You may have just opened the cutlery drawer and realized that it is full of utensils that, for the most part, you don’t use on a daily basis. Or perhaps it was the closet, where more clothes accumulate than you wear in a year. There are also bike or gym accessories, collections of cables and chargers, boxes to organize more boxes… We are not talking about Diogenes syndrome, with medical causes. It is a version light of this syndrome of our days, now that we live convinced that there is a product, not a solution, for every problem.
The result is a lot of junk and the eternal question of how to get rid of it. And it turns out that the answer is also another product. The logic of the market has permeated all areas of our lives, from economics to politics and spirituality. If you want to learn how to throw things, you can buy an online course. If you want to learn what minimalism is, you can buy another class online. And if you want to learn to buy “consciously” there is also another e-book, another coachanother paid subscription.
Say minimalism gurus Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus, authors of the blog The Minimaliststhat the best way to avoid having to clean and get rid of unnecessary junk is to leave it in the store. If it were that simple, they themselves wouldn’t have created an entire brand around the challenge of getting rid of possessions that we have accumulated over the years and that we don’t always know what to do with. Do we recycle, donate, throw away?
The succulent minimalism market
The creators of The Minimalists They claim that since 2010 they have helped millions of people “eliminate clutter and live fully with less.” Along the way they have produced two documentaries on Netflix, three series (one of them has three seasons) and have published six books. They also have a podcast and offer career advice to $300 for a one-hour session.
In this same sector is Joshua Becker, author of More with Less (The More Of Less). In 2008 he created Becoming Minimalista personal diary in which he narrated how he was getting rid of his things and why. The blog also inspired several books —The minimalist house, What really matters—, courses on-line with more than ten editions, an app and one newsletter payment.
“If a person is getting rid of products because they feel they ‘have to’ do so or because it’s New Year’s, they are simply making room to buy more things later,” Courtney Carver, former publicist, author of the blog, explains to elDiario.es Be More With Less and responsible for Project 333a course on-line at the same time he challenged himself to dress in 33 items of clothing in three months. “Sorting and throwing away is only part of the solution if it also helps you break the purchasing cycle, if it helps you think about why you continue purchasing products,” he adds.
Carver assures that there are people who feel inspired by a move or a major change in their life to start getting rid of the junk accumulated at home. And although the reasons vary in each case, he says that the important thing is what comes next. “We must pay attention to why we buy: Does it help us with stress? Do we think it will make us happy? Why do we buy what we don’t need? “We have to examine and change the relationship between stress and shopping,” he says.
If a person is getting rid of products because they feel they ‘have to’ or because it’s New Year’s, they are simply making room to buy more things later.
Courtney Carver
— Former publicist and author of the blog ‘Be More With Less’
Six months of our lives looking for junk around the house
One of the consequences of this consumer cycle is that Spanish families invested on average 1,349 euros in 2023 to acquire furniture, household items and items for their maintenance, according to the National Institute of Statistics (INE). The figure is slightly higher than spending on clothing and footwear, 1,319 euros on average. Furthermore, 96% of Spaniards admit to having electronic products at home that they do not use and that exceed an average value of 511 euros, according to this study by Milanuncioswhile This one made by Sigma Two discovered that we spend, on average, six months of our lives looking for objects we have lost at home.
In contrast to this image of chaos that may have come to your mind, the gurus of minimalism defend an aesthetic that is quite far from the ideal of a cozy home. Minimalist houses “lack decoration, the furniture is rigid and skeletal, the pantry is a grid of exactly the same jars, as precise as a row of orthodontically corrected teeth. There are no crumbs on the counter or personal items on the bedside table,” denounces the British critic Becca Rothfeld in her book All Things Are Too Small.
“Ordering is not the end result, it is just the first step,” they say The Minimalists in one of his essays. “You’re not automatically happy because you threw away your stuff, at least not in the long term. The ordering process doesn’t work like that.” Fields and Nicodemus add that once you start getting rid of your possessions, the process of answering those difficult questions begins: “Why have I given so much importance to my possessions? What is the most important thing in my life? Why am I not satisfied?”
The market itself gives us an encouraging answer to these questions in the form of new purchases. In the documentary Buy now: the consumerist conspiracy (Netflix) Eric Liedtke, former brand president of Adidas, makes it clear: “No one needs a new sweatshirt, a new t-shirt, a new pair of sneakers. What you need is a compelling reason to buy.”
