So much of our life is lived in a fog of automatic habitual behavior. We spend so much time on the hunt, but nothing ever quite does it for us. And we get so wrapped up in the hunt that it kind of makes us miserable.
I had everything I ever wanted. I had everything I was supposed to have. Everyone around me said, you're successful.
But really, I was miserable. There was this gaping void in my life. So, I tried to fill that void the same way many people do. With stuff. Lots of stuff.
I was filling the void with consumer purchases. I was spending money faster than I was earning it. Attempting to buy my way to happiness.
I thought I'd get there one day. Eventually, I mean, happiness had to be somewhere just around the corner. I was living paycheck to paycheck. Living for a paycheck. Living for stuff.
But I wasn't living at all. At a time when people in the West are experiencing the best standard of living in history, why is it that at the same time there is such a longing for more? I think of that as a kind of biologically based delusional craving. That auto craving is a good strategy to keep animals alive, including early human animals, in really harsh conditions. But these days, today, it creates a disconnect.
You're like a puppet whose strings are being pulled by Mother Nature and evolution, reaching back tens of millions of years. We still feel restless. We still are always scratching and clawing for more. It's why lottery winners are miserable. It's why homeowners have three-car garages.
The first car creates an exponential awesome rush of happiness and joy and utility. The second car comes about because we tire of the first car and as humans were wired to become dissatisfied. It's an addiction really.
And we are encouraged to maintain the addiction through technology and information. American culture has, for the most part, these blinders on. There's definitely this illusion of what our lives should look like.
Whether it's advertising or your Instagram or Facebook feed, it's this illusion that our lives should be perfect. It's natural to use other people's lives and even imagined lives, you know, the confections we see in advertisements as a yardstick. You open Vanity Fair or Esquire and you see very sexy and glamorous lives and then the projects for most people seems to become, you know, how can I get that or as close to that as I'm going to get. There can be an immense amount of dissatisfaction trying to live that way and Many of us see no alternative but to live that way. Advertising has polluted and infiltrated culture.
It's in our movies. It's in our television shows. It's in our books. It's in our doctor's offices.
It's in the taxi cabs. It's in the bar sitting next to you. The person who you think you're just having an idle chat with could have been placed there by an alcohol company.
It's been a slow evolution. This is not something that just happened yesterday. This is something that has been sold to us over, say, the past hundred years, slowly but surely, by those that want to make a whole lot of money. Now that's what I call a good-looking car....us to believe these things. Every year that passes there's more stimuli, there's more pressure, there's more options, there's more media, there's more noise, noise, noise.
And by streamlining and simplifying and just letting people know that they have the option, it's that wake-up call that is really valuable and a very critical time right now. It got to a point in my life where I don't know what was important anymore. Then... At some point when I was approaching 30 years old, I noticed something different about my best friend of 20-something years. Josh, he seemed happy for the first time in a really long time, like truly happy, ecstatic.
But I didn't understand why, because we had both worked at the same corporation, we had both wasted our 20s climbing the corporate ladder together, and he had been just as miserable as me. So I did what any good best friend would do. I took him out to a really nice lunch. I think we went to Subway. And I sat him down and I asked him a question.
Why the hell are you so happy? He spent the next 20 minutes telling me about this thing called minimalism. Before I discovered minimalism, I think my life looked like pretty much anyone else's. I had a lot of stuff.
Hundreds, thousands of books. DVDs and VHS's. Closets full of expensive clothes. All of these things that I brought into my life without questioning.
But when I started letting go, I started feeling freer and happier and lighter. And now is... As a minimalist, every possession serves a purpose or brings me joy.
I have a bed and a chair and a radio and I have some furniture in my dining room. In my kitchen I have appliances. I don't have any excess stuff.
Everything that I look around at, I have to be able to justify to myself. Not to anyone else, but just justify to myself. Does this add value to my life? And if not, I have to be willing to let go. Ryan and I just finished writing a book about the last five years of our lives from being these suit and tie corporate guys to minimalists.
And so now we're going to get on the road for ten months this year and promote that book, but really promote a message we really believe in, a simple living message of living more deliberately with less. Oh, and I'll need a jacket. We'll see where the journey takes us. So you presented this as a 12 minute talk, 8 minute reading.
Okay. Cool. Because I just don't want to feel rushed to the talk, that's all.
Right. Ready? I was born ready.
Nice. Hello, thanks for coming out. My name is Ryan Nicodemus, and this is the Joshua Fields Milburn. And together we run a website called TheMinimalists.com So today, Josh is going to read from our new book, but first I'm going to tell you a story about how we became The Minimalists.
We've never been shut out, so as long as one person shows up, that's all that matters. I feel really good. We've had events where we've had two people show up, and that was amazing, because we got to spend time with two people and add value to their lives in a different way.
I'm a hugger, man. Thanks for coming out, man. Thanks for coming out and seeing the talk, man.
Our pleasure. Did you forget your Kindle Land badge in there? Oh, yes. Thank you.
From the day I was born until the second grade when my parents got divorced, I had like the perfect quintessential mom and dad. When my mom left my dad, she just really went off the deep end. By junior high, we had a lot of people over at the house. And later I found out they were in there smoking crack.
They would cook crack. By the 8th grade, the SWAT team was kicking in our door, busting my mother for selling drugs. It was a drug that overtook my mother.
Josh had a very similar childhood to what I did. My very first memories of my father extinguishing a cigarette on my mother's chest. Shortly after she left my father, she started drinking. It was my biggest fear that I was going to get taken away from her.
