Vegan-Connections_Nov18_V3

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How Minimalism Can
Help You Keep Your Cool
This Holiday Season.
Words: Isabelle Thul
hristmas, it’s a time of spending. Spending time
Cwith family and friends, yes, but also spending a
whole lot of money on things we think we need. Needing a
new dress/suit for this or that event, needing to stock up on
booze, needing the latest kitchen gadgets to host the next
dinner party, needing that Christmas special edition of
whatever it may be. While the economy booms, our planet
suffers. It suffers from the waste which the production and
eventual disposal of this vast mass of consumer goods
creates. Let’s talk about how we can rethink our consumer
behaviour, buy a little less, give a little more and reduce our
landfill contribution.
In November of last year, Time Magazine reported that
Brits were expected to spend £1.8m per minute on Black Friday.
(http://time.com/5036097/black-friday-britain-sales/).
These figures will come as a surprise to no one. Remember
that footage showing shoppers scrambling over TVs on sale
at an ASDA in Wembley which went viral in 2014? The Black
Friday phenomenon has rapidly spread to the U.K. from
America, thanks to online retail giants like Amazon. What
does the fact that we are happy to adopt a sales event tied
to a public holiday (which we don’t even celebrate) have
to say about us as consumers? Clearly, we are susceptible
to the aggressive advertising schemes aimed at us around
this time of year. Online ads, TV commercials, social media,
posters at bus stops - these all contribute to convince us that
Christmas is a time of “I need” and “I want”. We begin to
believe that if we don’t purchase a particular seemingly essential
item, we’ll have a lesser holiday experience. But is this
necessarily true? Not according to Joshua Fields Millburn
and Ryan Nicodemus.
The pair of self-proclaimed ‘minimalists’ featured in the
2015 Netflix documentary: ‘Minimalism’. On their website
and blog, aptly named “The Minimalists”, Millburn and
Nicodemus claim that rather than reducing your overall
pleasure and happiness, opting for a minimalist lifestyle
can help you “focus on what’s important – so you can find
happiness, fulfilment and freedom.” Addressing the holiday
frenzy in a blog post titled “40 Reasons to Avoid Shopping
on Black Friday”, Millburn draws on his past experience of
managing a number of retail stores. This, Millburn claims,
made him aware of just how reliant retail businesses are on
the holiday season for maximising their yearly intake. The
dependence on ever-growing profit to compete with market
leaders has led to aggressive marketing campaigns in which
consumers are lured into “purchasing sh*t you don’t need
by creating false scarcity.”
Nobody likes to feel as though they are being coerced;
we like to believe we are in control of our own desires, and
yet so many of us are evidently drawn in by the call for
mindless consumption each year. Millburn advises to take a
step back and avoid shops on Black Friday and the holiday
season more generally. The minimalist approach to “feeling
festive” means spending time with family and friends rather
than on the high street with hundreds of other stressed-out
shoppers. Stressing the fact that a minimalist lifestyle begins
with a change in mindset, the pair state that: “there’s nothing
inherently wrong with gifts, but it’s irresponsible for us to believe
that purchasing presents is a holiday requirement.” The
Minimalists believe it’s a question of mind over matter when
we try to resist the urge to splurge during the festive season.
How then does the average individual resist the urge to
join in the mass consumer frenzy over the holiday season?
The couple Masa and Michael Ofei,who run the blog “The
Minimalist Vegan”, provide a very pragmatic set of guidelines
to spending less. The couple give three questions to ask
oneself before making any purchase:
1. Do I already own something that’s similar?
2. Is this something that I absolutely LOVE and will use
on a regular basis?
3. Do I really need this? (be honest with yourself)
The first logical step towards reducing excess consumption
over the festive season is to cut down our own spending by
thinking twice about what we need. What remains is the pressure
to find presents for our nearest and dearest to show that
we thought of them at this time of giving. The Minimalists
and the Minimalist Vegan resort to the same simple solution:
giving non-material gifts. Instead of gifting yet another pair
of socks (predestined moth-food) or this year’s bestselling
book (inevitable dust catchers), why not invest the time you
would have spent rushing around the high-street or browsing
online retailers to come up with something more personal.
Gifting a dinner, a trip, or tickets to a concert will make for
much longer lasting joy and have the potential side-effect
of strengthening your relationship. The gift of shared experience
naturally means investing some of your spare time
but think of all the time you save on raking through retailers’
extensive offers at this time of year. What if you don’t
live in the same country as your recipient or don’t have the
time to spare for an activity? In this case, The Minimalists
swear by the ‘gift of giving,’ which according to Millburn and
Nicodemus is the greatest gift of all. The formula is simple:
work out what your recipient feels passionate about, find a
related charity and then make a donation in their name. Vice
versa, you can do the same for yourself - gifting yourself that
warm fuzzy feeling by choosing a charity which you ask your
loved ones to donate to in your name rather than receiving
physical presents.
Want to learn more about living a minimalist lifestyle?
Helpful blogs:
theminimalistvegan.com/
becomingminimalist.com/what-is-minimalism/
Free PDF version of The Minimalists’ book:
gumroad.com/l/rNQM
Free podcast by The Minimalists:
https://soundcloud.com/theminimalists/p000
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