10 lessons from 10 years as a minimalist

[Music] all right so this video is really going to make me feel old because i have been a minimalist now for 10 years it's kind of crazy to look back on it and realize that it truly has been that long so much has changed over the past 10 years i've gotten married i started my youtube channel my beard is starting to get a little bit gray i don't know if you can see but i've got a few white hairs coming in and my back is just it's not what it used to be sitting down on

the floor here it was a struggle but the one thing that has remained the same is that i'm still a minimalist and so in this video i wanted to share the 10 biggest lessons that i've learned over the past 10 years this video is brought to you by squarespace i'll talk more about them later in the video the excitement fades but the value remains i remember that first week that i learned about minimalism and to say it changed my life would be well it wouldn't be an understatement or an overstatement i would say it was

an accurate statement minimalism changed my life it got me to think about the world in a different way it got me to change my values my idea of success and i was truly excited and i wanted to share it with everybody that i knew but that excitement actually faded over time and eventually minimalism became the new normal and what i realized was that's completely okay because as the excitement fades that value still remains and so i still had those changes in perspective my idea of success was still completely different my values had shifted and so

even though i wasn't waking up every day with a massive smile on my face i i was still seeing the benefits seeing the value of minimalism you don't need to marry a minimalist so i was a little bit worried early on thinking that i had to find somebody who was also a minimalist and i thought that would just narrow down my search results on uh plenty of fish or okcupid down to maybe six people and i found out that that wasn't true at all i just needed to find somebody that was open-minded that accepted me

for who i was that was a really good listener and that didn't care that i wore the same shirt in every photo we took together and so i'm very lucky that i found that person in natalie um i think in the beginning she definitely thought that i was in a cult and so it did take some explaining uh but i think it helped that i wasn't pushing it on her in the beginning and i never pushed it on her and i just said yeah that's just you know i'm a minimalist i don't own a lot

of stuff um it really wasn't such an important part of what i was bringing to that relationship it was just a part of who i was and it was really in the background it's not a religion i think some people take minimalism way too seriously i understand it i think it's great that minimalism has changed your life it certainly has changed mine but at the end of the day i think we need to stop judging people there are going to be people on different paths at different points in their life and there was a time

in my life where i was really absorbed in consumption and trying to make more money and all that stuff and it's okay if there's people in our lives that are also on that same path right now they may never come to be intentional with their consumption or their purchases or what they're doing for a living and that's okay all we can do is support them and be there for them but we should never really force minimalism on people we should never judge people for the decisions that they're making we need to do what's right for

us we need to make decisions that are going to make us happy and then just be there to support our family and friends when they need us you spend less time cleaning when you have less stuff that means that it takes less time to clean up after yourself and so it really takes us 20 maybe 30 minutes to clean up our entire apartment every week and i guarantee if we had more stuff it'd probably take two hours or more getting our time back there but then also that peace of mind of having a clean apartment

is so important to me i've been working from home really for the past decade and so having a clean environment to work in not tripping over stuff as i go throughout my day is vital and i know that people in the comments are gonna be saying just wait till you have kids and yeah i'm sure that we're gonna get more stuff when we have kids but i think we're still gonna be really intentional with the things that we do bring into the house because it can very quickly get out of hand we upgrade too often

brands do a great job at convincing us that we need to replace our phones computers and kitchen appliances every couple of years but do we really need to make the upgrade will those extra pixels different buttons and a new sleek design really improve our lives that's up to you to decide but you may find that the phone or laptop that you own now meets your needs just fine this is a hard one for me because being a filmmaker i have a lot of camera gear and it's very easy to get excited about that new camera

that comes out every year or the phone that comes out every six months now and so i think that is the place that i have struggled with the most that i have really tried to work on myself the camera gear the lenses the tripods all that stuff is one thing but when it comes to the smartphone this is actually a device that i've seen affect my well-being in a negative way the camera gear and stuff is is fulfilling for me it's creating a purpose in my life this phone is actually usually just a distraction and