When she was sober, she was a phenomenal mother. I think she kind of felt trapped. My mom always complained about money.
She didn't have any money. I remember being poor growing up and I remember thinking when I graduate high school I want to start on a path that is going to take me somewhere other than a struggle. We're currently on our way to NPR for a radio interview.
Those are our peeps. That's our demographic. Howdy. You're looking for Rita Daniels? I think so, yes.
You're the minimalist. We are indeed. How are you? I'm Scott. I'm Ryan.
I'm a hugger, man. Oh, nice to meet you, buddy. Oh, thanks for having us.
We're filming, too. Joshua. Nice to meet you.
All right. I think my light bulb moment is when I was showing my guys how to sell cell phones to a five-year-old. I was like, what am I doing? this mentality of getting a better promotion, getting a better house, getting a better car, getting a bigger paycheck, being able to buy more expensive bar tabs. And to do that, I had to sell cell phones to five-year-olds.
There's a template out there, you can call it the American dream or keeping up with the Joneses or whatever. That's just a template, it's not the template. And once we realize that, I think we can create our own template that works just for us. The American dream has a long history.
It started out as a concept that was really more about opportunity. The U.S. is a land of opportunity where somebody could start out at the bottom, work hard, and do well. There's no question that what it means to have made it or to have achieved the American dream in the United States has increased tremendously in material terms. A $100,000 a year plus kind of income became more and more an aspirational norm across the society because that's what's portrayed as normal on TV. A six-figure income.
Beginning from about the mid-1990s, Americans went on a buying spree that was probably unprecedented in human history. And a lot of it had to do with the cheapness of products coming mostly from China. Whether we're talking about fashion, electronics, all types of household goods.
So stuff's cheaper, but it's also more available. You can order stuff 24 hours online, there are big box stores. We ended up accumulating a lot more stuff. So much so that even though we have about three times the space per person than we used to in the 50s, so a lot more space, we've got so much stuff we need space on top of that and so there's a 2.2 billion square foot personal storage industry, which is ludicrous. So you have people living in these enormous homes.
And if you really look at it, people don't use the space that they have. Someone did a study and they showed a heat map of like where people traveled inside their homes over the course of a normal day. It was a family of four and they were in a very average home. And what they found is that people used about maybe, maybe 40% of their space. Nobody used the dining room.
No one used the living room. There was a big, you know, porch. No one used the porch. You know, I mean, I'm not saying this is the way everyone lives. Some people use dining rooms.
But it creates this big vacuum that you have to fill so people are throwing all this crap into their homes that they don't need. We're living our life depending on the space we've got rather than creating our space to fit our lives. It's so easy to go wrong, and you wind up with three dining tables in the same house. Well, you gotta run pretty fast to eat at three tables at the same meal.
Nothing is more responsible than living in the smallest space you possibly can. We've probably sold or donated, I'd say at least 90% of our stuff. I mean, you can't bring all your stuff into a tiny house. I was commuting about two hours a day and then sitting in a cubicle for 10 to 12 hours a day. I had gained a lot of weight.
I was unhappy. And I was kind of like, what's wrong with me? I should be happy. I've got all this stuff.
Nice home, great husband. And Logan was like, well, you know, you could probably quit your job if we simplified and moved into a smaller apartment. And I was like, what the hell are you talking about?
I don't want to get rid of my stuff. I found a YouTube video, saw the tiny houses, and I was hooked. Hi, Earl.
What's up, dude? I think the biggest thing for me, at least in the beginning, was the financial side of things. When we looked at our budget and the numbers, I was like, well, let's just give it a go. If I hate a smaller apartment, we can always upsize. I think there's this element of affordability, simplicity, and sustainability that just makes tiny houses seem like the perfect solution to a problem we haven't yet figured out, which is, how do we go from working all throughout a lifetime to enjoying a lifetime with a bit of work here and there.
For a long time when people were looking to buy their first house, they looked at their budget and they said, how much money do I have to spend? Oh, I have $500,000. Let me buy whatever $500,000 can get me.
And the big mistake there was that these individuals didn't have $500,000. They had a loan that would guarantee them that amount. And of course, after a few years of people buying houses that they weren't actually buying, they were just hoping to buy someday, the entire housing market collapsed.
We're down 1.7% here, a loss of 37 points or so. Apple shares are just getting hammered this morning. We're down by between 3% and 4.5% generally across these markets.
Let's talk about the speed with which we are watching this market deteriorate. It was the worst day on Wall Street since the crash of 1987. This could be the most serious recession in decades. And that means life, as most Americans know it, is about to change, in some cases dramatically.
I think where that has left us in the wake of a recession is with a... Really, really strong appeal to buying a house outright. The vision that really came out of LifeAdded is just like, hey, I think we got to take a step back here.
We're very much a mission-based company. The mission being to do more with less. So the life edited prototype apartment started with me buying a place, 420 square feet in New York. And coming up with a really aggressive program. What I was asking for was a lot.
Live at home for a couple. Be able to have a sit down dinner for 10 or 12. Be able to have guests over in a civil manner. And be able to work at home with some sort of standing desk. Very quickly I realized that I was going to be a part of a community. I realized that small space made so much sense environmentally, but it also made sense on many other levels.
One of the things that we really want to do is design homes around, A, how people live, and B, what's truly important, creating more social homes, you know, homes that actually bring people closer together. It was kind of an incredible experience. because going from the 1,200-square-foot space, I had never felt more calm in my life. There was less stuff to think about.
