The Philosophy of Minimalism

I do not know when it happened. Not even why it happened. But it happened.

The “it” was a change in perspective. I woke up one morning and it occurred to me that the reason I had to get out of bed was to pay off debt.

The debt which came from spending more than I had, on things I didn’t need, and plugging the gap with other people’s money.

What was I spending it on though? And more importantly, why was I spending it?

My thoughts turned to Thorstein Veblen and his book The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899). The basic premise was simple. Through “conspicuous consumption” members of a consumer society attain social status.

The point of life then becomes not the purchase of “things” for their intrinsic value.
Rather the point of life becomes the search for the extrinsic value of “success signaling” through consumption.

What Veblen did not mention is how we fund that signaling in our modern economy. In today’s world we do it through debt. We buy more house than we need through debt. Perhaps the same with cars, vacations, schools for our children, ad infinitum.

But there is a price to debt. We get owned by “things” rather than the other way around. That is the perspective change that happened on a dreary winter morning sometime in my early 50s.