how minimalism can improve our health and relationships by creating more time, attention and presence.
Joshua really is a wonderful human being, a brilliant communicator and someone who thinks deeply about the human experience.
He believes that minimalism is the art of addition through subtraction.
It's not about having less for the sake of it, but about making space. for what matters most.
You are someone who I have been wanting to talk to for absolutely years.
I think ever since I saw your very first documentary, which had a massive effect on me.
So I've been super excited about this.
Oh, well, thank you.
Yeah, the minimalist turned 15 in this week and we have a the 10-year anniversary of that first documentary minimalism.
It came out on netflix a decade ago and uh, that strangely sort of changed everything.
We had no idea what it was going to do.
We were just out here sort of pounding the pavement talking about living a meaningful life with less.
My best friend, ryan since we were fat little fifth graders, we sort of grew up really poor and in uh impoverished situations.
You know a lot of uh drug abuse, alcohol abuse, physical abuse and and household, and we thought the reason we're so unhappy when we were growing up is we didn't have any money.
And so he and i both climbed the corporate ladder throughout our late teens and all throughout our 20s and by age 30 it was like wow, look at this, we have everything we ever wanted And we're kind of miserable as a result.
It's like oh, I got everything that was supposed to make me happy, but everything that was supposed to make me happy isn't actually doing its job.
And I was ostensibly successful.
But I think it's sort of like...
A glacier.
You see a little bit of it, but what's underneath the surface was a lot of anxiety and stress and debt and overwhelm and all these identity issues and clutter issues that were internal.
And of course, that shows itself outwardly.
Our material possessions is the easiest place to see it, because our stuff, that's a physical manifestation of whatever's going on inside us.
So if I have a lot of clutter inside out here in my home, it's most likely because there's a lot of mental clutter or emotional clutter or spiritual clutter or career clutter or relationship clutter, identity clutter.
There's all of this milieu of chaos that's going on within us.
And so for me it kind of started with the stuff 16 years ago after my mother died and my marriage ended.
And those two events forced me to start looking around and questioning everything, all of my so-called success and achievements.
And what am I doing with this life that I have here?
Is it about endless consumption or is it about something more than that?
Yeah.
Given how many people, how many millions of people around the world have resonated with what's you have put out in that documentary and in your books and in your podcasts, it's really clear that you're not the only one who is suffering from this problem.
You mentioned quite a lot there about how external clutter is a reflection of internal clutter.
When I was researching some of your blogs yesterday.
You write in some places that clutter is a physical representation of poor decisions.
So why don't we start with external clutter?
Because we've never actually covered that on my podcast in eight years now.
Never really covered decluttering.
And I know so many people struggle with this.
So, first of all, why is it that so many of us are drowning in so much stuff?
Think there's a bunch of reasons.
Quite often there's an emptiness and it kind of starts there and where we say there's this void in my life.
I need to fill it with something that presupposes that needs to be filled, and we could talk about that as well.
I have some issues with that.
Maybe there's a lack that is necessary as part of being a human, and yet there's this void.
We can fill it with relationships sex drugs food, But also we fill it with stuff, or at least we try to.
Unfortunately, it doesn't work.
That void just widens.
And so we end up in tremendous amounts of debt.
At my nadir, I had about half a million dollars worth of debt, and I had a lot of stuff.
The average American household has about 300,000 items in it.
And I don't think that's inherently wrong or evil or bad.
It's just that the stuff isn't making us happy.
It'd be great if all of the material possessions and the superabundance was making us joyous and brought us to a point of perpetual bliss.
But I think it's a misunderstanding of consumption.
Now, I'm not against consumption.
We all need to consume some things.
The problem I have is with consumerism.
Consumerism is the ideology that acquiring more usually more stuff in this case is going to make you happy.
It's as if externalities have the happiness embedded in them.
The paradox of that, or maybe the irony of it, is there's a happiness that's inside us.
You look at a baby and they're just cooing and smiling.
They don't need anything. a BMW or a Rolls Royce or a Prada belt to make them happy, right?
It's preexisting.
And the unfortunate thing is we actually tend to cover up that happiness with those externalities.
And it's easiest with the stuff.
The ancient Greeks have this wonderful word pleonexia, and loosely translated it stands for the greed for the things that can be counted right.
Right.
And our society now has more things that can be counted and measured than ever before.
We have obsessions with square footage.
How many square feet is your house?
How many material possessions do you own?
How much money is in your bank account?
And now of course, with all the digital clutter, it's what's going on with your followers.
How many likes do you have?
How many views are you getting?
And it's this constant chase.
In fact, in America, it's even in our founding documents, right?
You have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
But the pursuit of happiness is actually the problem.
There's nothing wrong with pursuing.
We can pursue happily, but it's almost like the equation is inverted there.
And so we're trying to find some happy end point.
And then we make a contract with ourselves and say I'm going to be discontent until i reach whatever that thing that can be counted is.
I have a million dollars in the bank, i have the promotion i've always wanted, i have the relationship i want or i have all of the material possessions.
I really desire that thing, whatever it is.
But of course we never actually desire the thing and i think that's the problem.
We think like okay, do you want those new chrome heart jeans?
Okay, maybe they're a work of art and maybe they're wonderful.
Maybe they fit you well.
Maybe you've budgeted for them.
All that's fine.
You can have a pair of jeans.
I'm not against the stuff.
But I also know the stuff isn't going to complete me.
In fact, in many ways, the stuff incompletes us because it makes us, we adorn ourselves with things.
The cars, the houses, the closets, the walk-in closets full of designer clothes.
All of these things.
We adorn ourselves, those things as if it's part of our identity.
Um, the first big book that minimalist ever did was called everything that remains.
It came out 12 years ago now and uh, the opening line to that is our identities are shaped by the costumes we wear, and i was really talking about me in the corporate world at that point.
That was a story of the five-year journey of me sort of walking away from the corporate world that i was in.
I was managing 150 retail stores And my life looked successful because I had all those things you could count that we talked about before.
But I also had a bunch of other things that you couldn't count, the things that are hard to quantify.
And a meaningful life is often shaped by those unquantifiable.
But because I don't have a square footage of joy.
Right.
How many yards of happiness are in your life?
I guess you'd say meters.
Right.
How many meters of pleasure or whatever it is, the excitement of contentment?
But also like the things that make humanity humane, right?
Like grief, sadness, sorrow.
These are all parts of the everyday human experience.
And there isn't necessarily a measuring stick for those things.
And so because that's difficult, we search for the easy things, the things that can be counted.
Yeah.
I think this is one of the reasons I love your work so much.
It really resonates with me.
And I think I share similar philosophies in terms of how I see the world.
For many years, I've been saying that the unmeasurables in life is where the gold is.
I have, like you, a lot of these societal ticks of success, right?
If you look on the outside.
But the things that bring me true contentment are things that the public can't see.
You know, my 18 year relationship with my wife.
Now, even saying an 18 year relationship, I'm kind of trying to give you a measurement that that doesn't even tell you the quality of my relationship with my wife.
It just says that we signed a contract to be husband and wife 18 years ago and we're still in that contract.
But I can tell you, we have a fantastic relationship.
And we were talking before, I spend a load of time with my two kids.
So I, very consciously, will say no to so many things that might give me more, in inverted commas success, because I understand, having made poor decisions early on in my life, that every single thing in life comes at a cost right.
If you're doing something, you're not doing something else.
And I think for me Joshua, as a doctor.
I'm not sure if you've spoken to any doctors about minimalism.
I'd be interested if you have.
What's really interesting to me is that I believe that the biggest disease in society is not cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer's disease strokes, autoimmune disease.
The biggest disease in society is the disease of more, because it's that desire for more that drives people to do more than they can physically do.
And that's what gets them sick.
So I can tell someone, hey, listen, I think you need to reduce your stress levels, right?
I think that's making you sick.
But even that's downstream.
This desire to get that better promotion, the corner office, the better job, the nicer car, it's that desire that underpins it all, which means, of course, they're going to overwork, because they think they need that in order to be happy.
So I think what you guys do is absolutely related to health and well-being.
Yeah, without a doubt.
In fact, the irony of it, whether you're talking about something as simple as diet, it's much more about what we remove from what we're eating in order to become healthy than what we eat.
Right, because if, if we are consuming a bunch of processed nonsense, you know it's not even food, it's food like products.
Um and it, it will sustain you for a while right, and and if, i guess, if you're starving to death, those things make a whole lot of sense, but For the average person, it's empty calories.
