On becoming a minimalist
8 things I learned after selling 90% of my possessions (plus a couple of regrets)
In 2018 I had lunch with a friend who suggested I read The Life-changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo. I remember the year, because I was stressed about having to move out of the flat I had lived in for 10 years, and she thought it might help lighten the moving load. I took on board some of Marie’s ideas, and it did make the move easier, but my approach to decluttering was more akin to the title of this article by The Minimalists: “Organizing Is Well-Planned Hoarding”.
A second house move a year later resulted in a little more decluttering, but then COVID arrived. Melbourne locked down for two years, and I did what everyone in my city did – medicated the stress with online shopping.
Our new view of Brno, Czech Republic at sunset.
Those two years gave my husband and I time to think about our lives in Melbourne, and we decided we wanted to spend some time living in the Czech Republic where he was born. We blocked out our calendars from July 2022 onwards, and began the enormous task of reducing our possessions down to the absolute bare minimum. We ended up selling, donating or recycling about 90% of our worldly goods, and are currently in Brno with a double bass and a handful of clothes between us, the rest of our belongings packed away in a few boxes back in Australia.
The process was not easy, and despite an overall sense of liberation I have still cried several times, homesick for our old rental house and the things we had around us to bring warmth and comfort. I found the book Love People, Use Things: Because the Opposite Never Works particularly helpful for letting go. It allowed me to see minimalism as a philosophy for living with more intention, and not just some kind of capsule wardrobe or home decor trend.
Read on for 8 things I have learned about myself on my journey toward a minimalist life, plus a few regrets. I have also included a list of books, links and other resources at the end of the article if you are interested in learning more about living a minimalist life.
1. My instruments are my 10%
When I reduced my life down by 90%, my instruments and related tools for working on music were the bulk of what remained. I was forced to make serious choices about what I want to spend my time on, as all hobbies and interests require time, money and storage space. I only have enough of those for one passion, and I have chosen music.
I tended to use my other interests as a distraction when I was feeling creatively stuck, but my inspiration usually returned swiftly leaving me with another half-sewn blouse for my unfinished projects box. I can still cook, still draw, still sew or knit if I want to, but I only need the simplest equipment.
2. Minimalism is not about replacing what you have now with something sleeker, whiter or more perfect
Working on the Song-chain project in 2017 I faced my perfectionist tendencies head on, and it is a personality trait I work alongside every day. Here are some of my posts from that project tagged perfectionism:
Perfectionism was sowed deep inside me from childhood, for better and for worse. Building a life with less possessions could easily have been about selling everything and accumulating from scratch the ultimate set of 99 items that were functionally, aesthetically, ethically and sustainably perfect.
That’s exactly what my inner perfectionist wanted to do, but the real sustainable path to minimalism is to make the most of what you already own until it no longer serves its purpose, and pass on anything that is surplus to the life you want now.
3. I had been buying for a future version of me
Before music took over my life, I spent a lot of time dressmaking, but my habit of stalling when there was a difficult creative or fitting problem to be solved meant that my half-finished projects outnumbered the finished. And my fabric stash outnumbered both of those together. A beautiful bolt of wool crepe or silk velvet still tugs at my imagination if I pass it in a shop window, and I am suddenly in the outfit of my dreams, living the life that only the wearer of that outfit could live.
I had stored these dreams of the future me in labelled plastic tubs: wools, silks, cottons, linens, rayons, shirting, crepes, velvets, voiles. They contained the lives I would have lived, places I would have visited, friends I would have made.
I made my own wedding dress completely by hand (no sewing machine!). I originally sketched a design intending to purchase fabric, but instead decided to use what I already had available in my fabric stash.
During Melbourne's lockdown I made my wedding dress from a collection of silks and a heavy curtain lace from this stash, but the rest I eventually donated to become dream outfits for lots of other people. I was filled with remorse the day I dropped the boxes off. I had opened and caressed each piece of fabric and imagined those perfect outfits many times over. I can still remember which sewing pattern or sketched idea I had earmarked for each length.
But then, suddenly, I was lighter. By clearing away those material symbols of future, unrealistic versions of me, I have found myself with space to get to know the person I am today.