Our overhead was lower. This is when I first started to say, you know, this life-edited thing, this philosophy, philosophy. Maybe there's something to it. A beautiful future for us would be to do development that does really well financially, has a much lower footprint, and have lots of developers copy what we're doing. And so that it really spreads and we start to change how we live as Americans and just change this desire for the bigger is better philosophy.
I think we've only begun to reexamine. and what it means to be successful in life. It's no longer that white picket fence.
It's no longer that McMansion. I think that people are beginning to recognize that they've maybe been tricked and that they maybe have more agency over their options than they once thought they did. We're out sharing a recipe. You know, we're not out here trying to proselytize. I'm not trying to convert anyone to minimalism.
But I do want to share a recipe and see if there are ingredients that other people can get value from and apply those ingredients to their own life. There's this underlying discontent and I think that it starts to manifest in our stuff. And what I'm finding as we go out on the road and we talk to so many people, everyone is looking for more meaning in their lives. We're at the Tucson Book Festival.
We're getting ready to go sign some books. And then a little bit later we'll do our speech. Man, look at all these people waiting to get their books signed by us. Let's sit on the outside.
This just doesn't feel like us. If one person comes, then we will go out to the front and stand there. Okay. What's up, man? Oh, thanks.
I'm a hugger, brother. I'm gonna give you a hug. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I follow you guys on Facebook, and you got your talk this afternoon. What time is it at? We are at 7 o'clock. Imagine a life with less. Less stuff, less clutter, less stress and debt, and discontent.
A life with fewer distractions. Now imagine a life with more. More time, more meaningful relationships, more growth and contribution and contentment.
So it's funny because people will inevitably come up to us and they'll be like, now I'm not a minimalist like you. I've got this book collection. I love books and I've got a nice big library and I love the way the books smell. I love turning the pages.
I love how they feel. blending them out to my friends. And then we talk about the books later. And I'm like, hey, keep your books. It sounds like you get a lot of value out of your books.
And that's what I would say with any type of collection. If you get a book or whatever, that's great. Make sure you minimize it afterwards.
But I'd love to get a hug from you as well. You know, we're big time huggers. So they're free and transferable.
Make sure you grab one from us afterward. I was 27 years old. I was the director of operations for 150 retail stores. It was December 23rd, 2008. I got a phone call from my mom. I sent it to voicemail because I was in a meeting at 7pm, going through this barrage of emails.
And I realized I had several voicemails. One was from my mom. She had been sober for a while, but I could tell in the message she had been drinking.
On her voicemail, she said, Honey, it's me. Can you call me back? She told me the doctors have found something.
She found out she had stage 4 lung cancer. She went through chemo and radiation. Stage 4, you usually don't get out of that.
I got to hospice, my mom was still in the bed. It was the first time I cried in my adult life. Sobbed uncontrollably.
He kept saying, I'm sorry. I didn't even know why at the time I was saying it. It just was the only thing that I could say. I really wish that I would have spent more time with her. My mother's death still hangs in the air around me.
And now, during the same month, my six-year marriage is ending. But even while Rome is burning, there's somehow time for shopping at Ikea. See, when I moved out of the house earlier this week, toting my many personal belongings in large bins and boxes and 50-gallon garbage bags, my first inclination was, of course, to purchase the things I still needed for my new place. You know, just the basics. A shower curtain, towels, a bed, and oh I need a couch and a matching leather chair, and a love seat, and a lamp, and a desk, and a desk chair, and another lamp for over there, and oh yeah, don't forget about the sideboard that matches the desk, and a dresser for the bedroom, and oh I need a coffee table and a couple end tables, and a TV stand for the TV I still need to buy.
And now that I think about it, I'm gonna want my apartment to be my style. You know, my own motif. So I need certain decoratives to spruce up the decor. But wait, what exactly is my style?
And do these stainless steel picture frames embody that particular style? Does this replica Matisse sketch accurately capture my edgy but professional vibe? Exactly how edgy am I? What espresso maker defines me as a man? Does the fact that I'm asking these questions preclude me from being a, quote, man's man?
How many plates and cups and bowls should a man own? I guess I need a dining room table too, right? And a rug for the entryway and bath mats and...
What about that one thing? That thing that's sort of like a rug, but longer? Yeah, a runner. I'm gonna need one of those. And I'm also gonna need...
Hell, what else do I need? My name is Sam Harris. I'm an author and neuroscientist, and I'm interested in how our growing understanding of ourselves scientifically... Can and must and really should change our conception of what it means to live a good life. Gratifying desires in a starkly materialistic way is really an interesting phenomenon.
You have this thing that you were obsessed about, but then the new version comes out, which is new and improved in a dozen ways. When it comes to the newest, hottest, most crave-worthy status symbols, you can bet customers will wait long hours to snag one. And now you no longer care about the one you have.
In fact, the one you have is a source of dissatisfaction. I think we're confused about what's going to make us happy. Many people think that material possessions are really at the center of the bullseye.
They expect that gratifying each desire as it arises will somehow summate into a satisfying life. It is clear that as human beings we have strong attachment initially in our lives to people who are caring for us. And sometimes it feels like those attachments spill over to objects as if they were as important as people.
I'm not so sure that we have... have such a great relationship with things. I was talking to the author and sociologist Julie Shore, and I said, the problem with our society is that we're too materialist. And she said, actually, if you think about it, in some ways, we're not material enough.
We are too materialistic in the everyday sense of the word, and we are not at all materialistic enough in the true sense of the word. We need to be true materialists, like really care about the materiality of goods. Instead, we're in a world in which material goods are so important for their symbolic meaning, what they do to position us in a status system, based on what advertising or marketing says they're about.
