
What is Minimalism?
Albert Einstein once said: Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage — to move in the opposite direction.
Being one of the most brilliant minds of the 19th century, anything Albert had to say is to be valued and addressed correctly. That said the presented saying is a great introduction to Minimalism.
A simple interpretation at the present tense would be that anyone can, with a little intelligence and hard work, develop wealth, accumulate assets leading to more wants considered as needs. However, the ingenious approach would be, while keeping the intelligence and hard work aspects and adding some courage, to make things smaller and simpler by ensuring a clear boundary between the wants and the needs.
One could therefore be productive, evolve in professional and personal life while ensuring timeless satisfaction leading to real happiness. Isn’t this what life is about?
Most of us believe, especially in this capitalistic world, that our happiness resides in wealth accumulation. Just as divorce and unemployment rates are increasing all over the planet, useless and meritless celebrities and billionaires rising worldwide and social media with the internet making us knowledgeable of all these facts, nothing appears clearer and more reliable as money being the only scale of success.
Only some of us believe anymore that love is the key to happiness, even less think that a stable professional life leads to happiness as we are bombarded with those images on television, social media and the internet of normal people, doing nothing all day, sexy, wealthy, appearing to be as happy as we would never be, leading most of us to believe that wealth accumulation is happiness. Even our friends and family tend to poison our environment through the pictures and video shared. Have you ever viewed a picture where the publisher was sad, looking bad or doing daily routine actions?
Antoine de Saint-Exupery once said: Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
Let’s meditate on this saying for a moment. Perfection which is highly correlated to happiness, is reached while keeping only the essentials. The essentials is a vague notion that evolves with time, context, and way of life for which anyone of us will have a specific definition.
Minimalism is about being as specific as possible about that definition, ensuring you do respect it, enjoying the sensations it provides you with and reconsidering it on a yearly basis.
