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I want to share my views and hear feedback on them. I'm certain there are points many will disagree with, thus posting here in the cider press. This is important to me though and I think by posting I can solidify my viewpoints, or at least get better at expressing them. My wife just let me talk to her about this for about 10 minutes, and I felt like I expressed my feelings better than I have for a long time, so I'm going to try to restate what I said to her.
Preface: We moved into my wife's grandfather's house five years ago and have lived with her father, and near to her aunt, for the entirety of that time. All three of them (grandfather, father, and aunt) are hoarders. They kept things they need and things they'd never use, bought things they would never use, and built new storage units to store many of these things in a climate where everything degrades swiftly due to mold, mildew, sun bleaching, weathering, and insect damage. At the beginning of last year my wife's grandfather died and a few months later we were given the go-ahead to start getting rid of the accumulated stuff. My wife had been reading, listening to, and watching various minimalists, tidy-up, and "danshari" experts for a while now, I think largely as a result of being put in this situation of living with other people's stuff. Furthermore, unfortunately, none of her family had a particularly good sense of interior design, ergonomics, or aesthetics in general. These points lead-in to my views.
My views/feelings/opinions on minimalism, aesthetics, and a sustainable future:
I think that
Utility is inherently beautiful When things are stored efficiently they are often beautiful to see. Superfluous decoration is a waste of energy to create and view and inherently detrimental because it draws our attention to the wrong places. Having beauty in our environment is critical for motivation Living in an overstuffed junk-filled environment will limit your happiness Once perfect simplicity is achieved, there is no improving upon it. Complexity is the enemy, but it is hard to achieve simplicity AND utility. If we can learn to accept and live simply our needs become simple. If we seek complicated solutions our needs are compounded. In the long run simplicity requires less inputs and consumption.
I find the ideals I write here difficult to achieve, but worth striving for.
For example, I have a hideous metal bookshelf in our living/dining room. Currently it has a land-line phone, an ADSL router, various things we're elevating to keep out of kids' reach, cookbooks, gardening books, two baskets full of stationary such as pens, pencils, notepads, calculators, etc on it. If I'm honest with myself we don't look at 90% of the books on that shelf and probably never will, even though we've already reduced to that from six times as many. We use maybe one pencil, one pen, and one marker from the stationary baskets, and some other items occasionally. However, we don't use the pencils or pens in that space. It is not the best place to put them, they are there because we haven't spent the time to think about where we really do use them. If we then think about where we do use them that brings us to another dilemma, that our note-taking systems are not very efficient. That then leads us to think about how best to take notes. And then, where should our phone be? The one person that uses it finds it a burden in its current place and re-arranges his furniture when he needs to use it. Clearly our systems are poorly thought-out and inefficient. We have not achieved simplicity, our utility is impaired by our storage solutions. Therefore they are hideous to behold.
If I re-imagine this system now: The land-line phone is by the computer where it is used. The pencils are stored by the grocery list notepad on the refrigerator. We have three cookbooks on a floating shelf on the wall near the kitchen table. Already, this scene looks better to me in my minds-eye. If a visitor walked in, I'm sure they would see the cookbooks, read the three titles, see how well-worn and dough-spackled the volumes are, and immediately understand our values about food. They might even start a conversation about their own experiences with making food in the same vein. Our own cooking and dining experiences would be improved, we would spend more time with things we love and focus our dining more on cooked food instead of buying pre-made packaged food.
This is just one example, and maybe it seems vain, but I truly think that if we take the time to consider these systems and intricacies of our environment then we take steps toward a more minimal, achievable, and sustainable future free of the wasted time, resources, and energy that seems to be so dominant in this day and age.
The example I talked about is organizational. But I think if you have the opportunity and resources to think about the architecture of your living space, and before that the orientation, location, geography, and society surrounding your living space then you can go even further to create optimal systems that require less input produce better quality life. To this end, I think there is a lot of wisdom in tradition. Having grown up in suburban USA I felt almost completely detached from tradition. Architecture had no meaning other than the trend, it wasn't designed from a perspective of harmonious efficiency with the environment, it was built to suit a consumption trend, something that was shown to sell. Here in Japan I feel sad and lucky (because of the perspective it's given me) to live in a house that emulates western trends. Most of the traditional Japanese architectural features are absent, and I think we are worse off for it. We don't have windows that open to create a cross breeze through any room in the house. We don't have shikkui walls that breathe air to regulate the extreme humidity, we don't have long eaves to block the high summer sun from coming into the southern windows. These traditional features were arrived at because they were the simplest solution to a complicated problem, and it took generations to realize it.