The status quo in the fashion industry right now is driven by fast fashion. Maybe when our moms were shopping for clothes or our grandmothers, there were four seasons a year. Or maybe even two seasons.
You dressed for the cold, you dressed for the warm. Now we work in a cycle of 52 seasons per year. They want you to feel like you're out of trend after one week so that you will buy something new the following week.
There have actually been accounts of big fashion retailers bailing all of the clothes from one week together, slashing through them with scissors, destroying them and leaving them on the side of the road so that nobody can resell them or even wear them. They want consumers to buy as much clothing as quickly as possible. The era of fast fashion in which we're making clothes in sweatshops so we're not paying the true labor costs and we're not paying the ecological costs of these things drove the price of apparel down so far that used apparel became worthless.
I like to think rice and beans cost more than used apparel. In historical terms, that's... the world upside down. And that represents the economics of such an extreme and profound unsustainability.
For a scholar of these things it's kind of breathtaking and horrifying. Fast fashion is what's happened to apparel and then increasingly to the whole consumer goods sector. Almost anything in the home now becomes an object of fashionability.
And that's been a just dramatic transformation. If you think about the concept of fashion, it embodies in it the idea that you can throw things away, not when they're no longer usable, but when they no longer have that social value or they're no longer fashionable. I think people buy because they're trying to fulfill this void inside of them.
And I know that because that was me. But no matter how much stuff we buy and how many different fads that we try, we don't become a more whole person. We keep looking. This hunger never gets fulfilled. I think it goes to the bottom line fact that you can never get enough of what you don't really want.
In other words, steeped down, we don't really want more goodies, more toys, more cars. We want what they will bring us. We want to feel whole.
We want to feel content. This mindless consumption, this same thing that's not making us happy, is also causing the degradation of our habitat. We can afford to have 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
We're closing in on 400 parts per million. It's caused by the burning of oil, of natural gas, of coal, of all the fuels that we use to power our consumer economy, to power the making of crap that we don't need. is real and we really have to do something about it. We're not going to ever be able to achieve the environmental gains that we're seeking while still expecting our lives to be the same. We're going to have to give up a lot.
The secret is that a lot of that we're not actually going to miss. It has been. like four plus years that I've technically been homeless.
Though I go to new countries and rent flats, so it's maybe in between homes or maybe home full. I just have a lot of homes, just not in one place, not for very long. It's always interesting, you go on a date or something and have to explain, well, yes, I'm homeless.
Maybe I shouldn't lead with that. When I first started reducing the number of things in my life and started getting rid of essentially everything that didn't fit into these bags, I went through and took photos of everything that I owned in the world and counted. And as a result, I found out that I had 51 things in the entire world. I started living this way about four years ago. I was running a branding studio.
I'd always wanted to travel the world, and I had never left the country. And that was kind of a sign of my failure in a lot of ways. So I... I started up a blog, left my career behind in Los Angeles, and started looking for something new, something a little bit different, and something a little bit more in line with what I wanted out of life.
And now I carry everything that I own on my back, much like a hermit. hermit crab or turtle. I was able to get rid of everything that I owned that didn't fit into carry-on luggage, which was an immense decision and not something that I expected from the get-go. I realized very quickly I wouldn't need as much and came to the conclusion that anything I left behind would probably be left behind forever. What did it at the end of the day?
Knowing this path had been well tread, the direction I was going and these very, very successful men and women with all of this money and all this prestige and all this professional background behind them, weren't happy. They're very successful, but not in an absolute sense. They're dollars and cents successful.
It seemed far more likely that I could find something, find a definition of success that would actually get me to a place where I was both successful and just incredibly happy. It does look like money can buy happiness in some sense. In global research, below 70,000 US dollars a year, adding greater material well-being is linked to greater psychological well-being.
But when you start pushing past that rough threshold, money doesn't buy happiness. You can have more money, but you're not happier. Jim Carrey has a quote where he says, I wish everyone can become rich and famous so they could realize it's not the answer.
The first response is always this, well it's easy for Jim Carrey to say he's rich and famous, right? And I'm like wait a minute, who else could say that? It would take someone rich and famous to be able to say it's not worth it.
We all need to have our basic needs met. Having a house, food on the table, you know, being safe. That's really important to recognize because not everyone has those things. You think that more money is going to, say, give you security.
The problem is that you don't necessarily have control over making more. One thing you do have control over is spending less. What you do have control over is having less. And that by having less, you automatically stretch what you do have.
It's not so much about financial gain for me as it is about financial freedom, which is the ability to wake up in the morning and spend one's day as they see fit. Part of why we consume a thing is that we work for so long and a lot of people aren't finding fulfillment in their jobs. And they need some way to tell themselves that it is worth it. That it is amounting to something more than a few numbers in a bank account.
There's more to life than bills and money and work. How do you win? You win by traditional monikers of success.
You win by how many zeros are at the end of your paycheck. I remember I was sitting in a Barnes & Nobles and I was deciding what major I would study and all I was doing was leafing through this book. It was a book that showed degree versus earning potential. Over time and that's when I zeroed in on finance and accounting. My entire life became about winning with a capital W.
My entire life became about being the guy that would be respected. Had a series of vertical leaps from my 20s which landed me to this place in 2008. I'm making a ridiculous six figures. salary, I've got a corner office, and on December 31st, 2007, my boss calls me into his office and he tells me that I'm getting a promotion, and this is it.