And as a metaphor, we have empty calories all throughout our lives.
This sort of ephemerality of our relationships and our things.
And in that first documentary, you mentioned minimalism.
We put it up on YouTube a couple of years ago after we got the license back from Netflix, and it opened it up to a whole other world of a different audience, which was brilliant.
And there's a woman in there who's a professor.
Her name is Juliet Shore, and she talks in there.
The problem isn't that we're too materialist.
The problem is we're not materialist enough.
And I thought that was an interesting reframing when you think about it.
We don't care about the things that we create or make or buy or consume or own.
It has become a bit of a throwaway culture.
And I think sometimes people are confused to think minimalism is simply about getting rid of all of your things and living like an ascetic or a monk.
And I have no problem with ascetics or monks.
I really admire that.
But for me, the question is how can I live in this world by being intentional with the decisions about the things that I hold on to?
What are the things that add value to my life?
And then also, what are the things I'm going to bring in in the future?
Because the best way to sort of declutter is to let go of the thing in advance.
Leave it on the shelf.
The most sustainable product is the product that we leave at the store.
Often we get in that mindset of like, can I buy the most sustainable thing?
And it's like, well, then it becomes another type of consumerism.
And I would say there's even an inverted consumerism when you first stumble into some concept like minimalism or simple living or whatever you want to call it essentialism enoughism,
We often think like, OK, this is at least what happened to me.
At first, I was buying all of the things throughout my 20s because I grew up really poor.
I didn't have a whole lot.
So, of course, happiness must be in the things.
And I get all the things and that doesn't work.
I guess I need more things.
Well, you just talked about the disease of more, more, more, more, more.
I need more and then I get more.
And I get more, and I get more, until my whole house is teeming with stuff my attic, my basement, and then I have a storage locker, my guest bedroom, my garage.
I can't even park my car in the garage because I have a lot of nice things and they're organized.
There's an ordinal system of bins and boxes, but it's a lot of stuff.
It's clutter.
Anything that gets in the way is clutter.
And so it's like, oh, crap, you know what?
This the stuff didn't do it.
The more didn't do it.
I guess I bought the wrong stuff.
Maybe it's not the Lexus that will do it for me.
It's the Range Rover that will do it for me.
And so it's not the stuff.
It's the wrong stuff.
I just need to get the right stuff.
That's going to make me happy.
And this is all consumerism.
Finally, I'm going to reach some point where I'm fulfilled.
Where I'm satisfied.
And those are two different things.
You'll get satisfied in the moment.
You eat a really good meal.
You can feel satisfied by it.
But ultimately, you're going to be hungry again.
And consumerism sort of works the same way.
I can feel that burst of satisfaction that doesn't last far past the checkout line.
Yeah, and so we get all the more.
We get all the right things after we've bought the wrong things and it still doesn't do it for us.
And then we reach this point like i need to get rid of this stuff.
You know what's going to make me happy?
Minimalism, getting rid of the stuff is going to make me happy and it's like well no, that's also not the point.
The the point of, of simplifying our lives or minimizing is making space.
Going back to that thing we used to call a void, I've got this void in my life.
No, it's not a void.
Maybe it's just spaciousness.
And maybe minimalism is the amplification of spaciousness.
You don't go to a beautiful museum, the LACMA down the street here in West Hollywood.
You don't go to the LACMA and say, oh, wow, like. well, why is this place so empty, right?
Like we need to put more paintings here, right?
What if we stack paintings in the middle of the floor and we just brought racks of art in here?
No, that would be clutter.
It would get in the way of the experience.
I used to live in Montana here in America and it's beautiful.
You go to Glacier National Park and it's so open and spacious.
And I don't go there and say, we really need to fill this with condominiums.
And it's because It doesn't need more.
There's already enough.
And I think as soon as we realize that with our own lives, like I already have enough.
In fact, enough is often buried underneath all of the accumulations of the last several years or decades.
Yeah, it's like, as you say about happiness, I agree with you that happiness is our default state.
The child already is happy and mindful and present.
They get conditioned out of that by society and culture.
It's the same thing with being enough, right?
We're born knowing that we are enough, that we don't need to achieve in order to be worthy of our presence in the world.
But society, culture, education starts to give us this idea that it's about achievement.
You have to tick this box.
And when you do this, you will be worthy of X, Y, and Z, right?
So it's.
It's kind of super interesting and anything to do with health and wellbeing.
I, like many people, try and look at it through an evolutionary lens and go well, how did this make sense 100000 years ago?
Or what was the purpose of this?
And if you think about human existence, I don't know, 50000 years ago, hunter-gatherer tribes, I'm guessing it would have physically been impossible to accumulate stuff right.
You would have to live in harmony with the natural worlds.
In fact, there's a tribe, I think they're called the Johansi tribe.
I think they talk about this idea that they never overconsume.
They can't really understand the concepts of over-consuming.
They know that nature will always provide what they need.
So they just take what they need and trust that nature will continue to provide for them.
But we don't live like that.
You said, what was it?
Was it 300,000 items you said?
That's right.
And by the way, that's not me counting.
That's according to the Los Angeles Times.
And I've been on tour in your neck of the woods.
And our American dream has permeated your borders, Australia, Europe, Africa, Asia.
There's nowhere in the world now where they're not also striving for this so-called American dream of access.
Yeah.
But you physically could not have done it otherwise. in the past.
And I think there's a couple of layers to that for me, Joshua, if I think about it.
We're talking about this idea that if there's a lack within us somewhere, a hole within us, that we will often look to things or consuming things like social media, to fill that hole.
But if we go back to 50000 years ago, then I imagine well, did human beings back then also have this sense of lack, or was their life fundamentally different?
You and your other fellow minimalists talk about a focus on contribution over consumption.
I imagine life 50000 years ago had contribution at its very heart.
You were in these small tribes.
People would see the value that you provided to the people around you.
And if you weren't providing that value, I'm sure someone would have had a word.
Hey, guys, look, these tubers aren't going to dig themselves.
Come on, this is your job to do it.
And maybe the fact that...
That sense of value, I think, has gone from many of us.
We live these isolated lives.
We've moved away from our tribes and our families, often for work opportunities.
So we don't get that sense of value.
And I believe that one of the reasons so many of us are this busy is because we are desperately looking to show ourselves that we're important.
We have value.
Do you know what I mean?
I feel it's all linked together.
So maybe in the past they couldn't consume this much because Amazon didn't exist and all this cheap labor didn't exist.
And maybe they also didn't even have a need to consume or overly consume in the way that we do.
Yes.
And also it wasn't disentangled from consumption or from consumption was not disentangled from creativity and contribution.
It was sort of like a three-legged table.
Which table, which leg is the most important leg on that table is like they're all equally important.
It's what supports whatever's on top of it.
And you go back to you look at hunter-gatherers now, whether it's the Hadza or tribes like the Maasai, and you look at them and there's a harmony around those three things.
Every consumer act in terms of like consumption is a creative act.
And there's also contribution embedded into all of that.
And so it's only in the modern sort of Western world where we've separated those things and we've tried to put them in separate corners of the room.
I'm sure you see this in the medical world now is like your brain is here in one corner of the room and your body's in the other corner of the room.
That's how we treat it.
We even get specialized and, like you, go to the kidney doctor if you have a problem with your kidney, or you go to the ear, nose and throat doctor if you have a sore throat or whatever.
And then you realize like, oh, wait a minute.
Wait a minute, it's all connected.
And the problem that you're identifying there is actually what I would call identity clutter.
When we've said that well I, i'm this separate thing, separate from the system, separate from my neighbors, and i'm going to go down a a tangent here, that's going to seem very non-dual, but like, and maybe it is to some extent, but maybe we've just separated ourselves so much we don't realize where the stuff comes from, and that's why it's so easy to.
The average american throws out 88 pounds of clothing a year, even though 95 of it could be reused or recycled, and and so you realize like oh, we already have it more than enough of that and, and too much is never enough, too much is always too much.
It's a tautology, i know, but but it it means that like, we're not going to find enough by acquiring more, and so what we often try to do is change our identity.
I'm the type of person who drives this type of car.
I'm the type of person who owns this kind of watch.
I'm the type of person who wears this suit or this dress.
I'm the type of person who has this type of purse, right?
In fact, the first question when you meet someone i don't think it's intentionally uh, pernicious or malicious, but uh the first question you ask them is what, what's your job?
What do you do?
Yeah, what do you do?