Nobody needs a new sweatshirt, a new t-shirt, a new pair of sneakers. What you need is a compelling reason to buy
Eric Liedtke
— former brand president of Adidas
Advertising agencies and brands themselves are responsible for giving you that reason. From sales with a marked date, like Black Friday, to product pages on-line full of clocks with a countdown, the detail of “only 3 left in “stock” or how many times a room has been booked at the same hotel in the last 24 hours. And there is no shortage of advertising campaigns full of messages that supposedly connect with our values or our identity.
Carver, another proponent of minimalism who comes from the world of marketing, argues that the problem “is not so much the lack of time to think about whether we need a thing or not, but the ease of making that purchase in an instant,” which is why she recommends remove shopping apps from your phone and delete store cards on-line “to make it more difficult to make each purchase and give you time to think.”
Why do we buy so much?
Dimitris Xygalatas is an anthropologist specialized in the study of rituals and why they are useful to us. Buying is one of them. “One of their effects is that they help us reduce anxiety,” says the researcher, who associates this effect with the repetitive aspect of rituals. Numerous studies They show that they help us in the face of uncertainty, one of the greatest sources of stress. “I get stressed because I can’t do anything about something that’s overwhelming me, but in a ritual I do know exactly what is going to happen and how. Purchases, especially when they can be made with a click, have those same properties,” Xygalatas explains to elDiario.es.
And now that it is so easy to purchase a product, it seems that our relationship with what we buy has also changed. This professor from the University of Connecticut (United States) explains that we tend to value more the things that are most difficult for us to achieve. “When it only takes one click to buy something, then you need to get even more, because its value has gone down,” he explains. “Basically, they are getting cheaper, you need to buy again and again to achieve the same value.”
This anthropologist also suggests that rituals are precisely the method used by experts like Marie Kondo to turn around the problem of consumerism. The Japanese businesswoman managed to sell eight million copies of her book The Magic of Order and his company is valued at almost eight million euros, according to Forbes. It is the most successful model in the minimalism market, although it shook for a few moments. After recommending its followers to only keep those goods that “inspire them joy,” the store KonMari presented products such as incense holders for $48 that unleashed anger among his devotees.
“When it only takes one click to buy something, then you need to get even more, because its value has gone down.”
Dimitris Xygalatas
— Anthropologist and researcher at the University of Connecticut
Beyond the controversy, Xygalatas affirms that what the Japanese businesswoman did is “ritualize” the practice of stripping us of possessions that we no longer need. “Sometimes the solution to the problem lies at the very root of the problem and Kondo relied on the fact that ordering things can be as satisfying as buying them,” he explains.
The ritual of getting rid of what we no longer need or want also has harmful consequences that marketing gurus hide from us. Many of the clothes we donate to NGOs end up fueling a much more serious problem, since brands do not always reveal where the products we return to the store in exchange for a discount end up.
According to the documentary Buy NowGhana is one of the countries where some brands “export” the clothes that we donate to the store after wearing them. With a population of 30 million people, Ghana receives 15 million products every week that do not always end up in new closets or an organized logistics center, but on the coastal beaches that now have the color of the thousands of clothes that They cover the sand, invisible under a layer of polyester and synthetic fibers.
Buying less is the only solution
“Life is about the experiences and the people we share them with, and the things we own should serve to support this. But our possessions are not the end, that is not the goal: whoever dies with the most possessions does not win,” says Kyle Wiens, co-founder of iFixita company specialized in repairs, in the documentary Buy Now.
To achieve this, order experts recommend taking inventory of what we have before buying something new, to be able to evaluate whether it is necessary or not. We can also incorporate the habit of buying what we know we can repair to use it for longer.
Xygalatas assures that one of the ways to change the shopping ritual is to replace them with exchanges. “It is part of many traditions, exchange can be a solution as a ritual and can contribute to aspects such as the creation of meaning and improve social cohesion while reducing consumption,” defends the anthropologist.
The ritual of exchange is also one of the principles behind initiatives such as object libraries that are beginning to operate in our country and also helps us not to end up with a house full of things that we barely use. Regarding unnecessary and purely impulsive purchases, Xygalatas warns of its link with addiction: “The reward system in our brain responds in the same way to drugs as it does to things like gambling or compulsive behaviors, which involve rewards. in the short term and create the same type of response where you need more and more to be satisfied.”
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