4. IKEA furniture is easy to sell
In my mid-20s I was obsessed with modelling my life after black and white movies, and coveted a classic, dark wood cocktail cabinet that opened to reveal sparkling mirrors, delicate glasses and bottles of exotic spirits. I finally found one on eBay that fit my tiny budget, and roped in a few friends to help carry the huge, heavy beast up to my second floor flat.
I lived in that flat for nearly 10 years, and when it came time to move I was no longer drinking. In my sobriety I was happy to let go of that tie to my previous life, but discovered that heavy, dark brown furniture is almost impossible to pass on, even for free.
The immovable brown furniture of my youth was replaced by light, easily dismantled flat-pack IKEA, which proved amazingly easy to sell when I started downsizing in preparation for moving overseas. My younger self was one of the few millennials keeping the antique furniture industry alive instead of killing it off, but the reality of moving from one unstable rental property to the next ruined any joy in owning beautifully crafted, old, heavy things. Furniture that is easy to move and easy to sell won, which is an unfortunate symbol of the state of the housing market in Australia for my generation.
5. I want a capsule wardrobe life, but it’s a little more complicated than that
Perhaps there is a middle ground for me somewhere in between the creative hoarder I was and the capsule-wardrobe-lifestyle I crave.
Since I was a teenager, I have been shopping for clothes in op shops, charity stores and vintage markets, and these treasure hunt finds make up 90% of my wardrobe. My clothing was the hardest thing to downsize. I made multiple passes, whittling the collection down, then down again, then going back to the donation bags and rescuing items, only to put them back in.
I did manage to reduce my collection down to a modest size, selling on Etsy and donating the remainder to The National Trust. I packed most of what remained into boxes and currently have exactly 16 items of clothing with me in the Czech republic.
In a way, I love living with these 16. Getting dressed in the morning is simple, and mending is an approachable task when only one top needs darning, rather than half my wardrobe. At the same time, however, I am missing the experimentation and expression of my eclectic collection. I still have too many clothes, and need to tackle those boxes when I return to Melbourne, so perhaps there is a middle ground for me somewhere in between the creative hoarder I was and the capsule-wardrobe-lifestyle I crave.
6. The urge to shop doesn’t go away
We are flooded daily by advertising from all corners of our lives. Even our friends and creative idols sell to us daily with what they wear, how they decorate their houses, or the images they post to social media. I want the artistic life of my musical colleague Lucy Roleff, or the balanced, yogic personality of Adriene Mischler, or the delicious, conversation filled tables of Olia Hercules.
But art supplies, yoga pants or vintage tableware won't give me that life. Making art, practicing mindfulness and inviting my friends over for meals will. And I can do all of those things with what I already own. I still need to regularly remind myself of this when I feel the urge to improve or comfort myself through acquiring new things.
7. You are not the same person you were 10 years ago
10 years ago I started my music degree, intending to sing popular jazz and live out fantasies formed while watching black and white movies. Then, in my first week of classes, I was asked to freely improvise and my world changed. The horizons of what was possible stretched wide open, and I discovered a vast universe of music outside of the singer-songwriters I grew up listening to and the popular jazz I was playing in my spare time.
This guitar has found a new home as the style of music I play has evolved. I found this instrument particularly difficult to part with, but in the end I hadn’t played it for several years and decided it would be better off with someone who had the time to play and love it just as much as I did in 2014 when this photo was taken.
I no longer own the various guitars I started my career with. I now have my double bass and a versatile acoustic guitar that lets me explore the edges of pop, folk and jazz. As I wade further into production I have added some recording equipment to my collection, plus this totally bizarre but beautiful 1960s Hohner Guitaret that I really love experimenting with:
You can hear more of the Guitaret on my singles Olive and Violet.
I have no idea where I will be creatively in another 10 years’ time, and perhaps these instruments too will find new homes as my interests shift year by year. Any musician will know the sadness of parting with a beloved tool, it’s like parting with a piece of your own flesh, but this opening can turn out to be the perfect space for fresh ideas to grow.
8. I still have to work hard at being neat, even with a handful of possessions
I wrongly assumed that owning less things would miraculously make me a neater person. In Writing Down the Bones, one of my favourite books on finding and maintaining creative inspiration, Natalie Goldberg offers the following advice:
“It is important to have a way worked out to begin your writing; otherwise, washing the dishes becomes the most important thing on earth—anything that will divert you from writing.”
