Less and Less: Introduction (Cont'd 2)

I talk about the idea of the book: to explore how a minimalistic personality deals with both possessions and people.

Transcript

Hi, this is Wayne Jones, narrating the book Less and Less, my book about personal minimalism. Introduction (Further continuation).

This book is the story of my exploration of those differences, and particularly the intricacies of personal minimalism. I was interested in finding out partly through an examination of my own behaviour and partly through research, just what is this compulsion for minimalist living that I both enjoy and struggle with. Minimalism is a habit that others either admire because their own places and lives are so messy,  or they just dismiss as a harmless quirk. Like everything in life, though, it is not just an innocent tendency. It is a manifestation of a psychological attitude with some negative aspects associated with it.

I discovered that there is not a lot written about personal minimalism and virtually no authoritative research by scholars and psychologists on the topic. Many of the books, articles, and websites I came across tended to focus on the simple living lifestyle or what some writers call "voluntary simplicity." They write about the benefits to the person and to the environment of decluttering and living in simple spare spaces. It was the same thing for many of the interviews that I conducted with various people. For them, minimalism is synonymous with living a life with few possessions and free of clutter. It's only in the last few years that communities of commentary have started to develop on the web so that individuals suffering especially from the more extreme versions could give voice to an ailment that finally had a name: obsessive compulsive spurtainism. This is well beyond decluttering or simple living or even the personal minimalism that I write about in this book, just as there is a difference between a collector or pack rat and a flat out pathological hoarder.

I'm not a psychologist, and so I sought out those who have studied spartanism. One of the emerging researchers in this area, Dr. Annabelle Charbit, cites four specific characteristics of an obsessive compulsive spartan, whom she also calls a clutterphobe: "need to have minimum things in your house; need to have specific numbers of everything that you do have in your home; everything must fit into a category, or you cannot have it at all; everything has a very specific place. In a radio interview, Dr. Charbit says further: "most of the time, these people are very careful even about buying things. They don't want to buy things. If you purchase something for such a person, you actually are causing them great anxiety."

It's only recently that minimalists have also started showing up in therapists' offices as well. In an email interview, F. Diane Barth, a practicing psychotherapist and psychoanalyst in New York City, says: "I had recently worked with a couple of clients who seem to have a compulsive need to get rid of things, which was pretty unusual in my experience, and I couldn't find anything much written about it." My book touches on this manifestation, but the main focus is twofold: my own experience with personal minimalism, and how that practice in my home and with possessions reflects itself in other aspects of my life, notably my relationships with people and my tendency to practice minimalism even outside the world of things. Am I a controller, a perfectionist? Why am I so tense all the time? Why doesn't my daily, nearly lifelong practice of minimalism contribute overall to a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment? Has it been a hindrance to happiness?

I don't make any judgments. Your cluttered house and messy commitments are no better or worse than my own simple life. I have no expectation that I can substantially change my ways, but I do want to understand why I am the way I am, what the good and bad sides of that are, and what effect it has both on my own self as a person and on the people I have relationships with. I may not be able to extricate a moral or draw an objective conclusion, but at least I can try to discover what moves me.