Minimalism Is a Luxury Good

How the urge to simplify becomes more things to buy

Photo: Ishan@seefromthesky/Unsplash

Maybe it started with the iconoclastic act of throwing tea off the boat in Boston Harbor, or perhaps with the misperception that North America was simply a blank space before the pilgrims came from England and the pioneers headed West. In any case, the United States is particularly vulnerable to the charms of minimalism.

Something about our belief in the power of self-definition and starting over suggests to us that if we only sweep our floors, we will magically become new people, unburdened by the past. We like to think that we can do without, rough it to prove that we’re not so soft or bound to the past. Our collective impulse to KonMari our closets is merely the most recent in a long history of nationwide cleaning fugues, from Henry David Thoreau’s cabin to the present.

In 1933, the American philosopher Richard Gregg published an essay called “The Value of Voluntary Simplicity” that foretold today’s preoccupations with decluttering, unplugging, and slowing down. “We think that our machinery and technology will save us time and give us more leisure,” he wrote, “but really they make life more crowded and hurried. It is time to call a halt on endless gadgeteering.” Gregg was critiquing telephones and Henry Ford’s motorcars, but also the greed of traders in the newly ascendant stock market that had helped cause the Great Depression.

The solution to this hurried life, Gregg proposed, was an ethos of “voluntary simplicity:” a “singleness of purpose, sincerity and honesty within, as well as avoidance of exterior clutter, of many possessions irrelevant to the chief purpose of life.” Voluntary simplicity emphasized “psychic goods” — art appreciation, friendship, and love, for example — over owning things. It was the 1930s answer to “buy experiences, not things.”

Gregg saw voluntary simplicity as a new aesthetic system, in line with what was happening in European modernist architecture at the time. He also cited the experience of visiting a Japanese country inn that sought an overall harmony through soft colors and textures, as opposed to a western excess of furniture or interior decoration. It taught him, “There can be beauty in complexity, but complexity is not the essence of beauty.” Like…