This is the game changer. This is me being a junior partner in this firm. Everything that I'd ever worked for was going to be handed to me right then and there. In banking terms, I was minted.
And I remember just hearing this man say that. And it was just a really bizarre kind of ethereal moment where I was like watching this happen. And I walked out of his office and I walked back into my own. And I just closed the door behind me and I just started weeping. And because I realized that I was completely...
and utterly trapped and that I would never be able to walk away from that amount of money ever in my life. And any dream that I had of living a life of purpose and meaning and, and, and being an adventure and somebody that would actually take risks and live a life that's deliberate and intentional, those were gone. When you see your life scripted out and you recognize that this is not, this is not anything I want.
Why am I doing this? This guy that's handing me this, I don't want to be him. I don't envy his life.
You know, maybe this was never for me to begin with. And maybe if I don't leave right now, I'm going to be that dude for the rest of my life. I just took the elevator down 28 stories and that was it.
And ever since then I decided that this life was going to be mine and it was going to be wildly, flamboyantly my life. You know? Ready?
Here it is. Nevada! Nevada!
Nevada! Nevada! Nevada!
Woohoo! Nevada! Woo!
Yeah. All those people are waiting. That's what we're figuring out.
And I'm not sure where they're supposed to be. I'm thinking, could you want to go take a look over here? Sure, we can do that.
We're scrambling to find seats for roughly 30 people. This is the most disorganized night of the tour so far. We're in Las Vegas, go figure.
And the space that we rented here, for whatever reason, aren't ready for us, even though that we paid to rent this space. Thankfully, there are some awesome people here who are really helping us. Somehow we're going to make this work. Yes.
Wow. Thank you very much. You know, it's funny.
I used to think Rich was earning $50,000 a year. Then when I started climbing the corporate ladder in my early 20s, I quickly began earning 50 grand. But I didn't feel rich. Something went wrong. I had to go back to the drawing board.
And I found out that I hadn't adjusted for inflation. Okay, so we can pontificate for only so long. We're really here for you, as Ryan mentioned.
And so we like to do what we call questions and attempted answers. You're dedicated, you're creative, you're innovative. You have a sincere desire. for mankind. The very people who the wolves of Wall Street fear and to me you're moving yourself from the wall.
If you really talk about middle-ism the ultimate middle-ist is a hermit, a recluse or a And to me, that's not gonna change the world. You know what I'm saying? You're the only threat to that system.
Hmm. You're right. There are two sides of the spectrum.
I think, you know, we're ideally somewhere in the middle of that, right? Because I don't think there's anything wrong with consumption. The problem was compulsory consumption, buying stuff because that's what you're supposed to do.
That's what advertising tells you to do, or that's what the magic template is for happiness, and then when you get it, you realize that it doesn't make you as happy. happy as you thought it would. Yeah, it was a great comment. Thank you so much. Yeah, but try to destroy those walls.
Amen. Let me grab a hug. Yeah, thank you so much.
I tell you, your personality and your straightforwardness and answering all the questions, that charisma about it was connecting with the people, as you can see yourself. It's like 4.30 in the morning. Yes. And we are going to go.
Go be on TV. Good morning, 523. A lot of us look forward to buying the latest gadget or smartphone. But this morning, I'm joined by two men who've taken what they say is the simpler route and are living a life of minimalism.
Hello. Hi, we're here for 5 o'clock hour and 6 o'clock hour. Josh and Ryan with The Minimalists.
I was living the American dream and I realized it wasn't my dream. I looked around all the stuff in my life when my mother died and my marriage ended, both in the same month, and started questioning what was actually important, what things were actually adding value to my life. And I realized that many of the things that I bought to make me happy... They weren't actually doing their job. Okay, well, good luck to you.
Take it easy. Don't do too much. Don't buy anything today, all right? Amen. Good luck with that.
We'll be back in just a bit. Well, next at 5.30, the latest on the search for a missing Malaysian flight that disappeared five days ago. Minimalism is not a radical lifestyle.
Yeah, I absolutely believe in quality over quantity, right? So I'd much rather have one nice sweatshirt than a closet full of ugly sweatshirts that I don't enjoy wearing. I don't own a lot of clothes now, but all the clothes I do own are my favorite clothes.
So let's take a look at what I have packed for 10 months of traveling. I'm wearing my one pair of jeans. Got a couple denim shirts. I have a short sleeve button-up oxford. A few t-shirts.
A blow dryer. Every good minimalist has a blow dryer. And plenty of underwear.
Now here's the secret with underwear. You have to have one color that's in the middle. This is how you separate your dirty underwear from your clean underwear, with the red pair of underwear. Toiletry bag.
Everyone needs a toiletry bag, obviously. And I also have a laptop with me, but that's it for ten months. We didn't really have a plan, which is pretty much our story. In 2010, when I was really digging into this decluttering and simplifying, I thought about the one place in my house that was the most cluttered, and that was my closet.
And so I decided to create a minimalist fashion challenge to use less than what I had. So project 333, the challenge for me was to wear 33 items for three months. months and the 33 items included clothing, jewelry, accessories, and shoes.
That's where I usually lose people. It was a great way for me to really see what I needed, what I was using, and just if it would make a difference. And so I was working in advertising.
I had a lot of clients I had to see every day. I'd go to sales meetings and for that first three months nobody knew. noticed.
