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Comment by raman162 | Hacker News Reader

I feel like this article misses the true point of minimalism. It's not about having monochromatic houses and boring designs (fine if that's what you're into). Minimalism is about avoiding excess junk that you don't need. You can still choose to have multi colored rooms and decor and be someone that adopts minimalism. I agree that our homes should be expression of ourselves but we shouldn't accumulate for the sake of accumulating.

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I think you mean sparse or unadorned rather than boring– boring minimalist designs miss the point of minimalism. The idea is to create beauty using the form of the objects themselves and how they interact with their surroundings rather than adding purely decorative elements. A picture of open ocean or desert can be beautiful, entirely unadorned, and a picture of a carnival can be boring as hell. I'd certainly call Gottfried Böhm's Brutalist church sparse or unadorned in contrast to St. Basil's Cathedral, but I'd call it anything but boring. (Personally, I find them both breathtaking.)

Same thing with minimalist lives, ideally!

> Minimalism is about avoiding excess junk that you don't need

This is a very shallow heuristic. “Stuff you’ll need over a lifetime” has a very long tail that requires a balance in trade-off between just-in-time availability vs waiting two days of Amazon shipping; throwing things away once done vs inventorying them at home etc.

Turns out one is particularly shitty for the environment while being revitalizing for the current economy; throw-away-ism is not feasible at the planet scale; there is only so much raw material you can extract and process without paying attention to recyclability, very little of which is factored into pricing.

“The true minimalism” would be a lifestyle change that minimized throw-awayism too, while the popular minimalism is a petite bourgeois fashion that hinges on it.

A good example to this ideal is ISS; it looks cluttered but that's as good as a minimalist space can get when you have to inventory everything you'll need locally and have true constraints on bringing in useless mass of materials onboard.

I think there's confusion on "minimalism" the aesthetic choice and minimalism the life-style choice. Real minimalism is about reducing foot-print (both spacial and ecological) to just the necessities and things that bring you joy. "Throw-away-ism" is consumerism wearing a minimalism shaped mask, which is ironic because minimalism is at least partially a rejection of consumerism.

If the long tail contains many items that are rarely used more than five times in a lifetime, does everyone need to purchase their own?

(for some items, perhaps - and communal item libraries don't necessarily solve the waiting-time concern, sure)

No, there’s also the possibility of inheritance.

These are two different things. There's minimalism as a life philosophy, and there's minimalism as a design style. They go well together, but, as you point out, you can also have one without the other.

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