Five Trash Bags

Most people work forty hours a week to buy things they do not need, to impress people they do not know, who at the end of the day do not care. This cycle continues until death. It is not a life. It is a transaction repeated until the body gives out, and no one on either side of it remembers what was purchased.

If I earn forty dollars an hour and spend one hundred and sixty on something I use once, four hours of my life have been converted into landfill. Not metaphorically. Literally. Four hours of irreversible human existence, traded for an object that will sit in a closet for eleven months before being donated to a stranger who will also not use it. This arithmetic is simple enough that a child could follow it. The fact that most adults cannot is not a failure of mathematics. It is a failure of philosophy.

The question is not whether the purchase was wise. The question is why it was made at all. Was it for dopamine. Was it for the brief illusion of fullness that consumption provides. Was it to impress someone. Was it to avoid sitting still long enough to hear what the silence has to say. The reasons do not vary much from person to person. Desire, ego, addiction, the need to fill a void that was never meant to be filled with objects. The void is structural. It is the space where purpose should be, and when purpose is absent, people pour money and possessions into it the way you pour water into a cracked vessel. It never holds.

This is not a new observation. The Buddha taught that attachment is the root of suffering. Christ told the rich young ruler to sell everything he owned. The Desert Fathers left civilization entirely, living in stone huts with a reed mat, a sheepskin, a lamp, and a vessel for water. They had a horror of extra possessions. Abba Macarius was asked by a brother whether to keep his three books or sell them and give the money to the poor. The old man answered simply: it is best of all to possess nothing. The Stoics arrived at the same conclusion from a different direction, stripping away externals to locate what no circumstance could take. These traditions disagree on almost everything. They agree on this: less is more. The agreement is not coincidental. When every serious attempt to understand human flourishing arrives at the same prescription, the prescription is probably correct.

I discovered this at sixteen. I watched a documentary called “The Minimalists: Less Is Now” without knowing the impact it would have. Immediately afterward, I went to my room and filled five trash bags with things that had been sitting in my closet doing nothing for anyone. I gave them away, sold them, or threw them out. My parents were delightfully confused about why their Diablo-addicted teenager was suddenly emptying his room. It had nothing to do with the room. It had everything to do with a life philosophy that had just taken root in a place I did not know was fertile.

After that, I read “Goodbye, Things” by Fumio Sasaki. It remains one of the most important books I have encountered across several hundred. I began watching Matt D’Avella. I began applying the principle not just to possessions but to every domain I could identify. And then, years later, I encountered the Unix philosophy, and the final piece locked into place.

Doug McIlroy, the inventor of Unix pipes, summarized it this way: write programs that do one thing and do it well. This is a life principle wearing the disguise of engineering. The men at Bell Labs in the 1960s and 1970s, Thompson and Ritchie and Kernighan and Pike, built one of the most consequential systems in the history of computing by relentless subtraction. They did not add features. They removed them. They did not build monoliths. They built small, sharp tools that composed with one another. The power of the system came not from any single program but from the relationships between programs. Complexity emerged from the composition of simple parts.

This is how I build software. It is also how I try to build a life. The insight that changed everything for me was that minimalism is not an aesthetic. It is not a visual style or a trend or a way of decorating an apartment with white walls and one plant. It is a decision-making framework. It is a question asked before every action, every purchase, every commitment, every word: do I need this, and is it aligned with what I have decided matters.

The word “need” requires definition. Need does not mean survival necessity. It means: does this thing add to or subtract from the life I have chosen. Will I use it again. Does it serve purpose, or does it serve comfort masquerading as purpose. When I cannot answer clearly, I wait. A week. A month. Sometimes a year. If the desire persists after the delay, it may be genuine. If it evaporates, it was noise. This practice is called delayed gratification, and strengthening it is one of the most consequential things a person can do. It is the difference between a life directed by intention and a life directed by impulse.

I am not describing deprivation. This distinction matters, and I want to be precise about it. There is a philosophy circulating in certain circles that says “you will own nothing and be happy.” This is not minimalism. This is a vision of structural deprivation imposed from above, in which the absence of ownership is not chosen but enforced, and the happiness is not earned but prescribed. Voluntary simplicity rooted in self-mastery and involuntary poverty imposed by economic architecture are not the same thing. They are opposites. One is freedom. The other is a cage painted to look like freedom. I reject the latter entirely.

What I practice is chosen. It is chosen because it works, and it works because it is true & correct.

After nearly nine years of this, I can tell you what minimalism is not. It is not the absence of things. It is the absence of unnecessary things, which turns out to be most things. Jonathan Ive understood this when he said that true simplicity is not the absence of clutter and ornamentation but the act of bringing order to complexity. Coco Chanel understood it when she advised looking in the mirror before leaving the house and removing one thing. The best engineers understand it. The best cooks understand it. The best designers, fighters, writers, and thinkers all arrive at the same place: mastery looks like reduction. The amateur adds. The master subtracts. The difference between a good system and a great one is usually what was removed, not what was included.

I practice this in every domain I can name. Possessions. Software. Work. Health. Relationships. Mind. Emotions. Speech. Fashion. Training. Tools. Development environment. Living space. Information consumption. Communication. Faith. Time. Identity. Dependencies. Opinions. Ego. The list is not exhaustive because the principle is fractal. It applies at every scale.

