Transcription
Minimalism has made me hate stuff, but it's also made me love [music] stuff. And over the past six years that I've been practicing minimalism, trying new habits and experiments, I've learned some lessons that have really changed [music] my life in a lot of ways. In this video, I just want to share some of those with you.
First of all, strangely enough, this one was inspired by the Grinch, and that is that happiness does not come from a store. For real. I think that one of the things that I noticed first about minimalism was that a lot of people buy stuff. I used to buy stuff in order to make me feel better, right? You're insecure. You go buy some clothes, you get a new makeover, you do whatever, and then you're trying to make yourself feel better, [music] right? And a lot of times when I was buying stuff, it wasn't like the stuff itself. It was that I was trying to fix something that was wrong with my life [music] with spending money, trying to distract myself, trying to get a dopamine high, trying to do whatever, right?
And as I've really gotten into minimalism, gotten rid of more and more stuff, I've realized that the stuff doesn't matter. And I feel like once you step outside of that, once you try minimalism for 30 days, you try it for 6 months, you then go outside, you go to the mall and you're like, what is [music] this stuff? Like, who buys this? Who thinks that they need like the 12th pair of shoes? Who does this? And it seems crazy to go outside of that when you're inside of that, right? And I feel like it it's kind of like crossed over this border for me where I realized that all the stuff that I used to kind of chase to make myself feel better, to make myself feel included, better of myself, whatever it was, none of that [clears throat] stuff matters. It's not about that. It's about your relationships with people, helping people, building things that you're proud of. It's about your relationship with God, whatever it is for you. Almost all of your self-worth, your happiness, your whatever dopamine, the stuff that you get from the gym is way better than the stuff that you get from the store, right? The stuff you get from hanging out with friends, that dopamine is so much better than buying a new t-shirt. And yet, because people make money on buying a new t-shirt, all you see everywhere around you is go spend money on something that doesn't really matter. It's a madeup thing. It didn't exist 50 years ago. Like literally, I would say like half the stuff I used to buy wasn't even an option to buy 50 years ago throughout all of history until recently. Right once I got to this side, I couldn't believe I was on the other side so long.
I know I just mentioned stuff, but also I've realized that it's not about stuff. And when I got into minimalism, I was really about getting rid of my clothes. I was there was garbage bags full of crap that I was taking out of my house. I was clearing out things, waking up earlier, using all the free time that I've been wasting on better things. It was really about clearing out my physical space, right? But then it moved on to mental peace. Like once you have your house kind of cleared out, you you have [music] everything you have is like your favorite stuff, right? You you don't have junk everywhere, your closets are decently clean and all that type of stuff, you then realize that your brain is like [music] going haywire, right? their brains like full of clutter. And this is something that I've struggled with. But I feel like minimalism has really made me keenly aware of the fact that we are not just cluttered in our stuff in this society. We're not just [music] oversold on junk that we don't need. But also, people are chasing our attention, right? We live in this thing called the attention economy. And I realized that while I wasn't buying physical stuff, I was a consumer, right? I was consuming so much stuff. Podcasts, music, YouTube videos, Tik Tok, Instagram, Facebook. I was consuming media like there was no tomorrow. You're just like as many times as you can push the button, you can get go dopamine instantly with no work whatsoever. You can distract yourself from dealing with the fact that you're not doing the things you want to do with your life, that you know, you're not doing the habits you want to do, you're not in the relationship you want to have, you're not, you know, financially where you want to be. Whatever it is, you can distract yourself. Just open up your phone. Put somebody else in your ears. let them think for you so you don't have to deal with yourself. Right?