Right, life's most dangerous question, and i don't think it's a gotcha question.
But when you step back and think about it, what am i really asking when i say that?
Well, i guess it depends on the context, but quite often, especially when i was back in the corporate world, if i was at a networking event or something, i would say what do you do?
And what I really meant by that is tell me what you, where you work, what's your job title, so I can compare you to me on the socioeconomic ladder, so I can determine how much of my attention you deserve.
Now, if I were to say it that way, you would think I was insane and you'd ask me to leave immediately.
Right.
So instead we say, what do you do?
And my last year in the corporate world, I had to change that question.
And also my answer to the question as well.
But I used to instead of saying, what do you do?
I'd say, hey, what are you passionate about?
And sometimes people tell me what their job and their job title was.
Right.
But we get so wrapped up in that what's printed on my business card or what's in my ex bio or on Instagram.
Like that's who I am as a person.
And these things are great as labels, right?
Back in the corporate days, I was the director of operations for 150 retail stores for a telecom company in the Midwest.
Fine as a label.
That's great for communicating.
Or if today, if I tell you I'm a minimalist, that's not part of my identity.
It's just an interesting label so we can talk about things.
And so I, instead of saying, what do you do?
I'd say, what are you passionate about?
And sometimes people say, I'm really passionate about snowboarding.
Wow.
Okay.
I'm not asking you, do you make money from snowboarding?
But now, all of a sudden, I see your eyes light up and you're like oh yeah, tell me more about that, because I can see the passion there.
When someone would ask me like, okay, Josh, what do you do?
I said, I'm really passionate about writing.
And they're like oh, have you published any books or have you written anything that I would have read?
I would hope not, unless you've read my diary or something, because I hadn't published anything at the time.
I wrote all throughout my 20s.
I wrote fiction mostly.
And it was the thing that I was most passionate about.
And eventually that transitioned into Ryan and I writing about this whole minimalism thing.
And it's because it was something that I enjoyed doing.
It was a creative act, but also it's a consumptive act.
I'm consuming other written work.
But it's also an act of contribution as well.
Ideally, if I write something that adds enough value, then people tend to share it with other people and it just amplifies what we're doing.
And so that identity clutter has been, I think, the most difficult thing for most people, because if I get rid of my stuff,
Who am I as a person?
If I no longer dress this way, who am I?
If I no longer have this job, who am I?
If I'm no longer in this relationship, who am I as a human being?
And so often we don't let go, not because of the thing, we'll hold onto something that makes us miserable just because we're terrified of losing that identity.
You said that your identity is not that often minimalist.
So how do you at this stage in your life define your identity.
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If you ask me, who are you?
The only person I know who has a great answer to this question was Alan Watts.
And, uh, He said, you are an aperture through which the universe looks at itself.
And I think ultimately every identity is a false identity.
It's just a product of the ego.
And I'm not saying ego as an arrogance.
I'm just saying the false self.
And we all get caught up in it.
Right.
And well, not babies.
You were just talking about that earlier.
Like they know they're enough because they're not a separate self with a separate identity yet.
And so anytime I pick up an identity, I kind of just scrutinize and say, oh, that's interesting.
What a.
What a fun little label.
I think I can set that down now because it's pretty heavy.
So like if you're carrying – you were talking about the hunter-gatherers earlier.
The reason they couldn't overconsume or have all the excess is like even if you have a backpack on your back and you fill it with too much stuff, it's overwhelming.
It weighs you down.
I think metaphorically that is also true with our identity.
And so I look at those things as labels and they're useful as labels as long as they're useful.
The problem is we hold on to an identity even when it no longer serves us.
I have a friend who is a super talented musician but he stopped playing music for about a decade but held on to his instruments and his studio equipment and all of these things, because I am a musician.
It's like, But you're not playing any music is what he eventually told himself.
He had to look in the mirror and say, yeah, that identity isn't serving me anymore.
I really used to enjoy playing music.
And here's the irony of it.
Once he got rid of that.
He got rid of the stuff and he eventually went out and bought another guitar and he started playing songs again because he was able to drop the identity.
I teach a writing class two or three times a year.
It's called How to Write Better.
And I teach 100 students at a time.
And one of the things I talk to them about is I'm much more interested in the verb than I am the noun.
I don't care about being a writer.
I care about writing.
And so I find that that is much more useful for me.
What am I doing with this moment is more useful than the identity I've draped over myself.
Yeah.
Going back to this idea Josh, that external clutter is a representation of internal clutter, I'm really interested as to the best way, in your opinion, of tackling this.
And what I'm getting at is over the last few weekends I have probably taken on average eight full bags to the charity shop of stuff.
And this is not actually in preparation for our conversation today.
It's not as if oh Joshua's coming on the podcast time to actually put my minimalist hat on and take that identity for a few weeks.
No, it's actually really interesting.
So when...
My wife and I bought this house in which we currently live.
It was empty, right?
Completely empty.
I remember she was eight months pregnant.
We had no beds, no furniture, no kitchen stools.
And I had this old Pilates medicine ball that I put next to the kitchen counter so she could sit on it whilst eating.
And I thought everything in this house we have literally brought in. at some point since 2010.
But the point I'm trying to get to is that I've been on this kind of inner journey probably since my dad died in 2013.
And it was the very first time I turned inwards and asked myself Rangan, whose life are you actually living?
Who do I want to be?
Who do I want to become?
All these kind of things.
And I believe that if I was going to try and organize or declutter my world back then, I would have struggled because I wasn't ready to do it.
But I've done so much inner work over the past few years, I feel I've understood what's really important.
I feel I've orientated my life intentionally around the things that are important.
I've got way better at saying no.
I find now that on the weekends when I want to start clearing out the house, it's just easy.
I don't feel the attachment to the things.
So I guess the question I'm trying to get to because you've spoken to so many people around the world about this and you would have answered tens of thousands of questions from people can you declutter your external world from the outside in or does it have to come from the inside out?
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's almost like asking is a push up, up or down.
Right.
It's a trick question, I guess.
Well, no, I think it's a it's a useful question because you're right.
People call into our our podcast all the time.
Our show, we've been doing it for a decade now.
And it's a it's a call in show and people ask questions and it often starts with the stuff.
And then you learn very quickly that the story behind the stuff is what's keeping them from either letting go of the thing, or it's making them want to acquire the thing.
It's always the story that's attached to the thing.
And I do think it's useful sometimes to have certain tools or boundaries or rules, whatever you want to call them.
In fact, we have this, we call the minimalist rule book.
It's 16 rules for living with less.
People can download it on our website for free.
And millions of people have downloaded that at this point.
And you tweeze out a few, I just call them boundaries.
They're not really rules.
They're boundaries that help us live more intentionally.
But you, and what is a boundary?
It's worth talking about because that word has been in vogue for the last few years now.
But when I say boundary, all I mean is like, here's what I'm willing to accept.
Anything that's in bounds is what I'm willing to accept.
If something's out of bounds, I'm no longer willing to accept it.
You know, if you're watching football match or a basketball game, there's an out of bounds, and as soon as we step out of bounds it's unacceptable.
You can't keep playing the game and so you get to determine what is in bounds for you and and i do find it useful sometimes to have some of those heuristics like we have some heuristics like the 90 90 rule for your clothes.
We call it the seasonality rule.
Anything i haven't worn in the last 90 days, i pick up any piece of clothing.
It could be an old shirt.
Have I worn this the last 90 days?
No.
Okay.
Will I wear it in the next 90 days?
I got to be honest with myself.
No, I don't think I'm going to.
Okay.
Then I give myself permission to let it go.
And what's magical about that number 90?
Nothing.
You can adjust it.
Maybe it's 60 days for you or 180 days.
It doesn't matter.
The question is like, how am I more intentional with the things I'm holding on to?
But you hit the nail on the head here.
There's usually some sort of emotional clutter that's going on behind that, some sort of deep grief or sadness, or maybe it's just a low level anxiety, because we're overstimulated and there's a lot of noise and and it's not just the material noise now, it's all the digital noise, and so that low level of anxiety has encouraged me to consume and oh, by the way, all of the advertisements telling me that i have a problem i didn't realize i had, and they have a solution to a problem i didn't have six minutes ago.
And no wonder we feel so incomplete, and so We often are advertised to products.
Instagram's especially great at that.
That's another boundary I have.
I don't buy anything from an Instagram ad, not because I think it's wrong or evil, because I know I am a consumerist.
