The Paradox of Minimalism

So, minimalism has become quite the status symbol lately, hasn’t it? It’s ironic because the original idea was to reject consumerism, yet now people spend thousands of pounds on the perfect minimalist aesthetic – you know, the white walls, the single designer chair, the empty shelves. It’s become a way of performing wealth. Only someone with a lot of money can afford to have nothing, because if they need something, they can just buy it instantly.

True minimalism, for me, isn’t about how your living room looks on Instagram. It’s about mental bandwidth. It’s about reducing the number of decisions you have to make every day so you can focus on what matters. Whether that’s owning ten shirts that are all the same, or digitising all your paperwork. But we’ve turned it into a competition of who can own the fewest things. We’ve taken a philosophy of freedom and turned it into another set of rules to follow. I think we’ve missed the point entirely.