Less and More

The cycle and continuum from less is less to less is more, and all the stops in between, are described.

Transcript

Less and More

The hoarder and the minimalist are at opposite ends of the spectrum. They are positions along a cycle of more and less. In the life of a person who is neither a hardcore minimalist nor a hoarder, there tend to be phases, because the minimalist state is inherently unstable. It is something that you always have to fight to maintain, with the result that as a project it’s always tending to fail. There is a cycle during which a person has too many things, gets rid of a few of those things, then gets rid of more, and even more, and then eventually starts gathering some other things, and the cycle starts all over again.

It all begins with more, which is the world’s basic default position. Having more, getting bigger, doing whatever striving is necessary to make the things and people in your life more numerous, to have more children, to make more friends, to get a bigger house, a bigger car, and otherwise to add to the pile of things that you currently have allotted to you – this is such a natural longing that it is banal even to draw attention to it. Almost everyone you know, almost every institution, every business, every everything is so accustomed to swimming around in the culture of more that it’s not even something anyone really notices. However, the momentum which is inherently just more will continue on and on, of course, and then all the advantages of it may founder in excess. There’s something built into more that is the cause of its own eventual demise.

People develop a taste for more, and more ultimately mutates into being the only thing that counts. More is more. The focus moves away from simply padding the life around you with things and objects: in addition to the resultant pleasure of those objects themselves, there’s also the pleasure that comes from just acquiring them. It’s the hit, the high, and then the need for another hit, as you step over that consumer item that you just bought (and that you don’t really need or want) and buy something else. The psychology is that of any addiction. It starts with the simple pleasure of a good thing – a piece of chocolate, a drink, any consumer item – but eventually the pure motivations get ruined. Things are skewed. At its worst, the result is excessive collecting, where it starts to interfere with the prospect of having a good life – that is, having more starts to interfere with what was the original goal of having more in the first place.

And leads to more is less. This is the state of severe degeneration and deterioration, a state which is both counterintuitive and very understand-ably human. Perspective gets lost, the flood starts rolling over you, and you are then so overwhelmed by the abundance of things that the very value that came from having more is negated. You have everything, but you want less. There is probably a period, especially for non-minimalists, when you can’t figure this out. You are buried in it all and you can’t quite identify why it’s not making you happy, why it’s changed you so much, why you feel so different. Hoarding is only the most obvious manifestation. Another one is just being obsessed with things, with having them, with acquiring them, and with no particular need to keep them.

When things get too bad, there needs to be a righting of the balance. Less is more is the reaction to more is less. The cure, the fixing, the purging. You wake up to the realization that the richness of life is actually increased when less and less attention is dedicated to acquiring, to consumerism, to being obsessed with what you have and not with what you are. The dynamic of it is the movement away from something that is consuming you to a place where that consuming thing is gone, but you are also generally living in an environment and a mindset of less.

Less is less is life in another extreme. The severe cutting back on everything, not only things but also people and relationships, leads to a lesser life. Just as the inherent momentum of having more is to have more and more, the momentum of having less is to have less and less. One of two things happens. Either you strip your life down so much – removing people, things, activities, any sort of distraction – that it becomes logistically difficult and devoid of much pleasure or variety. Or you devote way too much energy to the activity of getting rid of things, ignoring the end result, forgetting to live a real life. Either way you are forgetting the lovely balance that made the lessness such a desirable state in the first place.

At times of stress and transition, my own natural tendencies are always toward less. Get rid of a few things, lessen, reduce. Sometimes it can be prosaic: cutting my hair really short, getting rid of unused clothing, getting rid of superfluous possessions generally. Interviewee Amber from Halifax says: “I actually get excited when I get rid of things; I even enjoy finishing a box of crackers and tossing out the box.” Sometimes it can be much bigger: reassessing friends, dropping girlfriends or acting so badly that they drop me, changing or quitting jobs (and preferably moving to another city), changing my daily life schedule. I have a tendency to always want to start over, and part of that – not sure which comes first – is that I also have a tendency to get into ruts of routine as well. The overall result is that I am always somewhere or other along a cycle, somewhere between burying myself in a rut (not a groove) and trying my damnedest to get out of it. There is never any sense of arrival or success: it is always heading toward X and then trying to back out of X.

Less is a state very similar to the more state, where there is a general balance in the lived life, but in this case with an overall tendency to be stripped back. It’s really all about balance and personal preference. An argument – possibly a very obvious argument – could be made that both less and more are the golden mean, the middle way, the two modes of life that are most likely to make and keep you happiest, as long as you are willing and able not to let them get out of control. If you’re a minimalist who wants this kind of happiness (and can tolerate it), you should get your possessions and your life generally down to a pretty reduced state: not so little that you are missing some things or are approaching that territory where you might develop a taste for even less, and not so much that you feel your minimalist desires and needs unsatisfied, and so you might be tempted to go too extreme. If you’re not a minimalist, get all the messy abundance that you crave and can tolerate around you, but don’t let it get out of hand. If you do, then the mess will tend to make your place and your life undesirable, less happy, less enjoyable. With just a little less or just a little more than the majority of humankind has, you are just that little bit happier. You’re not the boring average, but you are not afflicted with an excess that could destroy you.