If I fall back into that identity, right.
And so I have to be careful and say that's just not a boundary, that I that's not a thing that I want to do, because I understand that my behaviors are can be tricked, and so i have to set up some ground there.
But ultimately it always comes back to what's going on inside me mental clutter, emotional clutter, what was psychological clutter, spiritual clutter.
These are different ways that we interact with the world and then we see it sort of metastasize into our stuff.
First of all, i love this idea of rules or boundaries or principles whatever you want to call them as just guidelines to help you navigate this world where you are being marketed to constantly.
You know, last night, I was watching your latest documentary.
Did that come out three years ago now?
I thought it was newer than that, about three years ago.
And again, it's just, it's brilliant.
It's absolutely fantastic.
I watched it on Netflix.
And there's a section in it where I think you or Ryan say products promise us fulfilment but give us dissatisfaction.
I thought, I love that.
What an evocative and a provocative thought.
And then you go to one of the contributors to the film, And I think it is such a common story, this.
She basically says, I work hard.
I feel like I deserve it.
So I order stuff.
Stuff will show up.
But then the shame and the guilt will start.
That's the cycle.
A lot of people, dare I say it, most people are stuck in.
It's like you said before you can't separate this problem with clutter away from the way we live our lives, right?
So we live these disconnected, isolated lives.
Many of us are working too hard.
Maybe we need to work that hard.
Maybe our boss doesn't have great working conditions for us or whatever it might be.
And so to alleviate the discomfort from the state of our lives, we need to go somewhere.
And that somewhere can be anywhere, right?
It can be social media films shopping gambling, whatever you want, anything some sort of way to distract ourselves and actually numb the discomfort we feel about the state of our lives.
Going back to what I said before, Josh, as we're recording this, we've all been, what's the word?
What's the polite way of putting it?
We've all been exposed to the barrage of Black Friday emails.
You know there's been a problem in my inbox recently where my junk and my normal have gone together.
I don't know what's happened, right?
I'm trying to fix it and I can't fix it.
So I'm thinking of changing my email accounts, which I've been thinking about doing for a while anyway.
And suddenly I'm like, oh my God, I'm like getting 20 emails a day, you know, from brands and companies I really like, but it's like Black Friday madness has happened.
So you do need certain rules to navigate that, because if you leave it to your own devices, you are going to be stressed one night and maybe not feeling as good as you could do.
And you are going to be susceptible to bringing more stuff into your house.
But the point I was trying to make is that I think that was a very powerful section of the film because it does speak to this central idea that People don't feel whole and the stuff is there to fill that hole, but it can't fill that hole.
The hole will still be there.
So instead of filling it, you still feel discontented and you just end up with 300,000 items.
Right.
And it creates a new hole in a way.
And yeah, it's interesting how the objects of our desire become the objects of our discontent after they're acquired.
Right.
And maybe it's not immediately.
Maybe you get that new car and it has a new car smell.
And I drive a car, so I'm not against cars.
But you get that first car payment in the mail and you realize like, oh wait, is this actually worth it?
Right.
Oh, man, now I have 83 more of these now, right?
And we go into tremendous amounts of debt financially, but there's also this sort of emotional debt.
You talked about.
When the Amazon package shows up at your front door, it sort of comes prepackaged with the shame and grief that you were talking about there.
Isn't that interesting?
We don't think about what else.
I call it the true cost of our goods because there's a price tag on a thing, right?
But what are the other costs that are associated with our things?
The cost of storing the thing and cleaning the thing and taking care of the thing and protecting the thing and locking the thing up and repainting the thing and changing the oil in the thing or putting gas in the thing.
Or what if the thing needs batteries?
Or what if I have to worry about the thing?
There's some mental clutter right there, right?
Or what if someone's going to take it from me?
Now I'm...
I have to be protective of the thing.
These are all the costs that are associated with our things.
It's not just the price tag.
But to get back to some of those rules that you were talking about here, another precept that works well for me is you talked about the Black Friday thing and sale price.
Black Friday is just a type of sale price.
And I know because I used to work in the corporate world and we made about 40 of our revenue between Thanksgiving and the end of the year.
So Thanksgiving is the middle of the end of November here in America.
And so the last six weeks of the year roughly was.
We had all these big Black Friday sales and Cyber Monday and all of these things that are designed to get you to buy.
And it makes me think like, well, wait a minute.
Okay, it's 40% off now.
Were they just ripping me off yesterday?
And by the way, this year, I got my first Black Friday email in October.
And it's like, well, wait a minute.
And then on November 1st, I got an email that said oh happy Black Friday month, which is literally incoherent.
And then I see sale price all the time.
I don't call it sale price anymore.
In fact, I have a rule for that.
It's called fool's price.
Sale price is fool's price.
And this might shock you, but I've saved many, many tens of thousands of dollars.
I don't buy anything that's on sale.
And that might sound ignorant or silly to most people.
But I don't buy things that are on sale, not because I'm allergic to sale price.
And if I get to the register and they're like oh, this is 10 off, I'm not going to be like, screw you, I'm paying full price.
But my point is that I don't let the impulse of sale price determine whether or not that thing's going to add value to my life.
Because here's the truth.
Money has to be considered.
If money was in a car, it's a necessary passenger and we have to consider it.
Whether it's the creative work that we're doing, the job that we're working or the things that we buy, I have to consider money.
It's a great passenger in the car.
It's worth considering.
It is a terrible driver.
Money is a drunk driver.
And if I'm making my purchasing decisions based primarily on whether or not this thing is on sale.
You hear it all the time.
Like, oh yeah, I bought it because I saved $40 on it.
So we save a hundred percent if you just leave it at the store and realizing that has been so freeing and it's counterintuitive.
I know it's like, aren't you spending so much more money?
No, I'm spending so much less money.
I didn't get into minimalism to be more sustainable, but it's been a great byproduct of producing less waste because I consume less than 90 90 less, I should say of the things that I used to consume.
I still consume some things, and I do so with intention, but the byproduct here is I'm consuming way less because some of these precepts or guidelines or rules that I've put in place.
I love this idea of, that everything has a cost, right?
So let's just think about that through the lens of what you said about sale prices.
It would be easy for someone to go.
Well Josh, all right for you, you might be able to afford not buying things at sale prices, but I can't.
But here's the missing piece, I guess, right?
If you are never buying at sale prices, but you're only buying 10 of what you used to buy at full price, you're winning right.
Whereas if you're constantly buying at sale price things that you don't need, you're actually spending more, even though you think on that individual item you got a deal.
So that's the first thing that's super interesting.
Something I've been chatting to my wife about over the last few weeks, maybe months, is For many years I've been obsessed with this idea that everything in life comes at a cost, but too often the cost is invisible and we don't see it.
So I said to her you know when we buy, or if we buy clothes and you buy a load of clothes because you don't know what size it's going to be.
I think it's cool.
There's 30 day returns.
I can try it on, figure it out, check it out in the comfort of my own home and then send back what I don't want, and I'll get a refund.
I said, okay, sure.
I understand that.
But if that box of clothes is sitting in the hallway or the corridor upstairs for four weeks at a time, and that happens six months of the year I'm not saying my wife does this, to be clear, right.
It's just more a conversation I had.
I was like, that has a cost.
That daily annoyance, a frustration that the hall isn't clean, or you know, oh God, I need to move that now so I can get the things that I do want.
That is costing you stress and time, but you don't see it.
All you think about is, oh, I've got 30 days to return this.
So it does come at a cost.
And actually you can apply that, I think, to something you said on a podcast recently.
Which is one of your best investments is is YouTube Premium, which I found really interesting because if someone asked me that question, I would say the same thing.
But why don't you tell me, why would you through your minimalist lens, why would you say that is one of your best investments?
Yeah, it's interesting.
I don't think advertisements are immoral or unethical.
I just think they're interruptions, and I don't like interruptions.
It's a type of clutter.
If you have that box in your corridor, you might trip over it.
Right.
And I always feel like I'm tripping over advertisements.
And so when I would get on YouTube and forced to watch some sort of advertisement from Walmart or a mattress company or something, I don't think those ads are bad, but if I have an opportunity to opt out, that is what I would prefer.
And so it's just really a preference to opt out of any interruptions, opt out of the chaos whenever possible.
It doesn't mean I'm going to get rid of all of them.
But according to Forbes, the average American sees about 5000 advertisements a day.
And I would suspect it's even more if you're in a city like New York or L.A. or or London.
