Real Talk: My path to Minimalism. [ LONG ]

Massive *eye roll* here

 
Google "Minimalism" and you are going to get a ton of definitions, a ton of pics of IKEA-like spaces, and a ton of cheesy one-liners like above.  BUT, after a major life shakeup, I examined my life, and decided to why not give it a try.  I'm going to throw everything out there, behind the semi-anonymity of the internetz, just to give everyone a glimpse of my path towards this new life choice, and how it has affected me.  Things are gonna get personal, and very real.  I'm writing all this off the cuff, so to speak, so expect a bit of rant as I just type out whatever comes to mind...

   I think the best place to start is with MY definition of what minimalism means to me.  To boil things down, it was an examination of all the consumer-driven aspects (i.e. my stuff) of my life, and how my "things" affected my overall happiness.  It's about getting rid of anything that doesn't add to my wellbeing or happiness, to the point where, I've surrounded myself with ONLY the things that make me happy.  The beauty of this lifestyle choice, is that there is no right or wrong answer.  No right way or wrong way to go about doing it.  What my concept of "minimalist living" is/looks like will not look like yours.  It's also affected by the fact that my family doesn't really share in my choice of minimalism, and that's fine too.  THEIR stuff doesn't really affect my happiness... though I admit, I get grumpy at the ENTIRE ROOM dedicated to my daughter's legos that she currently doesn't use, but that's a different story.  But again, my minimalist journey cannot, and will not look exactly like your own, or like those seen online.  It just CAN'T, as our stations in life are always completely unique.



  So, what led me to this?  Well, my wife was laid off from her job, during a holiday no less, an in an instant, my family went from making six-figures, to essentially zero in the span of a phone call.  Sure, I work part time from home, but my income is such a joke, that I wouldn't have been able to cover a house payment, let alone food, utilities, etc.  See, we have a bit of a unique living situation.  I used to work full time, and while I made decent money, when my daughter was born a little over 8 years ago, it made sense for me to stop working to take care of her.  the US was in a major recession at the time, and while I was working a ton, over 1/3 of my paycheck went to travel costs, and the remaining would probably had end up being spent on childcare.  After all, why did we decide to have a child IF we were just going have someone else take care of her?  On top of that, the company I worked for was having their own financial crisis, and every paycheck was a gamble as to whether or not the check would clear or bounce.  So, I basically, gave up working, to help raise my daughter full time.  I had always been willing to put aside my own plans for the sake of my family, having given up a job in advertising to move to Kansas when my wife took her job, the one she got fired from btw, and became a stay-at-home dad.  This brings me to another tangent: don't think for a single second that being a stay-at-home parent is easy, or a lazy person's excuse to not work!  I hear and see that a ton, and it is just simply NOT TRUE.  Making this choice, was a difficult one, and brings with it a whole new set of stresses, both from inside the home and outside the home, from society, and in my case, from assumed gender roles.  I am NOT lazy, very much the opposite in fact, as a perfectionist I am very hard working, and honestly, pretty hard on myself.  Why bring all this up? Well, I'm hoping it will start to paint a picture of what brought me to this point, and some of the stresses I may have been under... add to that the depression I've dealt with for the last 20+ years, but that is a whole nother' story, but does play some role in all this.


  Well, back to story of how/why I got to this point.  My wife was working out in the basement on her day off, again it was a holiday, when she comes upstairs, and pulls me aside out of earshot of my daughter.  We sit down on the couch in a different room, and she bursts into tears as she said: "I just got fired.  I just lost my job." and I remember just grabbing her, as the room started to spin for me, hugging her and thinking about how helpless I was to do anything about it.  We had built our lives, our family around this one job, this main source of income, and just like that, it was gone... and not just her job, but over 400 other employees as well, as her entire department was shutdown!  All I could think about was what am I going to do as a husband and a father to help out?  I had no real skills to speak of, no prospects lined up, all of that had kind fo shriveled away over the 8 years of staying at home.  My only thought, and it was literally the 3rd one after "oh god why?" and "what am I going to do?" was I remembered I had a fairly substantial life insurance policy.  I even voiced out loud to wife that if it came down to it, if need be, I would end my own life for my wife and my daughter, that they may be at least somewhat taken care of in my absence.  See, that's how unhappy I was, even before this moment... despite what I felt was a noble intention, it took a mere minute for the idea of ending my own life to pop into my head.  Life should not be like that!  The only reason I'm telling you all this, is because this is the event that really sparked my examination of my life to that point.

