The journey to where I am now (extreme minimalism)
Recently, a fellow human asked me this question: May I ask how long you've been an extreme minimalist? Perhaps upon the first reading the question invites me to simply share the number of years. But upon another reading I realise that the question is so humbling and deep. It encouraged me to write an entry about my journey. I've shared many parts of my journey in this autoethnography before, but the question reminded me how important it is to reemphasise the messy nature of my path. I often have this fear that my fellow humans who read my autoethnography assume that something happened in my life and I became an extreme minimalist with an ideal consumption pattern. That I figured it all out very quickly. That it was an easy path. It wasn't.
Childhood. I was born into a normal, middle class family. When my brother and I were very young, our family moved to a rural area due to my stepfather's job. We lived very close to nature without much exposure to advertising and shops. We would still get normal toys (such as Lego and Barbie dolls) as gifts, but we were much more interested in being with nature, exploring the local environment, playing with our cat and the dog. In the rural area, we learned a lot about what we could eat in nature and about the animals living there. We would visit fields, forests and rivers instead of theatres and museums (though there would be plenty of those when we came back to the city). While our parents consumed normally (they had a car, would buy the latest technology, my mother would wear makeup, high heels and special occasion clothing), I've never felt attracted to stuff. I've always lived with sensory processing sensitivity, which meant that I found stuff overwhelming. I also live with an autoimmune skin condition, which encouraged me, since my childhood, to be careful with various fabrics and common household products (e.g., cleaning products, cosmetics, perfumes).
In my childhood, I didn't have any particular philosophy of life. I was trying to figure out how to live and was learning about my preferences. One of my childhood memories is our parents asking my brother and I to help them clean a crystal chandelier. I could never understand why we had to do that instead of doing something else, something more pleasant.
Teens. My family returned to a large city when I was a teenager. The city felt incredibly busy, loud and overwhelming. The parks could not compare to nature in the rural area. They were so polished and planned. My health was in a very bad state, as my autoimmune condition was manifesting incredibly often. The apartment where we used to live was much smaller than the house in the rural area. It felt as if we were being suffocated by stuff. I certainly did not want more than the amount of things that found their way into my life via my parents and other relatives.
In my teens, I was not thinking much about developing a philosophy of life either. There was simply no time for deep contemplations. There were too many expectations from my family to do well at school and to do extracurricular activities. There were no fellow humans that I knew who practised an alternative lifestyle either. I feel that many of those years were lost. I didn't know who I was beyond someone who had to get good grades at school. In summers, I would spend much time in my stepfather's summer house. There, I would forage and read. Those were wonderful moments. Then, my mother died in a car crash. I was 17. My relationship with my mother was not particularly good at that time, as much of the pressure to do well at school came from her rather than my stepfather. As bad as it may sound, and as much as I felt incredibly sad about her death (she was in her early 40s), I felt liberated. I could choose my own path in life (apart from the university, as by then I was already a student). In the years after my mother's death, I finally had an opportunity to connect with myself. I gave away many of my possessions. I also realised that I could not build my own future in the space that I associated with pressure to perform. I travelled a lot around that time (I used to fly, and I'm not proud of that). And I made some decisions about my life. I decided to never own a car or wear uncomfortable clothes. I decided to never go to theatres, museums and various parties just to say that I have been there, to seem busy.
2010. I moved to another country when I was around 20. This move gave me an opportunity to take with me only what I truly needed. I moved with a tote bag. At that time, I was not calling myself an extreme minimalist, but on an intuitive level I knew what I wanted: freedom.
Living far away from my family of origin meant that I could be myself, whatever it meant. I got interested in veganism and various alternative modes of relating with the world and diverse beings. The following few years, I was trying to figure things out. I experimented with various kinds of uniform. I stopped wearing makeup completely. I volunteered. I slept on the floor. I shaved my head to challenge various ideas about femininity and to live an easier life.
I certainly didn't drop all the destructive habits overnight. For example, I still decided to do my masters degree in International Business and Finance, which is a rather mainstream subject to study. During my masters studies, I realised that there are different schools of economics (the subject that I studied at uni). Eventually this led me to ecological economics, as this was the school of thought that allowed me to bring together my love towards nature and my interest in the social sciences.
At that time, the zero-waste movement was on the rise, and I got interested in that too.
2016-2020. In 2016, I started working on my PhD about post-growth and business, based in ecological economics and the philosophy of science called critical realism. Critical realism invites us to consider the unity between theory and practice. I fell in love with critical realism, and especially with its moment called the philosophy of MetaReality. This philosophy emphasises oneness or interconnectedness of everything with everything else. It argues that humans are inherently good and capable of love, creativity, freedom, and right actions. This philosophy allowed me to put words to many of the things I was feeling. Being in the field of sustainability exposed me to a vocabulary that I did not know before. Voluntary simplicity, post-growth, living well with less. I was reading a lot during those years. Taoism, American environmentalism, deep ecology, literature on voluntary simplicity and post-growth, economic anthropology and so many other things.
2020-present moment. By the end on 2020, I was already practising a constellation of zero-waste, (extreme) minimalism, and voluntary simplicity. I could never, and still can't, find the exact, perfect term to describe my mode of living. After my PhD, I got another opportunity to move. This time, I moved to northern Sweden. With me, I took everything I owned. Everything fit into a tote bag and a backpack. And then I moved a couple more times. In the past few years, my practice has been more or less continuous in terms of the objects I live with. There were challenges too. In every new country, I had to establish many of my practices from scratch and learn about particular systems and structures that empower and constrain sustainability practices. At times, I feared to invite something into my life simply because I knew I would be moving again (because academic contracts are often temporary).
I don't plan to ever discontinue my practice. It feels liberating, authentic, calming, nurturing. Naturally, my practice will change over time, but I believe that its core will remain. The core, to me, is the realisation that it's the non-material that matters the most.