And any of these big metro areas, they're just, we're bombarded with these.
So much so that we're steeped in it.
It's the old, you know, the fish in water doesn't realize it's in water sort of thing.
The human in a city doesn't realize they're steeped in advertisements.
And a lot of these, the messages of these advertisements are useful.
It's like, oh, here's a thing that I might actually get value from, right?
In fact, I struggle with this almost internally is like I think some of the most dangerous ads are the ones that are really useful.
Right.
I love listening to like a sports podcast or something.
And they have like a Arby's or McDonald's commercial and a Michelob beer commercial.
And I'm like, I'm never going to consume any of this crap.
So like you might as well be advertising moon rocks if I just fly to the moon.
I'm not going to it doesn't. get me at all.
Maybe sometimes the more dangerous ones are like oh yeah, I think that one that's the one that will complete me.
That's the thing that will make me happy.
I will find joy in that product if I just consume it.
And it gets back to the, the thing is never about the thing.
It's about what I think the thing can do for me.
And so do I think that new um iPhone camera, that attachment uh will help me that I see an Instagram ad.
Yeah.
I might think that in the moment.
But that makes it dangerous because then I go buy the thing on impulse.
And that's why I put rules in place for even that.
That's what I call the wait for rule.
We also know it's known as the 30-30 rule.
Anything that costs more than $30, I wait at least 30 hours to buy it.
Now, why is that?
It's not that I don't have $30 to spend on the thing.
It's I don't have all the additional costs that you just talked about, the stress and the anxiety.
I have the money that I can count.
Or you were talking about earlier, like okay, it's going to take up space in the hallway for four weeks.
I can count that.
There's three shirts that I want to return.
I can count that.
Okay, there's one box.
I can count that.
And I'll get $73 back.
I can count that.
But I can't count how many metric tons of stress this is creating in my life throughout the whole process.
Yeah.
Do you still find that you want much stuff?
Hmm.
Well, you brought up that term a couple of times now, lacking, right?
I think I don't want as much now that I realize that the desire is actually one of the things that we do want in a way.
So I'll give you an example.
Let's say I really wanted a BMW.
I don't have a BMW but if I wanted a BMW and like, I started putting up on my vision board and I'm getting the brochure sent to me and I look at the website and I'm typing all the custom with this color and this interior.
There's something kind of Exciting about that.
There's a desire to that, right?
But what did I say earlier?
The objects of our desire become the objects of our discontent after they're acquired.
And so in a weird way, we don't actually want the BMW.
We want the desire.
And that desire can be for another human being.
It could be for interaction.
It could be desire to contribute beyond ourselves in a meaningful way.
It could be desire for a new mattress.
It could be desire for good sleep.
But we don't just want the things that we think we want.
We don't just desire those things.
We desire the desire.
And often one of the worst things that we can do is acquire the object of our desire, because then it extinguishes the desire.
The philosopher, French philosopher, Lacan.
He talked about object a, And I find this concept really fascinating, because everyone has an object A.
It's the thing that you'd be willing to set your life on fire in order to obtain basically.
Whether it's that BMW, or it's the promotion, or it's a million followers on Instagram, or maybe it's the dream home, or maybe it is the dream job.
Whatever it is, it's your object day.
And sometimes it can be healthfully expressed.
Sometimes it's unhealthfully expressed, but it's the thing we desire more than anything else.
And the problem is when we get it, we often get it.
And this happened to me by age 30.
I had gotten everything i ever wanted, and it took getting everything i ever wanted to realize that maybe everything i ever wanted wasn't actually what i wanted at all.
Maybe there was something about that lack, and maybe there's even something about a shared lack.
That's what uh, communion is, if you.
I'm not talking about in a church setting, but like a community same root.
There we commune around something, but A communion is often around a shared lack.
You'll see this at an AA meeting, for example.
Different people from all different backgrounds, really wildly successful businessmen and housewives and homeless people and drug addicts and nurses and doctors and unemployed people and construction workers all in the same room.
What do they have in common?
Well, nothing except for their shared lack.
And that's what our humanity is ultimately is we're congregating around some sort of shared lack.
Even those hunter-gatherer tribes.
They're hunting and gathering because they lack the food that they need.
Otherwise they wouldn't need to hunt or gather if it was just served up to them like a McDonald's drive-thru sort of thing.
And so I think ultimately part of the human experience is about embracing that lack. that lack.
And so do I still desire things?
Sure.
But I'm less compelled by impulse than I've ever been.
Yeah.
The reason I asked that question is I found on my inner journey for want of a better term I just find these days, and maybe for the last few years now, that I don't really want much stuff.
And I can't tell you that, oh, I did A and that led to B. I can't give you that, right?
There's no easy prescription that gets you there.
I just know that for a sustained period of time, and this is why I asked you the question, because you've been a minimalist, I think, as you say, for 15 years, right?
And you must have started somewhere.
And it must be a constantly evolving journey as you get to know yourself better.
And you think that you thought you still needed maybe five years.
You're like, well, actually, you know what?
I don't really need that.
But what I found, Josh, is that I just don't find I feel I'm very content with what I have.
You know, as all these great philosophers talk about, you know, what does Socrates say?
The secret to happiness is not found in seeking more, but in developing the capacity to enjoy less.
Now I can say that, but I also have to recognize and this must be a question that comes at you sometimes because I've got the societal ticks of success And I realised that that doesn't actually make you happy, right?
So with that realisation, I have lived my life a lot more intentionally.
I guess, can you get there?
I think you can, but perhaps it's easier to get there once you've kind of filled that bucket and realised that that bucket wasn't what you're after.
Yeah, I played that game.
That game ain't the game I want to play, right?
So if you have never had that kind of validation, perhaps you still believe the myth that actually, when I get it, when I get that promotion, when I get that job, things will be good.
I'm sure you must have been asked this before.
Yeah, you bring up a good point.
And now there are more ways than ever to count success, right?
The so-called success, which I don't even think success exists, think all success is failure on some level.
Uh, in the sense that, like we, we often point to trophies, thinking that that is success, and sometimes the trophies of success are the material objects i i, i got the big deal, so i bought this car, or i got the promotion, so i bought this house.
Or i i um, got the new jobs and i have to wear these types of expensive suits or dresses, and those things make it so that we get wrapped up in that identity that we talked about earlier.
Right,
And we just keep playing a new game and we up the stakes of the game, because you realize like, oh yeah, I remember when I was 18 years old and I got that first corporate job and I was like okay, what do I need to make in order to be happy?
And it was like, okay, $50,000 a year.
If I can make $50,000 a year in Dayton, Ohio in 1999, then I can be happy.
And I made $50,000.
And by the next year, when I was 19, I was like, nope, that didn't do it.
I need to adjust for inflation.
So maybe it's $65,000 a year that'll make me happy.
And maybe it's $90,000.
And the number keeps going up.
And it's six figures.
And of course, that race never ends.
That's a pleasure chase.
And in a way, it's a type of hedonism.
And hedonism is not a sustainable life right.
We just stay on and it keeps going faster and faster.
We need more and more becomes the disease of more again.
It metastasizes to every area of our lives, and so we all do play this game and we think that if I just have what he has or I have what she has, they appear to be happy, and but we're not seeing what's going on underneath the surface.
There are very few people who are contented with their relationships.
There are very few people who are contented with their financial situations.
It's not because they couldn't be, it's because they think they need to be somewhere other than where they are right now.
Yeah.
Might there be someone who has stumbled across this conversation, who perhaps lives in poverty and struggles to pay the rent.
Feed the family, put the heating on.
And might that person think that some elements of this conversation are insensitive to their reality?
Sure, yeah.
That's a great question.
I grew up really poor.
We were on food stamps and government assistance in dayton ohio.
I mean, the duplex that i i grew up in was full of roaches and and uh, we had mice and it was just like a.
It was a.
It was an unfortunate upbringing and we had a lot of discontent and i thought it's because we didn't have any money at the time And that's part of it.
I'm not against money.
I'm not allergic to money.
I want to be clear about that.
I don't think that money is the root of all evil.
I do think that the love of money is a gigantic problem in our lives.
The deification of money has become a problem.
But I think, growing up poor, I would have really benefited from a minimalist mindset in the sense that you don't need to wait to experience joy, because there are moments all the time where we did experience joy, even though we didn't have much.
The discontent often came through the comparison.
You know, they say that comparison is the thief of joy.
I would say the opposite of that.
Joy is also the extinguisher of comparison.