The hardest domains are not the material ones. Getting rid of clothes and furniture is easy compared to getting rid of thoughts. Minimalism of the mind, of emotional reaction, of desire, of ego, is the real work, and it is the work of a lifetime. This is where stoicism enters as an adjacent framework. Epictetus taught that we suffer not from events but from our judgments about them. Marcus Aurelius wrote his meditations as a practice of stripping away the unnecessary interpretations that the mind layers onto reality. The Stoics were minimalists of perception. They understood that the clutter inside is more dangerous than the clutter outside, because external clutter takes up space in a room, but internal clutter takes up space in a life. Mastery is subtraction. Everything else is decoration.

Combined with faith, these frameworks become something more than philosophy. They become architecture. The Desert Fathers did not subtract from their lives because they hated the world. They subtracted because they loved God, and everything that was not God was in the way. Anthony the Great heard the Gospel read in church, applied to himself the words “sell all that you have and give to the poor,” and walked into the desert. He did not walk away from something. He walked toward something. The subtraction was in service of arrival.

This is the part that most writing about minimalism misses. The conversation is always about what you remove. Rarely about what remains. And what remains is everything that matters. In order of importance: faith, family, health, friends, purpose, and the memories you carry. If I had to compress it further, I would use one word: experience. That is all life reduces to. Not possessions. Not status. Not the accumulation of objects or credentials or followers. The human experience of being alive, of climbing the mountain, of standing at the summit. The mountain does not care what you are wearing. The view at the top is the same whether you are in technical gear or barefoot with a water bottle.

When you strip away the scrolling, the purchasing, the people who subtract from your life, the food engineered to be addictive rather than nourishing, the endless consumption of more, you begin to see through a fog you did not know was there. The fog is not dramatic. It is a gradual dimming that happens so slowly you mistake it for normal vision. Removing it feels like cleaning a window you forgot was dirty. The world on the other side was always there. You simply could not see it.

This clarity also reveals the questions you have been avoiding. Sometimes for years. The consumption, the busyness, the noise, these are not just distractions. They are defenses. They protect you from sitting in silence long enough to hear the things you do not want to hear. About your life. About your choices. About the distance between what you say matters and how you actually spend your time. Minimalism removes the defenses. What you do with the exposure is up to you.

I take this further than most. I live out of three bags. I own three forty-liter boxes of things. I live in a coliving space in San Francisco. I buy food, toiletries, travel, and experiences. That is approximately the full list. This is not normal, and I am not pretending it is. It is closer to vagabonding than to conventional life. It has tradeoffs I do not minimize. But it is aligned with my core commitments: build something meaningful, spend time with the people I care about, do not waste money or energy on things that do not serve either of those aims. I am happier than I was when I had my own apartment, a car, and a job that paid for both. The gap between that life and this one is the gap between performing contentment and possessing it.

The majority of decisions I make, large and small, pass through a single filter: do I need it, and does it align. Usually the answer is no. This question has saved me more hours, more dollars, and more energy than any productivity system or financial strategy I have ever encountered. I intend to practice it whether I am broke or wealthy. The amount does not change the principle. The peace it provides is the same at every income level, because the peace does not come from what you have. It comes from the clarity of knowing why you have it.

Once you taste this, you do not go back. The simplicity is quiet. It is not dramatic or photogenic. It does not make for compelling content. But it is built on something most lives are not built on: invisible consistency. The daily, unremarkable act of choosing less, applied across years, across every domain, until the choosing becomes automatic and the life it produces becomes unmistakably your own.

Nothing is louder than an empty room. Nothing is stronger than a man who needs nothing. Nothing is freer than a life stripped to its foundations, where every remaining thing is load-bearing and every empty space is intentional.

Less is more. And nothing, done well, is best of all.

"The root of suffering is attachment."
— The Buddha

"Sell all that you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven."
— Christ (Matthew 19:21)

"It is best of all to possess nothing."
— Abba Macarius

"Simplicity is not the absence of clutter, that is a consequence of simplicity. Simplicity is somehow essentially describing the purpose and place of an object and product."
— Jonathan Ive

"Before you leave the house, look in the mirror and take one thing off."
— Coco Chanel

"Write programs that do one thing and do it well."
— Doug McIlroy

"It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a great deal of it."
— Seneca

"Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself, in your way of thinking."
— Marcus Aurelius

"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

"The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak."
— Hans Hofmann

"Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful."
— William Morris

"He who would travel happily must travel light."
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

"If he is not edified by my silence, he will not be edified by my speech."
— Abba Pambo

"It is not the daily increase but daily decrease. Hack away at the unessential."
— Bruce Lee

"Less is more."
— Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication."
— Leonardo da Vinci

"The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials."
— Lin Yutang

"The sculpture is already complete within the marble block before I start my work. It is already there, I just have to chisel away the superfluous material."
— Michelangelo

"Beware the barrenness of a busy life."
— Socrates

"Simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art."
— Frédéric Chopin

"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."
— Albert Einstein

"Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify."
— Henry David Thoreau

"Simplicity and repose are the qualities that measure the true value of any work of art."
— Frank Lloyd Wright

"The more you know, the less you need."
— Yvon Chouinard

"To find one's direction, one must simplify the mechanics of ordinary, everyday life."
— Plato

"The height of cultivation always runs to simplicity."
— Bruce Lee

"There are two ways to be rich: one is by acquiring much, and the other is by desiring little."
— Jackie French Koller

"Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious and adding the meaningful."
— John Maeda

"I like ruins because what remains is not the total design, but the clarity of thought, the naked structure, the spirit of the thing."
— Tadao Ando

"Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated."
— Confucius

"The desire for possessions is dangerous and terrible, knowing no satiety."
— Abba Isidore of Pelusia

Last edited Apr 1, 2026 | 1775089935