As I got my physical stuff clear, I realized that the mental space was really also something that I valued. Not only does everything that I have have a little bit of space in between my ears, has a little bit of mental space, but also I don't want other things coming into my ears, right? And so it was this combination of clearing my physical space helped with my mental clarity a lot. And then also clearing my digital space and how much I'm consuming, not only physically, but also mentally really made a big impact in my mind. I felt like I could think clearer. And that's something I've kind of struggled with on and off over the past 7 years. I don't want to come off like I've been perfect here because honestly like social media and stuff's super addicting and it's built that way. There's like hundreds of people whose full-time job it is to get you to spend more time on their app. Like it's it's hard, right? But I feel like when you're free, when again you step out of that place of constantly consuming, the creativity just spills out of you, you want to make things, you want to build things, you want to go to the gym, you want to do whatever, when you're not always having inputs from other people, right? When you're very selective. When you think about minimalism, it is less but better. Oh, it's maybe essentialism, but like it's finding the few things that really matter and trying to ignore everything else. So you can take your time, energy, and focus from the things that don't matter, right? the wasting money on consumerism. The being the consuming endless hours of of content, you can take all this time and energy and focus and money, right, and shift it into things that really add value to your life, things that really make you happy, that you look back and you're proud of. That's the shift. And I feel like until you take a step back, until you you pull yourself out of that zone, it's really hard to make that shift.
By the way, if you're getting any value out of this, it [music] would really mean a ton if you could just drop a like on this video so it can reach more people. And so I guess I'll mention something that has really helped me get out of that multiple times. That's by having resets. While I'm a big fan of small changes over a long period of time, I've talked about that so many times on this channel. When you're just buying stuff every single day on Amazon, when you're just spam listening to 3 hours worth of podcasts every day, when you're watching five episodes of Friends every night, sometimes making a small change doesn't work. Doesn't work really hard. Sometimes what you need to do is make a big change. And a lot of times for me, those big changes are like resets. It's [music] taking seven days to totally reset a lot of different areas in your life. It's taking 30 days and not spending any money on anything that isn't essential for being alive. Sometimes it's going to the gym every day for a month. Like you need big life resets. I feel like sometimes just to get out of the bad habits so that you can establish the habits that you do want and move you closer to that life. And I'm going through one of those right now. If you've seen some of the other [music] content I've done recently, I've been talking about it. It's hard to get out of habits that you've done maybe for 5, 10 years, your entire life, even a couple months. Sometimes you can build bad habits of just thinking of something, wanting it, buying it on Amazon, it shows up the next day, you don't even remember what you had. Like, it's really easy to get into that habit and it can destroy your finances. 27 bucks a day doesn't sound like a lot, but that's 10 grand a year. That can change your life. And so I'm currently really trying to make that change to simplify my life, to find mental clarity, to focus on the things that matter, to make real improvement so that I don't look back in the next 30 years the same way I've looked back on a lot of these ones and realize that I distracted myself through a lot of my life.
I don't know. I feel like uh another thing that I do want to mention is that I've realized a lot that money is actually your life. There's a book on this called Your Money is Your Life, but it's really like when you're buying stuff, when you're wasting money on things that don't matter, not only are you like spinning your wheels, right? But like you're you're wasting days of your life that you will never get back just to have [music] stuff. 6 months from now it's it's ending up in a trash. Literally everything you see at a store. You go into a store. Everything you see in there within probably 10 years will end up in a landfill. Almost every single thing in that store is all just trash that is built to break, right? The the shirts are built to to wear out relatively quickly. So you buy another one. The dishwashers are built to last 5 years before some electrical things go and it's just cheaper to buy another one. Things are not built to last anymore. And when I started to see this, you realize that like I don't want to spend days of my life working for stuff that's going to end up in the trash like really soon. It's not going to change my life at all.
So yeah, these are just some of the things I've been I've been thinking about as I've been reflecting on this recently. Hopefully this helped you. If you got any value out of this and you think it would help somebody else, feel free to like share it to them. Um, anytime you interact with a video, it actually really helps like boost out to more people. So like every time you interact, it pretty much means like at least one other person is going to see this. And my really goal is to help people be less consumer focused, really have like healthier, more fulfilled lives. Um, so I appreciate everybody who does interact with these videos and likes and comments and all that type of stuff. So, thank you so much and I'll see you next.