[TT] Why I Want To Be A Minimalist

I was raised in an Asian household that believed that it was better to have than to not have. Although this is not a bad mantra to have, it also means that there is a propensity for my family to...hoard. One item came with a back up item, another item was kept purely because my parents could predict a possible use for it, when in reality, the chances of us actually using the item was slim.

Material items take up space. A lot of material items take up a lot of space. It started to become difficult to keep track of the things. Often, we bought more things thinking that we didn't have them. Valuables became excess, excess became mess.

I don't know when I began to realize that the mess and the excess was affecting me psychologically. I started to feel claustrophobic and like nothing was ever tidy enough or clean enough. This was when I decided I needed to purge some stuff.

In my search for motivation to purge, I found the idea of Minimalism. Inspired by Joshua Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus, I realized that there was happiness to be found in freedom, especially freedom from putting too much emphasis on material goods. Alternatively, happiness should not come from owning a lot of stuff, but from finding meaning from what we do. I found that, personally, I could not find value in having too much clutter. (Read more about Minimalism here.)

I found that embracing the idea of minimalism influenced my decisions greatly, from walking away from something I previously would have said "I need this in my life" to motivating me to save money for experiences that I would otherwise never have if I had spent my money on material things.

This is only the beginning of my journey towards Minimalism, and although I will never become a hardcore Minimalist, like some, I can already see the benefits of the lifestyle.