I still remember vividly about why I wanted to pursue minimalism in my very first blog post “Why I embrace minimalism – Dave’s story” that was written 8 years ago. The reasons that I wanted to pursue it in the first place had evolved quite a bit while I also had new discoveries about minimalism. All these reinforces why I want to adopt minimalism as my guiding light towards leading a simple yet purposeful life.
Initially, it was more about the physical decluttering of stuff just to make my house easier to maintain and to avoid buying unnecessary stuff to be more efficient with money. When the stuff gets lesser in my life, I have more time to focus on things that truly matters which most of the time aren’t things at all (at least from my experience). The idea is to lead a deliberate and intentional life that is not influenced by societal pressure towards consumerism and not be embroiled in the endless pursuit to acquire wealth as a scorecard towards success. Basically, I want to redefine success but it is not as easy as one might perceive it to be in our current modern society. I would like to leave the below quote from Albert Einstein to sum up my meaning of living a life of contentment.
“A calm and modest life brings more happiness than the pursuit of success combined with constant restlessness”.
On the consumerism front, I would say that I started to understand more about my own spending psychic. When I was young, I used to enjoy spending money in a local bookshop where I felt very happy being able to buy stationery. That kind of shape my initial spending habits where I equate short term happiness through buying stuff. As I seek independence early in my life to lessen my reliance of getting pocket money from my parents, I started working part time since my secondary school days. During then, I could understand the value of saving money but I wasn’t a big advocate of it yet. As I shared previously on my life story on The Financial Coconut Podcast where I got into debt due to my business exit in my late 20s, I was being forced to let go of most of my personal stuff like my first car, personal possessions, insurance policies and savings to pay off part of my debt.
That was the time of my life that I felt that I was at rock bottom with not many possessions left. Maybe part of the reason is our strong association towards stuff as we were surrounded by nice things since birth. Thus, we got accustomed to being surrounded by lots of things and might feel uncomfortable when we do not have it. During then, something weird happened to me when I was in debt and was left with just a bit of money. I used it to buy a brand-new mountain bike which represents the adventurous part of my identity which I desperately wish to retain that small part of it even though I’m still in debt. On hindsight, that was an interesting phenomenon I observed during then which begets the question of why do we have such a strong association to things that represents a big part of who we are and our identity.
We are not just associating ourselves to our prized physical items, but we also have a very strong association of our identity towards our job title, career, business and our past achievements etc. So that is why we know of people around us who recently retired but cannot adapt to retirement life as they associate too much of their identity and existence with their past career. They are unable to let go of their past identity thus they struggle with it mentally.
There were a few lessons that I would like to share about my minimalism journey that gave me hope to move on after I gave something up as listed below:
- When I was an entrepreneur during my business stint in my late 20s, I must give up that identity after I exited the business so that I could move on with life and start anew as an employee again. That was a humbling experience and due to that, my baseline towards happiness and contentment is much lower than most people nowadays which I am eternally grateful for.
- The heavy burden of being in debt after my business exit and being a failure in business was met with the lightness of being able to restart my life anew and relieving all my expectations of being an entrepreneur.
- Re-unite with one of my ex-business partners when we parted ways due to differences in views and values more than a decade ago. This is probably not easy at first but time does provide the platform to forgive and forget.
- Forgive my dad who was a compulsive gambler that created all the financial challenges and woes we had as a family. But at the same time, I’m grateful for having the opportunity to learn from those experiences during then so that I’m better at running my own household finances nowadays.
- When I was retrenched from my banking career just a few years back, I must give up that career in order to pursue a new career as a life and financial coach and spend time on meaningful things I’m very passionate about at this stage of my life. That also led to my new role of being an ever-present father to my two young kids and supporting my wife’s new career aspiration in a totally new field. (you can read about how we executed our “Great Resignation” here)
- Gave up playing football after my third knee surgery in five years (can read about it here). It was really hard for me as it was a very big part of my identity and gave me immense joy since my childhood days. Eventually, I was forced to let it go and pursue other sports or activities that could still promote a healthy lifestyle which is the ultimate goal anyway.
Being a minimalist, you need to be able to readily give up things in life and acknowledge that life will never be perfect. That will reduce your anxiety towards holding on to certain things be it physical or mental and to embrace uncertainty as part of life. Life is never a constant line, and we must appreciate what we already have as you do not know when you might lose them. My perception towards money changed a lot and nowadays, I view money as a limited resource you have and the main objective is to maximize your contentment towards leading a fulfilling and meaningful life. We are not rich by any measures but we do acknowledge that we have enough at this point of our lives. We do not want money to be our lives’ sole focus or identity so that money will not dictate our lives.
So, in summary, I must say that my biggest takeaway of being a minimalist is not the part on physical decluttering of stuff or spending less money, they are the willingness to let go of intangible stuff like your identity, your career, your business, forgiveness towards past mistakes or hatred to yourself or anyone.
Initially, my goal was to achieve happiness through the simplification of my life but nowadays the goal is to be contented with whatever life brings you and achieve a Zen-state of mind. Success is being define as the willingness to let go of anything and active acceptance of what life might bring you. Appreciate what life might bring you and live everyday with gratitude and contentment.
Bottom line is to ask ourselves, “Who am I” when we take away all these societal association like our career, our house, our car away from us. We must define ourselves by our self worth or our moral values and not by what things we own, where we stay and the so called success or achievements as broadly defined by the society.
At the same time, we must give back to the society in whatever ways we could as I really do feel that we are in a really privilege and blessed position. I would like to share the below Greek quote which becomes one of the main pillar in my life:
“A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.” – Greek Proverb