  I think it's clear to see that I was stressed, and perhaps not mentally equipped to handle the pressure at the time.  But, I remember looking around at all my gaming stuff, all my dvds, the house, we lived in, and in a round about way, all the choices I had made up to that point... and I couldn't help but wonder what if I had never made any of those choices?  What if I never had bought all that gaming stuff, all the video games, all the junk in my man-cave, all the cloths in my closet?  What would our finances had looked like?  Don't get me wrong, we were already doing good financially.  We didn't stretch ourselves thin, we didn't have credit card debt, we didn't buy the biggest house possible or the most expensive cars.  We preferred to live a fairly modest life, so that we could not particularly stress about our finances.  We were "modest" which really isn't that far form "minimalist".  We were able to float ourselves for several months, thanks to this financial life choice we had made, but I couldn't help but wonder: could I had bought ourselves an extra month or two if I had just NOT bought all the useless junk I was surrounded by?  I was reminded of a Johnny Cash song, Hurt, the one in which he references an "empire of dirt", and that's what I had built and surrounded myself with, or so it felt, an Empire of Dirt.

Gone.

  Now here is where things start to get a bit fuzzy.  I'm not exactly sure how I discovered the concept of minimalism, it may have been from a Netflix documentary, ironically watched in my man-cave surrounded by all my junk.  I'm pretty sure I watched the documentary and thought to myself: ya know, it kind of makes sense.  I had always been one to define success by the amount of stuff accumulated.  I was equating success with money, and Rich people were successful and hence, had more stuff.  Less successful people were poorer, and had less stuff.  This is/was society's accepted definition of success/failure, and one I slipped in to.... despite the fact that it goes completely against my world views as a Catholic.  (another topic for another time)  After the documentary, I started to watch YouTube videos by the same person.  I started to look around at all the junk I had, and I finally realized:  THIS STUFF didn't make me any happier, it never did.  In some ways, to go back to the Catholic perspective, I was trying to patch a cross-shaped hole in my heart, with a dollar signed shaped patch.  It was never going to work.  With time looming, and a desire to help out financially in some way, shape, or form.  I started the process of going from a consumerist, worldly lifestyle, to one of a more minimalistic one.... and let me tell ya, once I started, it was such a relief!

  I started by taking stock of all that I had, and how it affected me:  my gaming stuff, my books, my movies, my cloths, and I started to see how they didn't seem to take away stress, they added to it, and they connected in different ways, and added stress, in ways I never considered!  The first place I started was my books.   I had a shelf full of fantasy novels, warhammer 40k books, etc.  I had read 95% of them, aside from a handful of old Battletech novels I bought for really cheap, mostly as a collector.  I' had never been one to go back and read a book for a second time after finishing them, so I made the decision to sell them all off to 1/2 Priced Books.  I actually made like $180 because I had a lot of rare, out of print collector's books from Games Workshop, and I was shocked!  Granted they turned around and were trying to sell one of the art books for $100, which was pretty absurd imo.  With that shelf cleared, I just got rid of the whole thing, clearing up a ton of space too!  It felt, well, good.  Less stuff for us to move, wherever we ended up, and I got money to save or use for things like gas/groceries. 1/2 priced books also takes movies... and I had a few of those lying about.

Bye.

  ... and by a few, I actually mean several hundred!  I had always loved movies, and had spent many fo nights watching 1-2 movies while painting minis.  But why?  I had Netflix, so if they really were only for background noise while I painted, why did I constantly keep buying new movies?  So, BOOM, they were gone next!  The only ones I saved were Star Wars, and my wife insisted I keep the Marvel universe films.  So, fine, I kept those and sold the rest.  Making again, over $200.  I had kept all my movies in a 6 ft tall tool cabinet thing in the basement, which was now free to hold/organize my all my household tools.  (The tools were also later sold as well, just fyi.)

