How to be happy with less: A minimalist holiday manifesto

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I like to think I’m a minimalist, but my attic tells a different story.

I have racks of clothes I haven’t worn in years, mostly dress shirts and slacks from my office days. I have enough spare household goods to equip an entire kitchen. I have old chargers and electronics I’ve kept because they might be useful some day. I have college books and notes, tools and gardening supplies, and various baby goods and toys my son has outgrown.

Most of all, there are the books. They’re overflowing the shelves, stacked in untidy piles, filling boxes and crates. They’re the fruits of a lifetime of compulsive book collecting. They’re heavy and bulky and poorly organized, and I doubt I’ll ever reread most of them… but I’ve kept them because what if, someday, I do?

All these possessions create a mental load, like an invisible weight. For each object I own, I have to remember that I have it (or else I’d end up rebuying it). I have to find a place for it in my not-overly-large home, and keep track of where it is for when I want it. I have to pay the cost, in time and money, of cleaning and maintaining it. If it breaks or I no longer want it, I have to get rid of it: either find someone who wants to take it, or find somewhere to recycle it, or throw it in the trash and feel guilty about knowing it will sit in a landfill for thousands of years.

The more stuff I have, the more of a burden this is. I long for a simpler, less cluttered existence.

Some people talk about Swedish death cleaning: the idea of purging unneeded possessions now so your descendants won’t get stuck with them when you pass on. I use a different mental model that I like to call house-fire cleaning: if my house burned down and I lost all my possessions, what would I actually miss?

Luxury is a matter of perspective

Now, I have to pause from self-deprecation and acknowledge that most Americans would view my life as spartan. I live in a small apartment with limited closet space, not a big surburban house with a fenced-in backyard. I have two cars, both more than a decade old. I do most of my writing on a desktop computer I’ve had since my college days. I don’t own anything especially fancy or expensive.

However, I don’t feel deprived. On the contrary, my life is rich and full, almost embarrassingly so.

My home is heated in winter, cooled in summer, and lit at night. I have indoor plumbing, fresh water for drinking, and hot showers. I have a wardrobe of clothes in every color and style, and when they’re dirty, I have a machine that washes them for me. I have an ample supply of fresh food, brought from distant regions of the world no matter the season, that I didn’t have to grow or harvest myself. My spice rack alone would be the envy of past emperors.

My book collection would make the scholars of ancient Alexandria weep. If that’s not enough, I have a device I can carry in my pocket that gives me access to the sum total of human knowledge. That same device tells me the weather in advance, guides me to anywhere I want to go, plays any music I want to hear, and allows me to talk to someone on the other side of the planet in real time. If I want to, I can travel across the world in a day or less, in comfort and safety.

By the standards of almost every human being who’s ever lived, my life is overflowing with abundance. If this isn’t enough for happiness, what is?

The consumerism trap

What we consider a basic middle-class existence, by modern standards, surpasses the lifestyle that even the richest kings, nobles and robber barons of centuries past could attain. If people of the past could see us, they’d consider our world a utopian paradise.

From this historical perspective, it seems we should be blissfully overjoyed, all the time. But that hasn’t happened. We’re as disgruntled, anxious and fretful as ever.

Part of this, to be sure, is soaring inequality and poverty that makes it hard for millions of people to afford the basics I described. However, another part of the problem is that, as rapidly as we fulfill old desires, we come up with new ones.

We’re always upgrading our cars, our electronics and our TVs, wanting the newest and therefore the best. On Black Friday, we brave the traffic and the lines to cram into stores for the latest must-have. If the neighbors remodel their kitchen with stainless steel and granite countertops, we want to do the same. It’s an endless treadmill race that keeps us focused on what we don’t have, instead of what we do.

We’re encouraged to think this way by a vast advertising industry that spends hundreds of billions of dollars to bombard us with commercials, the purpose of which is to make us unhappy.

After all, if you were content and needed nothing, advertising would have no effect on you. The only way it works is by convincing you that you have an unmet desire. And, as the Buddhists remind us, desire is the root of suffering.

Except for the small number of things you genuinely need to live, possessions don’t bring lasting happiness. At most, they give you a temporary jolt of pleasure. But humans are very good at getting habituated to change. Soon you get used to the new possession, and it’s not exciting anymore. To fill that void, you have to move on to the next thing, chasing another temporary high.

The minimalist ideal

As I said, I’m no minimalist. But I’m striving to get closer to that ideal.

The reason I don’t have more belongings isn’t because I can’t afford them, but because I know they wouldn’t add anything to my happiness. I could buy more clothes, but I already have more than I can wear. I could buy a bigger car, but the ones I have are perfectly adequate for the amount of driving I do. I could buy a Rolex watch or some other expensive accessory, but that wouldn’t add to my happiness, it’d just make me worried about it getting lost or broken. If I bought a bigger house, I’d have to spend more time cleaning and maintaining it, and I’d feel pressure to buy even more stuff to fill up the space so it didn’t look empty. I’m happier with fewer things to weigh me down.

When you know there’s no link between material goods and happiness, it reorients your whole perspective. It reveals how much of our society is built on completely backwards assumptions. Middle-class people spend huge amounts of time working, chasing more money to get more stuff, often going into debt. But all that brings them is more stress, more depletion of our finite planet, and no extra happiness.

On the other hand, working less and having more quality time—to travel, to spend with loved ones, to do whatever you find most meaningful and fulfilling—that does add to your happiness. Not everyone has this choice, of course. But there are millions of people who could cut back, both on work and consumption, and aren’t doing so because they’re blinded by capitalist and consumerist assumptions.

If you want to put this into practice, you can start right now. Because the holidays are the biggest spending season of the year, they’re a great time to give minimalism a try.

Try agreeing with your family and friends that, this year, you won’t exchange gifts. It’s a double win: you don’t have to go to the effort and expense of shopping for others, and you won’t get new things you have to fit into your already crowded life. (Or if you absolutely must give gifts, try agreeing on only consumable gifts: chocolate, candles, wine, and the like.)

And if you have stuff you don’t need, the holidays are a great time to give it away. There are coat drives, toy drives, book drives, and many more opportunities to pass on your extra possessions to people who can use them.

It makes for a less stressful holiday season. And you might be surprised how much better, lighter and cleaner you feel.