The story got picked up by the Associated Press because so many people were writing about it and practicing it and trying it. In this video I'm gonna talk more about how I plan my project 333. Project 333. Project 333. And I thought, oh boy this is it. And they didn't notice. So I probably went that full year until I left my job with no one really knowing.
that I was dressing with only 33 items. I do this thing called Project 333, and it just kind of helps me keep my wardrobe really simple. I went from this giant closet where I had, I don't know, 100 sweaters, to now having this super tiny wardrobe and being able to share a closet with Logan.
And that's made a big difference, just... I don't fret about what I'm going to put on in the morning because all the stuff in my closet is awesome. At least I think so. There's something about not being prepared for every moment that actually helps you engage with your community.
Being pregnant, for instance, at such a limited time, I had a dress-up event to go to, and I said to David, let me go see if I can find a dress. And I was thinking, gosh, this is really outdated. I have two months left. The event is next week.
What am I going to do? So I called a couple of my girlfriends. Hey, do you have any dresses I can, you know, go through?
But in the past... I definitely would have bought what I needed when I needed it because that's what you do. You prepare yourself for your situation. The beauty of it is it's become very communal.
Our friends ask us for stuff. We've become closer to people because of it. Mark and I got married in 2005, and a year later, I started feeling really bad. I had a lot of vertigo and tingling and fatigue.
That following year, it got really bad, and in July, I was diagnosed with MS. And at first, we were both terrified. It was hard. It was hard.
That was a tough time. I mean, immediately, my... response wasn't I got to simplify things I'm a slow learner so I decided I had to really push hard to prove That I was okay, and so I worked more I worked out more. I really pushed myself for probably that first month and I felt terrible.
In any disease or sickness, one of the biggest factors, one of the things that contributes to these things in a negative way is the stress in your life. By getting rid of these things in our lives, these material items and all this excess that we used to live in, good things happen. Since then, I have not had what I would consider a relapse.
I'm in better health than I was before I was diagnosed. People always tell you, or at least they did for me in the early stages of MS, you have to listen to your body. I'm like, listen to my body?
I can't even listen to my family. I don't know how I'm going to hear my body. And so as I started to move that stuff out, I was able to finally realize what I had sacrificed by being busy, by engaging in constant work.
We have this capacity for focus, but we're living in a context where we are continually moving from one stimulus to the next in search of the dopamine experience where we're rewarded by the next email or the next retweet or the next thing that comes into our phone rather often. I think there's a price we pay for that. It's really become an issue.
There was a Nokia study that says the average person checks his or her phone like 150 times a day. You walk down the street in any major city locked into their devices. We are totally in the matrix.
It's easier to be mindless than just read the paper, update your social media feed, and consume. Because you can do anything you want, you can potentially do everything you want. But to do everything you want, you have to sacrifice the things that really are important. When it comes to the overwhelm, the easiest way to solve that is to turn it off.
Really, just turn it off. It was really powerful to realize that most of my life was in a daydream. I got here to ABC News when I was 28 years old.
I was a really ambitious young guy. And my way... compensating for my insecurity about being such a newbie was to throw myself into the job and really become a workaholic and after 9-11 I raised my hand to go overseas and cover the ensuing conflicts we were fortunate this week to have our reporter Dan Harris on a trip organized by the Taliban we arrived at night a spine-rattling ride down a single mangled road into a city under siege I spent a lot of time in Iraq and Afghanistan without really thinking much about the psychological consequences.
And when I came home from a particularly long trip in Iraq, I got depressed. And then I did something really, really dumb, which was I started to self-medicate with recreational drugs. It was enough, according to my doctor, to provoke a panic attack on live television. We're going to go now to Dan Harris, who's at the news desk.
Health news now. One of the world's most commonly prescribed medications may be providing a big bonus. Researchers report people who take cholesterol-lowering drugs called statins for at least five years may also lower their risk for cancer. But it's too early to prescribe statins slowly for cancer production. That does it for news.
We're going to go back now to Robin and Charlie. It raised the level of adrenaline in my brain, which according to my doctor, primed me to lose it on Good Morning America in front of 5 million people. 5.019 million people according to the Nielsen ratings. That moment set me off on a weird and windy road that ultimately led me to the last thing that I ever thought would be useful for anybody, which was meditation.
We're ruminating about past and future in a way that keeps us from really connecting with the present moment in a way that values it as good enough. Meditation is a technique of finding well-being in the present moment before anything happens. You can be happy and satisfied simply being aware of the sensation of breathing.
Very rarely are we fully dedicated to one thing. We're interrupting ourselves or allowing ourselves to be interrupted by these streams of data and what would in any other context be thought of as distractions, but now we think of them as just sort of all necessary parts of our bandwidth. If I leave my phone in my pocket and it's on vibrate mode, unconsciously I'll flinch when it vibrates.
I even flinch when it doesn't vibrate, thinking it vibrates. And that kills that little discussion. Like those nanoseconds of distraction, I think has a hugely detrimental effect. Everywhere I look, it's like constant high-frequency flinches.
This anticipation of novelty has the character of making us the lab rat that's just pressing the bar. Meditation is a great antidote to that. People around here at ABC News would ask me, why are you meditating? Parenthetically, what's the matter with you?
What happened to you? Eventually I started to answer, you know, because it makes me about 10% happier. And I could see the looks transform from scorn slash skepticism into interest. Like, oh, that sounds reasonable.
I'd like that. One of the best pieces of advice I've ever received in my entire life was from a meditation teacher named Joseph Goldstein. I was asking him about the utility of worry.
In this specific context, I was talking about whether it makes sense to worry about missing a flight. And I was arguing to him that, look, you Buddhists are always talking about how thoughts are just thoughts. They don't necessarily have any connection to reality.