Not really missed.

  Next up, all my little collectables from my man-cave were given away.  Yep, GIVEN away!  I let my daughter, who is also a Star Wars fan, look through and see if there was anything out of my collection she wanted to keep for herself, and they only thing she chose was a prop Thermal Detonator, a Sideshow Collectables 501st Stormtrooper Helmet, and a small 501st Clonetrooper bust.  I gave away all the rest to an old buddy from high school, who's son's room is star wars themed.  Hopefully he's enjoying them!  All my Halo collectables, including signed copies of Halo 5 and collector's edition copy of Halo Reach went to a buddy's son-in-law whom was going through a rough patch, but whom like halo.  Again, I'm hoping it made his day a bit brighter... even if only for moment!  The Street Fighter UFS cards were hard to give up, but I managed.  I was basically gonna just give em away, but I think my buddy insisted on giving me like $20 or something.  They were cool, and Street Fighter held a nostalgic place in my heart, but I realized that NOT having those cards didn't diminish the nostalgia I felt, nor would hanging onto them.  If anything, hanging onto them brought resentment because I wanted to play UFS really badly, but no one else seemed interested.  That's the part that bummed me out, that's the part that ate me up inside, that I could be so wasteful of my family's resources that I spent money on cards.  Cards that ended up unused.  This thought is also what motivated me to make the biggest change fo all.  My gaming stuff...

Bottom Right is all my kiddo's stuff.  (kept)

  I have been a tabletop gamer all my life.  I started around the 3rd grade, initially getting into D&D through some used "choose your own adventures" books, and form there, comics, and eventually Magic the Gathering.  Allow me this one "hipster gamer" moment, when I say:  I remembering buying packs of the very first MTG set as a kid, and I've been into tabletop gaming ever since.  For a tabletop gamer to give up all (or in my case, almost all) of his/her stuff is probably unheard of, but I did.  I remember looking at all my boardgames, that went unplayed, all my painted armies then went unused, and I thought to myself: why?  Again, this was my Empire of Dirt.  I didn't take pride in all the painted armies, I felt saddened.  Sad because they went unused.  They seemed to point out to me that my friends rarely called, asked me to play, to hangout.  It was like each unplayed game, each painted mini unused, was a not-so-subtle reminder of the loneliness I felt.  I basically had an entire case of loneliness.  **To the one guy whom kept inviting me to play games at his church, I'm sorry for never telling this at the time, but thanks.  I know you tried.  I just got a few weird vibes from the one time I did go, from a few of the people there.  Sorry, I just didn't feel comfortable playing there, and I didn't have courage to tell you at the time.  So again, I'm sorry. If you are reading this, then I'm sure you know who you are. **  But, back to what I was saying, what I thought was supposed to make me happy, was inadvertently doing the opposite.  This is the perfect minimalist moment, and I imagine it's a trap a lot of gamers fall into.  We keep trying to fill some void, with games, and miniatures.  Distract ourselves from the real issues, but that doesn't fix them.  So I did what to some may be unthinkable.  I got rid of it.  I started selling all my boardgames, then all my painted miniatures and stuff, one by one.  Heck, I even gave away a fully painted Flames of war army, because I wanted it GONE.  I had bought and painted a giant flames of war army, and never once, in all the years I had them, had been able to find someone to play with.  So, someone who bought my Congo stuff expressed an interest in my FoW stuff too, but only had enough for one or the other... well, I decided he could have them both for the cost of one.  Yes, $400 worth of minis, painted to, in my opinion, a fairly high standard... for free.  Because, having that army in my collection all these without use, honestly hurt!