When I feel real joy here in the moment, when you're with your son or daughter and it's just like some goofy movie or song is on and you, just you see the smiles and you see the joy and you're not saying
Oh, how can I get 17 percent more smiles in the next 24 hour period?
Like you would never even.
It doesn't cross your mind, because joy extinguishes that need for comparison.
Comparison is a type of mental illness in a way, because it it tells us it takes this this, this moment, that is enough.
And it says it's not, but it's out there.
And that's what happened when I was in poverty, like for the longest time.
I didn't even know we were poor until I would go to literally the other side of town, the other side of the railroad tracks, as a cliche.
But it was literal.
You go there and it's like, oh, yeah, look how much they have.
Wouldn't it be nice if I had that as well?
And you realize like, oh, okay, I'm now comparing myself.
I'm making myself miserable.
I'm signing a contract with myself to be unhappy until I can live like that person.
Yeah.
I know that your childhoods had a lot of challenges.
I've heard you talk about that.
Your father had... mental illness, your mother, I believe, struggled with alcoholism.
And I can't imagine what that would have been like for you.
We've talked a lot in this conversation about that.
Everything has a cost, but we can also flip that and go.
Everything also has an upside.
Oh, yeah.
So I guess my question to you is what were the upsides of your childhood and your upbringing?
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I remember we did an episode with Kelly Starr at once.
He had this great quote.
He said, pain is a request for change.
And he was talking about that in your body, right?
Pain is a request for healing.
Something needs to change in your body so that it can heal.
And I thought that was interesting, but also pain is from where we grow.
It can destroy us as well at too high of a volume.
But like we all know that about the comfort crisis that we've lived in and we're pacifying ourselves to death and you don't grow from a place of comfort.
The discomfort zone is the place from which we grow the most.
And sometimes that discomfort feels painful.
I lived in a world for a long time where i thought that quick shortcuts to pleasure were the best route.
But of course there are no shortcuts, there are only direct routes, and many of those routes that i took, the easy pleasure almost always leads to an unnecessary pain right.
But if you are willing to accept the pain of the moment, whether it's, you know, the going to the gym and that sort of pain, or you know, the ice bath craze that's going on now, it's painful if you get into an ice bath for a few minutes.
Right.
Like you feel the pain immediately, but it's earned reward at the end of that.
Right.
And so quite often we're not earning the pleasure that we, that we seek now, and i would say also that that much of the growth that we have is earned.
In a way, like i didn't seek out any of the pain of my childhood, obviously i don't think you need to seek out suffering.
It's going to show up in your life, whether you want it to or not.
Don't worry about seeking it out.
It's going to show up at your doorstep um, especially when you don't want it to, and it's going to change a lot of things in your life.
But it's also wow.
What have i learned from this?
I've learned that i can bear the unbearable.
Whether that's an autoimmune condition or some sort of health scare or a death in the family, or it's your father abusing your mother when you're three years old on green street in dayton ohio, it's uh.
We had to escape that whole situation.
We had to run away from him, basically And I don't even blame him
I don't blame a tornado for coming through Dayton a few years ago either, right?
Like it's just you don't point the finger and say, how dare you tornado?
He was mentally ill.
He was schizophrenic.
And we had to get away from that, right?
So suffering shows up.
And the question is, like, what am I going to do with that pain that I've experienced?
Am I going to learn from it?
Or am I going to keep repeating that cycle?
Because that often happens.
Someone who is abused as a kid often becomes an abuser.
Victims become victimizers, right?
And so we have to be intentional about that.
Otherwise, it's easy to just adopt that pattern, wrap ourselves in that pattern and then begin to victimize others.
Yeah.
Thank you for sharing that.
As I've been thinking about the whole concept of minimalism over the past few days, I really landed on the thought that the entry point for people of having too much stuff is almost like a Trojan horse.
Yes.
It's a symptom.
You have a load of stuff.
You think the stuff is the problem, but it isn't the stuff.
It's your relationship to the stuff.
And as you embark upon this journey of trying to declutter your external worlds, you will, through that process, start to learn really profound things about yourself, if you're paying attention.
Hmm.
Now, Joshua, how old were you when you started being a minimalist?
I was 28 when my mom died and my marriage ended both in the same month.
And those two things, they made me realize like, oh, the way I've been living right now is not it.
I don't know what it is.
Thankfully, I stumbled across this idea of minimalism.
And it wasn't something dangerous like a cult or something like that.
Minimalism is sort of the anti-cult.
But yeah, I was 28 years old.
And yeah, it took almost a year for me to start simplifying.
Yeah.
The reason I ask that question is because everyone these days wants the hack.
They want the one hit.
They want the solution.
And it's like, hey, guys, listen.
You've got to start somewhere, and this is a constant journey of growth and evolution.
Once you start on that path and if you keep paying attention and want to stay on that path, you will continue to learn things about yourself that you didn't previously know.
So if you start in your late 20s I think I heard in one of your podcasts you say when you were 39 you realized that a lot of your suffering came from your desire to impress other people.
Now that was really, it was really powerful to hear that.
And I want to talk about that through the lens of constant evolution.
You were already 10 years into your journey as a minimalist.
You must have been learning and uncovering so much about yourself.
And still, 10 years on, there was a core realisation, which is a core realisation for many people if they are self aware enough to realise that that's where a lot of our suffering does come from.
But can you speak to that a little bit?
Because that's interesting to me that it didn't come straight away.
It came as you were embarking upon this journey.
Yeah, it was sort of an unraveling of sorts, and maybe i realized glimpses of that, but that was through the material things.
Like i want to impress people through the car that i drive, or the job title that i have, or the house, the neighborhood that i live in.
That's impressive right, and so um, that was one but, but you can also trade that for other other means and can be impressive.
Getting rid of everything to impress other people, that's another type of uh, it's another trap right um, or getting more followers is a trap, getting people to like me, and and the internet is especially dangerous for this, because we're working really hard to impress people we'll never meet, or people that don't even exist right, bots or whatever, and so it's like i'm working really hard, i'm forsaking the people closest to me.
When i was in the corporate world and i forsook my closest relationships in order to look impressive, to appear impressive, and yeah, 39 i i had several sort of epiphanies um, as i, as i really got into the, the whole identity side of it, and i realized that, like it, the people more impressed when i wasn't trying to impress them.
It's a weird paradox right, like the person, the coolest person you can think of, i mean, if you, anyone listening to this, conjures an image of the three coolest people, they're not trying to impress you and yet they're the most impressive people to you, but it's precisely because they don't care about whether or not you're impressed by them.
How is your relationship to other people's opinions these days?
Well, we accidentally became famous in 2016.
That was not the intention.
When that first documentary went up on Netflix, it was before there were any other streaming platforms.
It was like on the first page for several months.
The first page of Netflix?
Yes yeah yeah, because there was, i mean, 93 million people saw that thing and so um, i would start to go to like, the grocery store and 12 people would say something to me and at first it was like oh, it's kind of nice, like it's nice to be recognized, and i'm not against it.
Even today, if someone stops me, i'm not against it.
But I also realized like, if you're not careful, then it's going to be another form of consumerism.
You're going to need more, more, more.
And so I found there was a moment where I'm like, okay, how do I get more of this?
How do I get more of this affirmation?
And it's like, oh, no.
Not only does that feel kind of gross, but like that's just another kind of consumerism.
That's completing me through their validation, right?
It's people pleasing in a way.
It's interesting because I saw this meme recently.
I said, oh, you're a people pleaser?
Really?
How many people have you pleased?
And it's like yeah, like the people pleaser, as anytime I'm a people pleaser, it ends up making everyone unhappy.
At least that's what I end up seeing, right?
Because we fixate on the people who are displeased with us as people pleasers.
And so I had to set that down.
And every time I would pick it back up, I'd notice that pattern of I need you to validate me in order to feel validated.
And I just didn't like the pattern.
And so every time I'd pick it up, the need for that, I would just set it back down.
And it was a beautiful accident.
The whole minimalism thing was great.
But I didn't need it for any sort of satisfaction.
It's really interesting, Joshua, hearing you talk about that.
I would say as someone who sits outside your world but has consumed some of your content over the years at various times, I would say that you're probably one of my favorite online creators.
And I'll tell you why I think that is.
You strike me as someone who is staying true to your values, even if that comes at a lack of so-called commercial success or followers or views or whatever that might be.
And I really love that because I think that's getting rarer and rarer.
Thank you.
