Yes, if you are going to minimalism as a lived, pre-subscribed aesthetic experience, it's basically a really uncomfortable fashion.

I find it better suited as a tool to examine your life and peel away things that aren't needed. That extra space and lightness that is made gives you freedom to do more of what you want and less of things you are forced into.

I personally started minimizing my wardrobe. By having radically fewer individual pieces of clothing, then I can more consciously consume. Case in point, if I have 20 pairs of jeans that I randomly picked up because they looked nice or more likely, I was bored and wanted to distract myself with shopping, then I was much less likely to buy something from a brand that treats it's workers and the environment responsibly; something I personally care about.

I would like to save money so that I can have the freedom to travel for extended periods while I'm still young. Getting rid of alot of things I didn't use but, were taking up space in my apartment allowed me to see just how much space was taken up by things I didn't really need and more importantly weren't adding value to my life.

Ultimately, minimalism for me is trying to give myself the room and the lightness to reach a certain escape velocity from the life I feel I have to live just to survive in my environment to the life I tell myself that I want to have.

It's easy to say, if I had the means, I would travel full time or I would bike across the United States or I would hike the PCT or Appalachian Trail. It's almost a comfort to say, I can't afford it, or I could never take the time off, or what would I do with my apartment for 3 months? It's entirely another thing all together to watch yourself answer those questions and resolve those roadblocks and to see if you really have the will to be the person you tell yourself you really are on the inside but, because of circumstances you don't have to opportunity to be.

Alot of people of financial privilege find appeal in this minimalist life only because it's easier and clearer to see that having everything or almost everything you want doesn't actually make you as happy as you expect you it will. At a certain point there are many people who feel working hard to get more stuff is a losing bargain.

Having less stuff and (for me at least) less carrying costs for having so much stuff, such a nice apartment, such a nice car, so many nights out, so many ways to keep up with the Jones' was something I gladly shrugged off once I saw how much of a difference it was making in my life.

Will I end up a hyper-minimalist in the end? I don't honestly know but, I do know that what I have done so far has impacted my life in real and amazing ways. Having less stuff isn't magic. What is magic is how your life grows when you give it space.

By going to a system of clothes, I have both fewer clothes, less time to shop for them and more outfit options while spending less time wondering what combination I would wear.

Encouraged by that, I'm planning on moving out of what seems like my huge luxury apartment into a smaller one both to have less space to fill up and also to save money.

Saving money and making a plan to confront who I really am. Am I the traveling, freewheeling, wake up in a different country, lover of the outdoors person that I tell myself I am or will I shy away from the new back toward the familiar? Does that even actually make a difference to who I am?

All of those questions can't be answered unless I change my life in an effort to answer them and that's what minimalism is doing for me, allowing me to start answering those questions.