Heart Soul Mind Strength

protecting the person from the scheme

When I was almost five years old, we moved for the first time in my memory. I was in awe when Dad and my big brothers picked up the couch and loaded it onto a trailer. To me, the scratchy, brown plaid couch had been an enormous ever-present part of the background of my life. The simple reality that the couch could be lifted, quite easily, into a trailer and moved taught me to reevaluate other things that seem enormous or permanent, but were actually transient and temporary. Although, I have never categorized myself as ‘a minimalist’ so far in my life, I moved frequently from home to home as a child and still move regularly as a part of a military family. Moving frequently presses me to continually reevaluate whether my belongings are worth keeping or not. I mostly feel empowered to avoid buying products that I deem non-essential whether they are trending or not.

The motivations behind minimalism may be philosophical and practical at the same time. The big idea is to inoculate our minds to reasonably resist the messages of commercial marketing and advertising. Minimalism broadly beckons us, “let us not become slaves of our belongings, let us be the master of our spaces and our things.”

Much distress comes when we feel like something is being done to us or something is happening to us in our lives that we cannot control or influence. The felt lack of control becomes a lack of agency.

If we feel like we do not have agency to vanish the mountain of laundry or fit 1,000 categories of stuff into ten storage spaces we tend to feel stressed. When we feel unable to choose for ourselves how we live or what we do with our time and energy because all we ever do is clear out pathways through piles of debris, we start to feel shame and may even start to question our self-worth. If some outside force seems to be steering our lives by burying us in “life-changing” products, we wonder if we are not trustworthy make our own decisions. As the stuff in our homes become unmanageable, our self doubt grows and our personal agency shrinks even more.

Commercial marketing is a strong, external current that strives to steer our decisions regarding buying and having stuff we may not need. By well-studied psychological manipulation and by engineering environments that stimulate our brains to think the way they want us to think, marketing experts have learned effective strategies to convince us to buy their product. It is profitable for the business world when it decides our buying habits for us.

Advertising is exquisitely proficient at communicating to us that sadness, woe, and avoidable anguish will haunt us if we do not buy their product. If we do buy it, we will fly through rainbow flavored skies of happiness and favor with all our acquaintances. While marketing and advertising try to build bonds between our eternal souls and products of transient moments of dopamine release for their financial profit, minimalism presents to us a rudder of using all that information to informour decisions, an anchor of the right to say “no” to whole categories of products, and an escape pod to see the ugly history of horrendously negative impacts of marketing and advertising on society.

Minimalism is saying, ‘I know your game, marketing, and I will choose to ignore you the majority of the time, unless I decide that I do need a particular thing.” This is the rudder a minimalist mindset hands to us, giving us control of how we choose to use the information rained upon us through advertising. Minimalism is the strong dissenting vote against the loud influence luring us to the products the seller wants us to buy.

For me, this looks like listening to dozens of experts across multiple fields of study who disagree on various points, but all recommend, for example, creatine monohydrate supplementation with explanation of why and examples of how it has been helpful and not harmful. This is me steering my decisions instead of buying every nutritional supplement I see advertised.

Minimalism is saying, “I am in charge of my life, my space, my stuff, and my energy.” I have a choice. The anchor minimalism equips us with allows us to say “no” to any external pressure we do not want. We should not have to provide any argument justifying not spending money on a trending product. The anchor is the option to mute whatever we choose to ignore.

For me, I use my anchor to say “no” to all make-up and beauty products that hide blemishes instead of cleansing, moisturizing, or providing nutrients. I do not like the idea of hiding imperfections because I believe hiding flaws can hide serious health issues instead of stimulating me to seek treatment. Also, I believe that getting older is a precious gift, and I see the resemblance of my beloved deceased parents more and more in my aging face. My philosophy is to wear my flaws to be real and, hopefully, approachable to anyone, even on their worst day. My personal philosophy dictates that I ignore all make-up advertisements, which means I am empowered to drop anchor and avoid whole categories of products.

Minimalism can help us to see through the facade of marketing and advertisement, to hold companies accountable for damage done, to stand strong against the mind tricks by allowing us to recognize that we do not need their product. We are not dependent on advertisers to know what we need and want. We can research past products and find information about misrepresented products that harmed or killed people in history. We can question everything about a company as much as we want. We should never trust someone to whom we are simply a conduit of money. We can opt out by refusing to believe any advertisement at face value and doing our best to make fully informed decisions.

Commerce and business need profitability to exist and grow, but they tend to isolate their purpose down to one goal; money. For the increase of business wealth, the Earth has been pillaged, groups of people murdered, and masses of souls have been disenfranchised. Minimalism refuses to go along with decisions made by them for me to the very best of my ability.

I am grateful for the moving we did when I was a child and the moving that I’ve done in a military family, which has helped me recognize the practical hindrance that too many things in my home can be. I continually declutter and really ponder before buying a new thing that will need a place in my house. I do not have the latest and greatest clothes, no make-up, and I cull through our belongings regularly.

Minimalism is permission to say “NO” to the alluring tricksters selling things, which brings a sense of personal agency and freedom to choose how we live.