It's a struggle because the algorithm is corrupting and it incentivizes to be divisive and A bunch of things.
I just don't want to be now because I think they're immoral, but it's just.
It doesn't delight me.
And I enjoy doing the podcast because it delights me to do.
I enjoy writing because it delights me to do.
I enjoy having an occasional conversation like this.
I told you before we started recording, I don't do many interviews.
I think I've done one other interview this year just because it it.
It delights me to have the conversation with someone who I think gets it.
I don't just want to go out there to do interviews.
I'd rather be delighted.
But there are other ways I can be delighted.
I live in Ojai, California, and I just go out to the meadows and hike.
And that's pretty delightful, too.
Or I'll spend some time with my daughter.
And that's really delightful.
And it's free.
Or spend some time with my wife every other Friday.
We just take the Friday off.
We have screenless day and we kind of get lost together and I love it.
That's, that's one of the best things.
It's so delightful and I can't measure any of it.
If you ask me why I love my wife or love my daughter, I I could give you a list, but it's not even going to approximate what's going on.
Their language fails us for all of the most important things.
Well, I hope this conversation has delighted you somewhat so far, but I
I wanted to move on to some practical things.
You've mentioned this PDF that I downloaded yesterday, 16 Rules for Living with Less.
It's brilliant, right?
Everyone should go on to the minimalist website and download it.
It's a work of art.
It's beautiful minimalist design, which I think is in keeping, but it's super, super practical.
Now I don't want to go through all 16 rules, but you've mentioned a few of them already, just in case people have been you know they've been excited by the thought of well, maybe I'm going to start seeing if I could enjoy life more if I have less.
And I want to start, for want of a better term, decluttering.
I think some of these things are fantastic.
So can you tell me about the 30 day minimalism game, which is right at the top of that PDF?
Yeah, you know, it's a great entry point into simplifying, because if you are one of those people who has tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of things in your home, if you're anything like me, you're just overwhelmed and you throw your hands up and you're like I don't even know.
I don't know where to start.
I'll just start tomorrow.
And so we procrastinate because you're overwhelmed by the stuff.
And so we came up with something called the 30-day minimalism game.
I don't know about for you.
You said you got rid of eight bags of stuff recently.
For me, decluttering can be kind of boring, and maybe I'll dread it a little bit.
So we found a way to make it a bit more fun.
We call it the 30-day minimalism game, and it derives from how I started simplifying my life.
I asked myself, what if I got rid of one possession every day for a month?
What would happen?
I knew it wouldn't change my life, but maybe it would start a new habit.
And it turns out I got rid of way more than 30 items in the first 30 days because you start to get this sort of compound interest of letting go.
That happens.
And so the minimalism game was birthed out of that.
And the way it works is you partner up with someone in your house, a friend, a family member, or maybe it's someone at work, a coworker, anyone else who wants to simplify with you together.
And you start off usually at the beginning of a month.
First day, you get rid of one item.
It doesn't matter where.
The only rule is you have to get it out of your house by the end of the day.
And second day, two items.
Third day, three items.
You see where it's going here.
It gets progressively more difficult.
Well, so far, so good.
This sounds very achievable.
It's in the latter half of this challenge where it sounds quite hard.
That's right.
Day 15, you get there and you're like, I got to get rid of 15 hours a day.
But wait a minute, I have to get rid of 16 things tomorrow.
And whoever goes the longest wins.
So you can bet whatever you want at the beginning of the month.
Maybe it's you know, a nice meal or concert tickets, or I'm going to bet you 10 or whatever.
It is just for fun.
And you you, whoever goes longest wins.
If you both make it to the end of the month, then you've both won, because you've gotten rid of about 500 items and We've had tens of thousands of people play this and they are posting their pictures online of these huge piles of stuff that they're letting go of together.
And it's no longer boring because it's that contribution.
You feel like you're letting go, but you're also contributing to someone else.
You're being someone else's accountability partner and they're your accountability partner as you let go together.
It's so much more fun than just doing it by yourself.
Yeah, okay.
So that's a challenge for people if they wanna sort of get stuck in after this conversation.
I also like the no junk rule and in that you say every single thing you own can be placed into three piles essential, non-essential and junk.
Can you explain about this rule a little bit?
Yeah, it's interesting.
We own a lot of things, and we all have the same similar essentials, right?
Like shelter and transportation and vocation.
I need clothing.
Now those essentials look differently.
They look different for each person, right?
Your house looks different from mine.
Your clothes might be a different size from mine, et cetera.
But we all have the same essentials.
And then we have the non-essentials.
I'm not against non-essentials.
These are the things that add value to our lives. value adding things.
So like strictly speaking, I can live without a couch or a coffee table, right?
But those things add value to my life.
I'm a minimalist.
I'm not a deprivationist.
I don't want to deprive myself of things that add value.
Unfortunately, most of the things we own fit into that third category.
It's junk.
These are the things we like or more accurately, the things that we think we like.
We've told ourselves a story that I should like this because someone else likes it, or an advertiser told me to like it, or I was influenced in some way.
Or maybe it's something I got value from once upon a time and it has ceased to add value to me.
But because I got value from it back then, I'm going to hold on to it just in case, which is another rule we can cover as well the just-in-case rule.
But the junk stuff that we're holding on to, anything that's junk, I can give myself permission to let it go.
And so everything you own, whether you own 10 items or 10 million items, it all fits into one of those three piles.
It's either essential it's non-essential, with value adding or, unfortunately for most of us, most of the things we own are junk.
Our life is so much simpler when we have the appropriate amount of essentials And we have the non-essentials that add tremendous value to our lives, because I don't want to go without things.
I don't think the things can complete me or make me happy, but they can augment or enhance or magnify or amplify my experience of life.
Those are the things that I want in my life.
Yeah.
That's the key message in your work, isn't it?
That it's not about deprivation.
It's about intentionally choosing what you bring into your life, whether that be things or relationships, or passions or hobbies.
It's basically about living an intentional life.
And I think, the other big thought that comes to me when I think about what it is you and your fellow minimalists offer people.
I think what you offer us is clarity.
Because ultimately, it's clarity that you need to be a good minimalist.
You need the clarity to look at your things and go, is this essential?
Is it non-essential?
Is it junk?
And the clarity you glean from understanding which things you can throw out will absolutely cross over to clarity in other areas of your life, won't it?
It's about clarity as well as intention, isn't it?
Yeah, we have to be willing to ask questions, and we don't ask those questions because sometimes we're afraid of the answers.
Why have I given so much meaning to my material possessions?
That's a difficult question to ask.
Right.
But also, like, does this add value to my life?
That's a difficult question to ask because I have to stop and think and I have to get clear.
I have to be honest with myself.
I mean, I could lie to other people and say yes, I get a lot of value from this watch or whatever, but I don't wear a watch and I'm not against watches.
It just doesn't add value to my life.
If you want to wear two watches on each wrist and you get value from that, so be it.
I have no judgment around that.
I just know for me it's inappropriate.
It doesn't mean it's inappropriate for you, but for me it's inappropriate.
And that's why minimalism to a great extent is perspectival.
I wish I could come on here and say actually download the list of the hundred things you should own to make you happy.
If that list existed, I'd be the first one to propagate it.
But it doesn't, because the a hundred things that add value to my life might be total clutter for you, and vice versa.
Maybe a bunch of them are going to get in your way.
And so it's about being intentional with things.
We have being intentional with the things we acquire and equally being intentional about the things we don't acquire and the things we continue to hold onto because the access. is what is keeping us from having enough, at least for most of us.
That's another question we don't ask.
How much is enough?
How much is enough money?
How much is enough relationships?
How much is enough status?
How many followers is enough?
Whatever.
And the truth is, quite often, for many of these things, it's zero.
Enough is zero.
Or it's a much smaller number than we think because we've never stopped even considering it.
Yeah, it's not the thing, it's our relationship to it that ultimately determines its effect on us.
It's a metaphor for everything, isn't it?
It is.
I often think about another rule that's in that rule book.
You mentioned the spontaneous combustion rule.
It's my favorite rule of all time, because I just think it works so, so well for any of the stuff that we have in our lives, whether that's mail or books or material items.
I think it works for careers and relationships as well.
But specifically with your material possessions, they cause so much stress.
And so as you get more and more burdened by these things, I feel like the discontent sort of heats up.
But you don't need to wait until, like it's your, your inbox is overflowing or you have a mountain of books on your desk.
And the spontaneous combustion rule just starts with one question.
