Minimalism
By: Adolfo Tomás Gregório Moreno
Tags: Saving, Saving Money, Experience, Minimalism, Money

Minimalism

Adolfo Moreno 01/2020 — Parque das Nações

Misconceptions:

A minimalist lifestyle isn’t donating everything and living in the woods hunting my own food.

Minimalism can be divided in 5 big terms:

Aesthetic/artistic

Frugality

Ecological/Environmental

Philosophical/general

Digital/Physical

For this article I will talk about Frugality and Philosophical minimalism in my experience and in other articles I will cover the other topics.

Context:

I come from an average family and moved to Lisbon to study and try to start a life. After finishing my studies and getting a job I realise im saving little to no money, living a life I can’t really afford, living in a shared house and think to myself “If I can’t save money like this I will never save any money and get out to my own place”. I wasn’t paying much for rent and life was messy. So I go to youtube for those dives into trying to find the solution to my problem and I stumble across investing, making more money with more than one job, flipping items but after a lot of videos I come across one that said “Spend less” and that hit me hard.

50 videos later I am listing to thoughts about a minimalist lifestyle, aggressive saving, excessive consumption and how our hobbies are stacking items at home and spend money on more things.

I realise I buy a tone of things I don’t need, a tone of things I don’t even use and spend a lot on food I don’t really need just because I don’t eat what I have at home. At this point, I knew I f*cked up.

My progress:

First thing I did was try to get in my head what really mattered to me, what I cared about, stick with that and use it has motivation for my actions.

The second thing I did was gather everything I had and haven’t used in a year or more and try to sell everything to get some of the money I spent back. This was quite the declutter.

With time I understood I need very few things to live my life happily because all the material things I need I already have and what I still think I need or want I can buy by selling the things I don’t really need or use and have.

Now I have fewer things to my name but almost all the things I own have a purpose and I can look at them and feel good and happy, everything has its own space and is not all cluttered.

There is still progress to be made since I wanna have even less items, I can combine some, trade some for multipurpose items and overall minimize my waste.

The feelings I had during this experience were not quite what I expected. Let me tell you about it.

As I got rid of stuff I felt nostalgic and felt like I needed them. They moved me to a time where everything was better. Took me a really long time to start to get rid of things but during that time I learned that if I look back at a time that was not bad for me I just feel good, I don’t need the things, I just need a trigger like a picture or a story. I decided to write this article so I look back at this time a few years from now and in a side note, I’m starting to get a kick for photography.

As I have less I feel relaxed, unchained, I feel I can do anything, move anywhere and be happy not missing material items. Try it, it’s an amazing feeling.

Life is a collection of memories not a collection of materials. So create content, share your experience, share your point of view and try to make lives a little bit better. The today world only wants us to spend money mindlessly.

In the end you will realize better than ever the classic Fight Club quote:

We buy things we don’t need, to impress people we don’t like.

Cya and try to figure out what you really value.