  In the end, I even got rid of the cases!  Full disclosure though, I didn't get rid of 100% everything.  My daughter was starting to get into tabletop gaming before we moves, so I did keep what few games we did play: Tanks, Test of Honor, Blood & Plunder, Imperial Assault, and my Eldar army to match against her Black Templars.  Basically, I didn't want my trend in minimalism to have a negative impact on my daughter, so I made sure to keep the things she may one day want to revisit. A friend, whom was inspired by all my giving away, gave my daughter a ton of his unused Test of Honor stuff.  So between, that, and what is left of her Black Templars, should she ever want to paint minis again, then we can!  Same goes for my Video Games.  My daughter plays video games as much, if not more, than I do, and as such I couldn't get rid of them.  They've become as much hers, as they are mine.  It's my one non-minimalist attachment that I couldn't let go of.


  Of course, I couldn't forget my cloths.  Honestly, I donated about 10 large trash bags of cloths to charity.  I realized I didn't need or wear all that stuff, especially, when I wear the same things all the time.  The easiest thing to do was to reset everything.  I've got a "rule of 5" going on, no more than 5 of anyone thing: 5 shirts, 5 shorts, 5 pants, etc.  Anything more than a week's worth to me is excessive.

I just need stream-viewers and twitter follows!

  Finally, and I hope this doesn't offend anyone, but I've even minimalized, minimalised, oh, what's the word trying.... (minimized) my friends.  All the gaming stuff mentioned above, made me feel lonely, left out of the conceived group and social settings.  So, when I moved, I left all that behind too.  You may be asking yourself: "so, your remedy for loneliness is to have no friends?"  And in a way, yes.  It's the age old phrase: "you don't know what you've got til its gone..." and it can apply to social setting as well.  What if you never HAD it in the first place?  Can't feel left out of the group, if you're never in a group to start with.  Cant feel lonely if all you know is being alone.  So far, it's working for me.  As I jokingly put it: You cant have Social Anxiety if you're never Social!  It was just another avenue of hurt, that I've been able to eliminate.  Some people will find it strange, but as an introvert, it's working for me.  I'm more alone than I've ever been in my entire life, and yet, I feel the least amount of loneliness than ever before.  Isn't that odd?  Saying/thinking it, it just seems so backwards, but it works me!

All that remains of my "stuff".

  Fast forward about 6 months from when my wife lost her job, to today.  I made somewhere between $800-$1,000 for all my stuff, but the value of the burden that was lifted off my shoulders is pretty priceless.  I don't think I've ever been happier than I am now.  Don't get me wrong, I still deal with the rollercoaster ride that is my mental health, but it's better than it has ever been in the past.  LIFE is probably better than it ever has been in the past! My wife has a new job, actually making way more than she did at her previous one, so that's a unexpected huge step up.  We've moved to a new state.  Bought a brand new home. (BEST home I've ever lived in, sorry Mom!)  All the stuff I got rid of?  Don't really miss it all!  Every now and I then I think about visiting one of the local game stores for the first time, just to check it out, but even just that thought starts to bring back a flutter of all the negative emotions I've now started to associate with my past consumeristic ways.  By getting rid of all the stuff of my past life, and that's how I look at it, I've effectively started over.  I own probably less than 100 things, and none of the burden that was attached!  Nowadays, I don't run out to buy movies on a whim, I rent or wait for Netflix.  I don't buy books, I download free ones.  (Legally, from Prime btw)  I have no desire really to go out and buy cloths unnecessarily, and my closet is rather comical looking with how sparse it is.  The only things I've kept around me, are the things I've deliberately chosen, but even then I'm finding ways to continue to reduce so as to not add any further burdens.  Again, don't think this means I'm never unhappy, because everyone experiences that emotion, rather just know that I can now confidently say it's not been affected in some shape or another based off of what I DO or DO NOT own.  If you had told a younger me that I could be comfortable living like this, I probably would have laughed at you and replied: "why would I want to live like that?"  Well, now I see why....

It felt to good to get all that out there!  Thanks for reading...

-WuhSawBe-









*PS: I'd like for Video games/Streaming to one day either stop causing me stress or to simply get thrown out!  Further proof that I'm 100% minimalist just yet and/or there is still room for improvement!  (fyi, putting yourself out there as a content creator can be difficult sometimes!)