If this item were to spontaneously combust right now, would I feel relieved?
What's the emotional response to this?
And it's a lot of the times it's like, yeah, if those books just disappeared right now.
Oh, full body sigh.
Yes.
Well, that's a sign that I want to let it go.
There's another one that runs adjacent to that.
It's called the wouldn't repurchase rule.
It's more about the intellectual exercise of this, not what what's going on emotionally.
But like if those books were to disappear right now, would you buy them again or would you request them again?
And if the answer is no on that, then why the hell am I still holding on to them?
And the same thing is true with the oversized orange sweatshirt in your closet, the one that has tassels from the 1990s.
What am I doing with this?
Why do I still have this?
Or the whole garage full of things.
What happens if these things spontaneously combust?
Would I feel a sense of relief?
If so, then I want to let it go.
It's interesting.
One of the realizations I've had recently, I mean, I love reading.
I read several books a week and I really enjoy it.
And I would say sometimes I think, yeah, this is great.
I'm going to come back to it at some point.
There's some really great lessons in there.
But then some of them I've been saying that for four years and I still haven't come back to it.
Now there are a few that I do come back to regularly.
You know, like maybe my top, I just freaking love.
I mean, they have a special place.
But the other ones, I just took to the charity shop a couple of weekends ago.
I thought, well, here's the thing.
The book, I don't know what your take is on this.
I've come to the realization that the book changes you as you read it.
It's the experience of engaging with it in real time that changes you.
It sitting on a shelf doesn't do anything for me, especially if I don't go back to it.
And even if I go back to it in three years' time, I'm a different person, right?
So I have changed since the first time I read it.
So my relationship with that book will also be different because I'm different.
Yeah.
To me.
That's really helped me get rid of a lot of these books and go well.
Actually, I want someone else to read that book now at a really discounted price in the charity shop.
It really had an impact on me.
The impact isn't from it being on my shelf.
The impact was from how I felt and how I changed through the reading of it.
You bring up a really good point.
In a strange way, we don't think about this.
It's selfish to hold on to things we don't use, right?
Because, by holding on to something that could add value to someone else's life, I'm depriving them of that potentially.
But also, you're illustrating another point there.
The charity shop can kind of be your storage locker of sorts.
This happened to me.
We were on a tour stop in Albuquerque years ago, a book tour out in albuquerque, and we at the end this guy came up and he was doing the q a bid.
He goes hey, i just want you to know that like, you've helped me realize that anytime i need a chainsaw i just go to my storage locker.
It's called craigslist and i guess today it'd be facebook marketplace and i was like, oh yeah, he's like, whenever i need a chainsaw it's usually about once a year i just go to craigslist, i buy it for however much it is 40 50, 100 dollars And then I put it right back in my storage locker Craigslist.
And sometimes I even make more money by putting it back there.
And if I need another chainsaw a year from now, I go on to Craigslist.
I get another chainsaw because he wasn't using it with enough regularity to make sense for him.
Now there's a lumberjack who's using a chainsaw every day.
It wouldn't make sense to do that.
But some of these things it's like, yeah, I can let it go.
And if I really feel compelled to pick it up again in the future, uh, then I can do that.
I don't have that scarcity mindset anymore that I need to cling to this.
Clinging is, it prevents us from moving forward.
And there's a level of scarcity there that says, I'll never be able to get this again.
And as soon as I recognize that as a false story, it's so much easier to let go.
How do the principles of minimalism help us with things like our relationships or our health?
Yeah yeah, it's.
It's making room.
Minimalism is the, the art of addition through subtraction right, and so I'm making more space.
It's more time, more attention is available, right.
More energy, more focus, more freedom, a lot of more.
You know, it's me, vander rowe, the famous architect, who said less is more, and our last, our last documentary we called it less is now.
It was about living with less so we could be more present.
How do we be in the present moment?
Not a prescriptive how to, but like.
What does that look like?
And it looks like shedding the distractions.
Right, and usually you'll see this as a doctor.
We're unhealthy because of what we have done to our bodies, all the things we've added, whether that's cigarettes, or it is processed foods, or it's the built environment that we're living in, or maybe it's EMFs and all of these other things that we're concerned about now.
But it's about removing the things that are harmful to us.
And the same thing is true with our relationships.
There's relationship.
Consumerism is in an all-time high.
Look at The dating apps we have more options than ever.
And it seems like we have less romantic love than ever, right?
And you even talked about it earlier.
You're in this 18-year marriage, right?
That's one way to count it, but that doesn't tell me anything about the quality of a relationship.
And the same thing is true.
The quality of your sex life isn't because you have 100 sexual partners.
It the quality of your sex life is because you're able to be present with someone.
The quality of your relationships involve being present.
The tagline for the minimalist has been for well over a decade now.
Love people and use things because the opposite never works.
I'm not against things.
I want to use them.
Don't want to use people, though.
I want to love them, and to love someone is to see them for who they are, without trying to change them.
To see them means to witness them, to be there with them.
We might call it compassion right to be with someone while they're suffering, and we're all suffering in some ways right.
And so seeing someone for who they are is to love them.
To use them is to unlove them in a way, and we use people in a bunch of interesting ways.
We coerce them.
We manipulate them.
We persuade them.
We try to force them into our point of view.
We have conditional love, which isn't love at all.
I will love you as long as you do these seven things in this sequence.
That's not love.
That's the recipe, right?
And with our things, we ended up loving our things, right?
You even said it earlier, and it's because we don't have more words for it, unfortunately.
So I love these books.
And it's like, okay, I know what you mean by that.
You mean I really, really like.
And I totally get that.
But if you look at the Inuit in Canada, they have 53 words for snow because they're steeped in different types of snow.
So they have to be able to tell you what kind of snow is present.
Right.
For us, we say love.
I love my wife, but I also love pickup trucks.
I love my daughter, but I also love tacos on Tuesdays.
Well, wait a minute.
What does that even mean?
Right.
My favorite definition of love is from the Oxford Dictionary.
It's the fourth definition in there.
And it says love is a score of zero.
Now, it's a tennis term, right?
Love means you have a score of zero.
But when you apply that to your relationships, it's like I'm not keeping score here.
There's no ledger for love.
There's no ledger in our relationships.
I'll love you 17 times more if you do these 17 things.
That's not love right.
And so I think we get really confused about our relationships because we're trying to use people in our lives, we're trying to manipulate them and then paradoxically, we're trying to love our things.
I love my house, I love my couch.
I
It's not love either.
I just really, really like those things.
There's nothing wrong with liking those things.
But I think we get real tangled up when we think we love them.
That was just so beautiful.
Honestly, there was so much gold in that.
Joshua, I've thoroughly enjoyed speaking to you today.
As I said at the start, we wanted to speak to you for years.
I love what you put out in the world.
I love what you stand for.
This has been a really uplifting and energizing conversation for me.
And just to finish off, if there was someone who has connected with this conversation and has recognized that actually their world is full of external clutter, they've got too many things in their house.
They know it's causing them stress and anxiety, they've never managed to do anything about it.
What would you say to them?
How might your life be better with less?
It's the most important, important question i ever asked myself how might your life be better with less?
Because i can't give you 67 tips to declutter your closet.
It wouldn't help you out anyway.
I can't come to your house and remove all your things for you, not only because that's theft, but It would rob you of the dignity of letting go on your own.
And some of those rules and precepts are useful.
That's the how-to stuff.
But it's only useful when you understand the why.
Because if I give you 67 ways to declutter your closet, it will be re-cluttered a month from now or a year from now if you don't know why you're doing it.
So it always starts with that one question.
How might your life be better with less?
Beautiful question to finish on.
If people want to connect with you Joshua, sort of get into your world.
You've got books, you've got documentaries on Netflix.
You've got your podcast.
You've got the beautiful essays on your websites.
Where would you direct them?
Yeah, all of it.
That website is the hub for all of it.
TheMinimalists.com.
Everything you want to find from the podcast to the films. essays, etc.
It's all there, theminimalists.com.
Well, Joshua, I appreciate that you don't do many conversations anymore on podcasts.
I'm very glad you made an exception for mine.
And I hope the conversation delighted you as much as it delighted me.
Thank you.
Oh, how delightful.
Thank you so much.
Really hope you enjoyed that conversation.
Do think about one thing that you can take away and apply into your own life.
And also have a think about one thing from this conversation that you can teach to somebody else.
Remember, when you teach someone, it not only helps them, it also helps you learn and retain the information.
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