But the fact is, if I miss my flight, I'm screwed. And he said, you're unquestionably correct. But there's a certain amount of worry that makes sense and a certain amount of worry that doesn't. So on the 17th time that you're worrying about missing your flight and all of the horrible ramifications, maybe ask yourself a simple question. Is this useful?
Boom. For a guy who had spent his whole life worrying and thinking that my worrying was the edge I had over everybody else because I knew I was going to be more anxious and more compulsive than any of my competitors, I realized there was a certain amount of worrying that is what I call constructive anguish, and then there's useless rumination that's just making you miserable. It's not like I'm 100% mindful all the time. I still do an enormous amount of stupid shit. And if my wife was here, she would give you the 90% still a moron spiel.
There's just no question that I'm still an idiot in lots of ways. But I'm less of an idiot and less of a jerk and more thoughtful and more focused and calmer. We've been on tour all year and just when I start to think if we're getting through, if we're making a difference, the Today Show gives us a call and asks us to be on.
Now we have an opportunity to share this with millions of people which is huge. Dude, we're actually late now. Where do we gotta go?
Uh, the entrance is... What's the address? It's uh, 35?
Yeah, but you'll see like the Today Show stuff set up. Oh, right there, right there, right there. You sure this is it? Yep.
Go down the stairs. Ooh, we're in together. Ha ha ha. It's the most wonderful time. From NBC News.
It's the most wonderful time. From NBC News. It's the most wonderful time. From NBC News.
It's the most wonderful time. It's the most wonderful time. It's the most wonderful time. It's the most wonderful time. It's the most wonderful time.
It's the most wonderful time. It's the most wonderful time. It's the most wonderful time.
It's the most wonderful time. This is Today. With Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Bows of Holly and stuffed stockings, it can start to feel like the holidays are more about more and less about what's really important.
Joshua Fields, Milburn and Ryan. Academus have come to see things differently. They are what you call the minimalists Hypothetical world what if one of you falls madly in love with a maximalist? Who likes her stuff?
What are you gonna do? That's a great question. Not my girlfriend actually I live with I don't think she would call herself a minimalist. She's got about 20 pairs of shoes But what I will say is that her and I have very similar values and beliefs Yeah, we respect one another we love one another we appreciate one another.
It's a great lifestyle great topic for today I got you both. Yeah, the minimalist latest book everything that remains is in stores right now what a concept So the event last night was crazy. We showed up, the store owner had about 30 chairs out. I asked him to put out more chairs and he was like, are you sure you're gonna need more chairs?
Ken Burns was here and he maxed out all my seating. I got 60 chairs total. And I said, yeah, I think we'll have about 50 or 60 people show up.
Go ahead and bring the rest of the chairs out. And we ended up having like 150, 200 people show up. I mean, people were standing on the bookshelves, wall to wall.
What's up? Hey, thanks for everything you do. I think your story came at the right time.
Serendipity. You guys are my inspiration. Awesome.
Thank you so much for that. I'm glad we get help. Thanks for coming out, brother.
We're seeing more and more and more people show up, so it's great to see the message is spreading. So we are on our way to L.A. It's going to be our biggest venue so far.
Expecting one of our biggest crowds. And really, I think L.A. is a city that could really use this message.
We like things little but we love things big Yeah, I grew out of it and you just feel right Desire and find what is the space inside my mind Philosophy of nothing in plain sight So familiar, so foreign Forget to remember to forget The same art, just a different medium A moving canvas, a picture of myself We like things little, but we love things big Yeah, I grew out of it and you just fit right in Cars, homes, and six-digit salaries. It may sound like a dream life. Joshua Milburn and Ryan Nicodemus on a world book tour. And here to explain why someone would just give up all this stuff.
Letting it go was really difficult. I wish I could say it was as easy as running a dumpster and throwing oil on my stuff, but it was really a process. Everything will someday fade The truth is we're not leaving It's all that has remained I love watching how it's spreading like wildfire and in a good way. It's like a good plague.
A startling new study shows a huge number of children under the age of four have access to a mobile device and some of those kids started using them before they were one year old. We're building more competitive, more interesting environments for the consumer. This means ingesting signals they're telling us about their interests and making sure we can control what message they see next. Toronto-based AdExec has written an op-ed in the Globe and Mail saying it's time we stop advertising to children.
Advertising to children has existed for so long. What's changed, though, is the amount of this advertising and the media through which this advertising comes. Historically, companies which had products aimed at kids would go toward the mothers and getting the mothers to want to buy the stuff for the kids.
What happens is the companies decide to go around the mothers and go directly to the kids. I don't know what the most common three words are in American homes. I don't know if it's I love you or if it's I want that. 5,000 advertisements we see every single day for the moment born.
And they all tell us, hey, this is what your life should be about. It should be about accumulating more. Things or it should all be about focusing on you. If you guys have walked around, you know, a kid's store lately, but it's kind of incredible.
Anything you ever could have dreamed of has been thought of. Advertisers have just realized there's this huge market. There are parents who want to give their kids the best and they're really working hard to go that angle. There's a problem of both process and content, and the problem of content is huge.
The products that are being advertised to kids are junk. Welcome to Mutant Mania Wrestling! 120 mutant characters you can collect! The secret is their flexi-spawn!
It's a junk culture. It's food that's bad for them. It's crappy toys that are gendered and violent. I don't see the argument for subjecting children to this.
