Friday, February 1, 2019

Stuff…Doesn’t Make You Happy

The Minimalist Home – A Room By Room Guide to a Decluttered, Refocused Life – Joshua Becker – (Waterbrook)

I have often said that there is a thin line between collector and hoarder. Over time I have come to believe that line between collector and compulsive gatherer is even more narrow and that we have created a way of life to feed that compulsion. The older I get the more I have come to believe that stuff and more stuff, can’t make you happy and that most of the things that we cling to because “we might need it someday” is almost certainly misguided.

With basements, garages and backyard sheds overflowing into countless and multiplying storage sheds and lockers; a new innovation/movement has sprung to life – minimalism. While minimalist acolytes come in a variety of forms and approaches; one of the leading progenitors of the movement via blogs and books is Joshua Becker. Becker sets his sights on your home space in his latest book, The Minimalist Home – A Room By Room Guide to a Decluttered, Refocused Life. Some may complain that there is nothing new here that Becker hasn’t covered in prior books/blogs or he doesn’t offer specific enough strategies.



I liked the fact that Becker offers an overview of minimalism, without feeling the need to drill down and tell what to do or what to chuck. Some will take minimalism to an extreme – stuffing a minimum of necessities into a duffle and lead a vagabond life in a succession of AirBNBs, worldly possessions in tow. Becker’s approach strikes me  to take a more thoughtful or thought provoking path, so you can develop your own processes and checklists.


Becker has even been slagged for assuming his readers live in houses and not apartments and injecting Christian principles into his writing. Sorry, but you have to be a nitpicky pinhead if you can’t gain value from the insight Becker offers into simplifying, downsizing and focusing on real joy in the freedom offered by minimalism.