Tuesday, September 22nd, 2026, 1:26 pm
The Minimalists’ Mindset
Filed under: Simple is funner
think there is a common perception or this widespread belief that when people are young they want to collect, to publicly boast about it, to keep accumulating “stuff”, then flaunt to peers and strangers. They seek affirmation. It’s not so gender-dependent a phenomenon and it has not much to do with “nesting” or “hunting”. It’s about insecurities and compensating for them.
So they hoard, they want big and complicated (extensive) things “in volume”. That is particularly applicable to habitats (homes). When people get older and more mature they may wish to give things away, want to move to smaller places for a simpler life with less maintenance to be done, less to worry about (less inside one’s mind).
The age factor is less to do with having to give things away at death; it’s not much to do with the physical difficulties of keeping intact large places or many rooms/units (sometimes with garden).
In practice it seems to boil down to mindset or mentality. The consumerism brainwash has less sway on older people, who learned from experience they can no longer conflate ownership with happiness and that having more than the minimal (bare minimum) required, e.g. life-sustaining medication, can become a burden.
What’s the point hoarding 100 pairs of shoes when you have only 2 feet for instance?
In geeks’ spheres it is the same. Young people install a lot of things (I was guilty of this too) and as they grow older they consolidate and try to simplify or cement workflows.
The human mind does not work well in parallel. It is an inherently serial machine, with ’round-robin’-type thinking relying on paper notes or memorisation.
Less is more (productivity).