Like, there's no positive social benefit from it. We just know there's a negative. And it's just the political power of advertising and the companies that do the advertising that keeps us from doing something about it.
So I've heard someone say there's another word for minimalism it's called being a bachelor. So that's yeah I mean I can see how people think oh that's really easy if you're not married and you have no kids. How do I set an example of myself? being married and having six kids, which is totally un-minimalist and very ironic.
How do I live a minimalist lifestyle with those kinds of constraints? Deco and I haven't been too prescriptive. about, like, no, you have five toys, you know?
No, dude, you can only have one truck. You can't have three trucks, you know? It's like, no.
When I was a little kid, I didn't have one G.I. Joe. I had, like, 100 G.I.
Joes. We've welcomed things into our life, but definitely with the intention of thinking about what we're doing as opposed to just consuming. When you live with other people and you're a family, you can't just make unilateral decisions.
Okay, we're now getting rid of everything and throwing the TV out the door. There will be a riot. That's a little bit frustrating because you can't just get your way. But it's also a really interesting experiment in how you can move together as a group and learn about this together as a group. At the very beginning when we decided to live with Les, we knew early on that Minimal Loves was just going to look like the way we wanted it to look.
I remember going through getting rid of things and finally saying, OK, Salem, let's go through your toys and let's get rid of some of the things that you don't need anymore. And he had no problem whatsoever. My daughter is seven and she is very different. She loves every doll that she can get. She collects rocks and twigs and anything else she can find, she collects and she holds on to.
You know, as parents we get to set some boundaries for her, but ultimately we let her choose what she wants. I think he certainly has been at a different level of minimalism than I am. He wanted to get rid of more than I wanted to get rid of, and so there comes the compromise. His side of the closet looks much smaller than my side of the closet and that's okay with us. You know, I think one of the lessons that we've learned through this whole journey is just that our kids are really watching us.
And we can tell them that we want them to be certain people, but man, they're picking up a lot more just from how we live our lives. This is undercurrent of consumerism. Removing some of that stuff provided a safe environment where they're able to become what they most want to be rather than what the world will try to convince them to be.
Good evening. It's clear that the true problems of our nation are much deeper, deeper than gasoline lines or energy shortages, deeper even than inflation or recession. In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, too many of us now are Tender worship, self-indulgence, and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns.
But we've discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We've learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose. This is not a message of happiness or reassurance, but it is the truth, and it is a warning. We think we need those things because we've been told we need those things.
We've been told we need those things by our society. It's been this kind of slow little thing that's just kind of trickled in and suddenly it becomes the thing you do. It really does come down to a value-based ideal. You want to do the most amount of good and get the most amount of value with exactly what you need. Having too little is not going to give you that, and having too much is not going to give you that, right?
Having that balance, having enough, that's what you're looking for. If I had to revise the American Dream, it would be more about coming together in community. It would be more about a society which had much less inequality and more fairness, in which everybody had a chance, that is responsible toward the planet and our ecosystem. To me, that would be an American Dream.
When you talk about not consuming, people think, well, you're trying to take something away from them. But the truth of the matter is that I think that what this movement is really about is questing after a life that's good for ourselves and good for the people around us. So we're in LA right now. We're here for our biggest event. What we're trying to do is show people that there's a different way for us to live.
The people you bring into your life, you should always be hanging out with people who have the same values. And that's really what minimalism is about. It's about living deliberately.
So every choice that I make, every relationship, every item, every dollar I've spent, I'm not perfect, obviously. But I do constantly ask the question, is this adding value? Am I being deliberate with this decision? You'll see him tonight at the last bookstore in Los Angeles at 7 o'clock. Thank you, Joshua and Ryan, for coming in.
I didn't realize it at the time, but I was so focused on what my idea of success was. My idea of success was making more money. I said my relationships were a priority. Well, I didn't pay any attention to the people closest to me, including my mom.
The whole point of this message, the whole point of us sharing this story, is to help people curb that appetite for more things. Because it's such a destructive path to go down. I literally have used people to sell cell phones. I've used people to get bigger and better clients.
And what I love about my life now is I can be genuine. And that there is no manipulation. It is my very, very great pleasure to introduce Joshua Fields Milburn and Ryan Nicodemus the Minimalists.
Imagine a life of less. A life of passion unencumbered by the trappings of the chaotic world around you. Well, what you're imagining is an intentional life. It's not a perfect life, and it's not even an easy life, but a simple one. What I found with minimalism is it's a way of saying, let's stop the madness.
You don't need this stuff. Like, it's not gonna do it. It's not the answer.
There's a movement growing. I don't think that there's a cap to it. I'm now surrounded by people who are inspired and creating massive social change and impact the depth and profundity of my relationship is beyond anything I could have ever imagined when you recognize that this life is yours and and that it is your one and only, and when that ceases to be esoteric bullshit, when that's not hippie poetry anymore, when the pragmatism of that statement seeps directly in your bones and you recognize that this is it, everything changes. I don't know where you are on your journey, where you are in life, or wherever you're going on that journey, but we are really grateful you're here with us tonight. So if I can give you one takeaway, one thing to bring away from all of this, it'll be this.
Love people and use things, because the opposite never works. Thank you so much for coming out. We like things little, but we love things big Yeah, I grew out of it and you just fit right in Desire and find what is the space inside my mind Philosophy of nothing in plain sight and so familiar, so foreign.
Forget to remember to forget. The same art, just a different medium. A moving canvas, a picture of myself. We like things little, but we love things big. Yeah, I grew out of it and you just feel right.