I don't understand what people like KirinDave are referring to when they discuss Minimalism. Anything beyond drill-down UX exercises like eliminating information clutter in visual design seems to immediately break down. Assuming we're talking about something more general than eliminating the widgets from our blog sidebars... What ARE we talking about? I guess I could imagine it going one step higher, into a campaign to stop ourselves from reading blogs and Hacker News when we should be working, ie., the logical evolution of our collective obsession with GTD and similar systems from a couple years ago: a slightly doctrinaire insistence on techniques for productivity. Which is great, especially if you're a 'knowledge worker' (I'm not).

But I still lose the plot when we start actually using the word big-M 'Minimalism', or when we start invoking Zen. Zen is many things: spiritual practice, proto-psycho-exploration, a system of psychology, a system of ethics and epistemology—but I'm not sure it has anything to do with anything that the leading Neo-Minimalists have deemed worthy of inclusion into their morning workflows. Keeping a blog, for one, is not a very Zen thing to do. In fact, the practice of Zen is in part anathema to nearly every technique of thought that a knowledge worker employs in his job. It's a refutation of the construction of narrative, of pattern-recognition, of comprehension, and finally of cognition. It's an attempt to obliterate our own understandings of the world, to destroy our conceptions of objects, uses, signs, signifiers, others and ourselves, to be replaced with pure being and hopefully compassion. And it's DEFINITELY at odds with the all-inclusive rapid-fire content-association that is at the heart of tumblr culture. But I don't see how the practice of Zen has anything to do with the way one orders one's workspace, if one never considers what one is doing with one's mind, or one's content. I don't see what possible use, that is, it would be to invoke Zen and minimalism when describing how we choose our text editors if we allow what we're writing to remain entirely unconsidered.

Which is not to say that I think these Neo-Minimalists are a sort of religious hypocrite for not practicing Zen in all walks of life. The people whose blogs I see reflecting the practices of Neo-Minimalism seem like interesting, intelligent people, writing about the same sort of thing we have been writing for years: technology, culture, memes, funny videos, food, beer. I just don't understand what they could possibly think all the fuss is about in any realm beyond what window manager they've decided to use.

I've heard a couple people talk about getting rid of all the things they don't use, which seems nice, too. But it's a housekeeping exercise. You can't possibly expect me to believe that only having five shirts in your closet will make you a different person, or even a different worker. What is the _there_ here? I haven't heard anyone discuss eating the same thing every day. Or listening to the same music. Or paring down their vocabulary. What does one do? What is there besides being able to create uninterrupted expanses of negative space (which I concede are very nice) and then appreciating their aesthetics?