so why am i trying to invest more money into this thing that is going to distract me even more why do i want to listen to these marketing messages that these companies are pushing on us trying to get us to buy things that we definitely don't need it's wasteful and i found that personally i'm trying to get better at not upgrading nearly as often as i used to it won't solve all your problems this was a rude awakening especially after that initial buzz of minimalism first faded when i realized that minimalism no it will not

solve every one of your problems and over the past decade i've really experienced so many ups and downs from severe anxiety to burn out to having really difficult conversations with those closest to me these are all part of life and minimalism will not protect you from them although i will say that minimalism will help to bring into focus what is most important and so when i was going through really bad anxiety i knew that i needed to slow down and focus on my mental health and i didn't need to be so dedicated to achieving x

y and z people overthink it should i keep the manual for my toaster what about my books should i keep the vase that my mom got me last christmas so i totally get it i am a serial overthinker i overthink just about everything in my life especially when it comes to my work but when it comes to minimalism i've really learned that a lot of times these are just stalling tactics we're avoiding the really difficult decisions because if we really ask ourself what is the worst case scenario if i got rid of this user manual

or if i got rid of my books or if i got rid of the vase that mom got me okay that one would actually be pretty difficult i think my mom might be a little bit upset but what i will say is that most of these things you can replace you can go online and find the user manual with a quick google search you can repurchase those books on kindle so my advice is to stop overthinking and to start taking action you can apologize to mom later so it really feels like it was ten years

ago but it was actually just four years ago when i started my youtube channel and when i was trying to build an audience and i was trying to get people interested in coming onto my podcast the first thing that i did was build a website and i used my sponsor for this video squarespace i've chosen to use squarespace to build all my websites for three main reasons their website builder is super intuitive and easy to use you can select from a range of beautiful templates plug in your info and publish your site in no time

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to squarespace.com for a free trial and when you're ready to launch go to squarespace.comella to save 10 off your first purchase of a website or domain i'm not gonna lie my back is actually killing me from sitting down it surprisingly makes gift giving easier so whenever i'm giving gifts i try to get really intentional my family has started to do secret santa because i'm one of seven kids and now most of us have significant others and so we just have so many gifts that we would have had to give and so now we just do

a secret santa we're much more intentional we get one person's name out of a hat and also it really helps me being a minimalist uh people aren't just going to buy me random crap now that it's out there my friends and family all know that i'm a minimalist they know that i value experiences maybe a bottle of whiskey maybe some wine or some coffee these are things that i'm actually going to enjoy i'm gonna be happy to receive and i'm not gonna feel guilty getting rid of something that i didn't want in the first place

detaching yourself from stuff makes you less of an ass i remember back in college my brother got me four really tall beer glasses and these were my favorite glasses and i treated them with care but eventually college parties would happen and one by one all of these glasses broke and i remem remember every single time one of these broke i really took it to heart like it really truly upset me and i think in part because i was completely broke and i didn't have any money and that was actually a financial hit and i couldn't

just go out and replace him but i think also because i put so much weight and value on physical things but now i don't care as much if i scrape my car or i break a glass one i can replace it because i'm more financially stable now things aren't as important to me as people minimalism is a practice so this is something that i've talked about many many times on this channel before and it's even more evident looking back over the past 10 years and seeing how my life has changed from the many moves that

i've gone through from settling down with natalie moving across the the country and across the world these are things that have changed my life and as a result the things in my life needed to change as well and so as we move forward say to the next 10 years of minimalism i know my life's going to change and i'm going to have to question the things that i own and so there's going to be a time like i said where we've got kids and we have to own more stuff and then there will be a

time after that where our kids move out of the house and then we get rid of some stuff as we continue to ask these questions we can continue to live a life that is intentional so whether you've been practicing minimalism for a week or you've been practicing for as long as i have i'd love to hear what are the lessons that you've learned by practicing minimalism let me know down in the comments below i can't wait to hear from you