One of my own tactics to begin is to jump on the sparks of ideas the moment they appear in my mind. Tidying up what I had previously been working on risks breaking the thread of inspiration before I have the chance to follow it.
Even with just a handful of possessions I still have to force myself to pack up my notebooks and laptop, fold my washing when it’s dry, or put my instruments back in their cases. I realise now this will never change, but it takes a lot less willpower to get started as it’s a job of minutes and not hours, and I can contain my chaos to a smaller area.
And some regrets, because I have those too.
1. I often wish I'd kept my books
I love the warmth a full shelf of books brings to a house. Reading was my favourite pastime from childhood, and there are many books I have loved. Perhaps not to read again, but as markers of the different points in my life. If I had a space of my own to store them, or they weren't so difficult and expensive to transport from house to house, from country to country, I would have saved them.
Instead, I kept the most special titles – the books my mother read me as a child and the novels my father-in-law gifted me after our discussions of art and literature – and made a spreadsheet of the rest. Browsing a spreadsheet for reminders of your history is not as enticing as perusing book spines in your living room, but if I do want to read anything again I have the list, and can find a copy digitally, in a library or a second-hand bookstore.
I have recently discovered Libby, an app that lets you borrow electronic books with your public library membership, which has been wonderful in a non-English-speaking country. Still, I think about my own library often, much more than the musical instruments I parted with. I thought I would miss those more, which tells me something I didn’t know about my values.
2. I miss the banana yellow safari suit even if I never wore it
I found it in an op shop, it was marked “Made in West Germany”, and was the most audacious shade of yellow. It was completely inappropriate for most situations, and I had worn it perhaps once a year. In the middle of downsizing I suddenly wanted to find it, and dug frantically through the donation bags that hadn’t yet made it out of the house, but it had already gone to The National Trust.
It makes me feel ridiculous, this attachment to an outfit I wore once a year. I suspect it is something akin to the IKEA effect, a term coined by Michael I. Norton, Daniel Mochon and Dan Ariely:
“when people successfully complete a labor-intensive task that they come to value the fruits of that labor”
Searching for buried treasures inside charity and second-hand shops is the labour that leads to love, which is only strengthened by the one-of-a-kind nature of the finds. I still believe in second-hand shopping as a sustainable alternative to the disaster that is fast fashion, but hoarding more second-hand clothes than one could possibly wear is not the answer to the world’s environmental problems.
3. I regret the money I spent on things
When it came down to the final stages of moving, anything that couldn’t be sold was donated or given away to friends and family. It made me think of the money spent over my adult life so far, and what I could have done differently with it, especially those purchases that were driven by stress or aspiring to a life that wasn’t my own.
There is no point holding onto something just because you paid for it. The reality of owning a thing is that you continue to pay for it throughout its lifetime: you pay for a house big enough to store it. Then you pay to move it, to clean, repair and maintain it, to insure it, or even to recycle it when it reaches the end of its life. I hope that I have learned enough from this experience to make better choices with my money in the future.
In conclusion
I took this picture just before we left Australia for the Czech Republic, feeling free and untethered among the native trees.
So how do I feel now? In a word, lighter. Almost like floating, the ties to material possessions having been cut.
I am not chasing some kind of “99 items that fit in a backpack” minimalist perfection. For one, a double bass is too big for that. I am not a writer or digital entrepreneur travelling the world with just a laptop and camera. There is a minimum amount of necessary equipment that goes along with my chosen profession, from instruments to leads and amplifiers to study books and recording equipment.
Eventually furniture will need to be repurchased once we decide where to settle down, but with only a small collection of books, clothing and musical equipment to store there is no need for walls of bookcases or elaborate storage units. After dealing with a quarter of a lifetime’s worth of stuff once, I have no desire to repeat that process.
Resources on minimalism
If you are curious about exploring minimalism for yourself here is a list of resources I found useful on my own journey, plus other links mentioned in the article above.
Books
Minimalism
Creativity and spirituality
Blogs
Other tools
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8 things I learned after selling 90% of my possessions (plus a couple of regrets)
“I had stored these dreams of the future me in labelled plastic tubs: wools, silks, cottons, linens, rayons, shirting, crepes, velvets, voiles. They contained the lives I would have lived, places I would have visited, friends I would have made.”