I'm not the best communicator, but I would love feedback to help me really express these things in a more useful and compelling way. Maybe I'm wrong? I could take some constructive criticism too.
Preface: We moved into my wife's grandfather's house five years ago and have lived with her father, and near to her aunt, for the entirety of that time. All three of them (grandfather, father, and aunt) are hoarders. They kept things they need and things they'd never use, bought things they would never use, and built new storage units to store many of these things in a climate where everything degrades swiftly due to mold, mildew, sun bleaching, weathering, and insect damage. At the beginning of last year my wife's grandfather died and a few months later we were given the go-ahead to start getting rid of the accumulated stuff. My wife had been reading, listening to, and watching various minimalists, tidy-up, and "danshari" experts for a while now, I think largely as a result of being put in this situation of living with other people's stuff. Furthermore, unfortunately, none of her family had a particularly good sense of interior design, ergonomics, or aesthetics in general. These points lead-in to my views.
My views/feelings/opinions on minimalism, aesthetics, and a sustainable future:
I think that
I find the ideals I write here difficult to achieve, but worth striving for.
For example, I have a hideous metal bookshelf in our living/dining room. Currently it has a land-line phone, an ADSL router, various things we're elevating to keep out of kids' reach, cookbooks, gardening books, two baskets full of stationary such as pens, pencils, notepads, calculators, etc on it. If I'm honest with myself we don't look at 90% of the books on that shelf and probably never will, even though we've already reduced to that from six times as many. We use maybe one pencil, one pen, and one marker from the stationary baskets, and some other items occasionally. However, we don't use the pencils or pens in that space. It is not the best place to put them, they are there because we haven't spent the time to think about where we really do use them. If we then think about where we do use them that brings us to another dilemma, that our note-taking systems are not very efficient. That then leads us to think about how best to take notes. And then, where should our phone be? The one person that uses it finds it a burden in its current place and re-arranges his furniture when he needs to use it. Clearly our systems are poorly thought-out and inefficient. We have not achieved simplicity, our utility is impaired by our storage solutions. Therefore they are hideous to behold.
If I re-imagine this system now: The land-line phone is by the computer where it is used. The pencils are stored by the grocery list notepad on the refrigerator. We have three cookbooks on a floating shelf on the wall near the kitchen table. Already, this scene looks better to me in my minds-eye. If a visitor walked in, I'm sure they would see the cookbooks, read the three titles, see how well-worn and dough-spackled the volumes are, and immediately understand our values about food. They might even start a conversation about their own experiences with making food in the same vein. Our own cooking and dining experiences would be improved, we would spend more time with things we love and focus our dining more on cooked food instead of buying pre-made packaged food.
This is just one example, and maybe it seems vain, but I truly think that if we take the time to consider these systems and intricacies of our environment then we take steps toward a more minimal, achievable, and sustainable future free of the wasted time, resources, and energy that seems to be so dominant in this day and age.
The example I talked about is organizational. But I think if you have the opportunity and resources to think about the architecture of your living space, and before that the orientation, location, geography, and society surrounding your living space then you can go even further to create optimal systems that require less input produce better quality life. To this end, I think there is a lot of wisdom in tradition. Having grown up in suburban USA I felt almost completely detached from tradition. Architecture had no meaning other than the trend, it wasn't designed from a perspective of harmonious efficiency with the environment, it was built to suit a consumption trend, something that was shown to sell. Here in Japan I feel sad and lucky (because of the perspective it's given me) to live in a house that emulates western trends. Most of the traditional Japanese architectural features are absent, and I think we are worse off for it. We don't have windows that open to create a cross breeze through any room in the house. We don't have shikkui walls that breathe air to regulate the extreme humidity, we don't have long eaves to block the high summer sun from coming into the southern windows. These traditional features were arrived at because they were the simplest solution to a complicated problem, and it took generations to realize it.
I'm not the best communicator, but I would love feedback to help me really express these things in a more useful and compelling way. Maybe I'm wrong? I could take some constructive criticism too.
