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Me, Minimalism, and Memoir · False Stories

• 0:06
  Wayne: I suppose it depends on what my or your bias is, but in twenty thirteen I indie published a book about my lifelong what to call it, fascination, obsession with minimalism.
• 0:21
  Wayne: Even as an adolescent, organization and order were important to the way I lived my life.
• 0:28
  Wayne: And those are traits that, again, depending on how you view things, are either complements to minimalism or lead to its development.
• 0:38
  Wayne: Part of it may be entirely practical.
• 0:42
  Wayne: It's easier to be organized if you have fewer things in your life.
• 0:47
  Wayne: The book isn't about Feng Shui or the Con Marie method, but rather about the psychology of minimalism, and in particular I try to answer a basic question about myself.
• 1:00
  Wayne: Do I treat people the same way I treat things?
• 1:04
  Wayne: Do I want fewer of them in my life?
• 1:07
  Wayne: Do I discard them quickly, especially when they become emotionally messy?
• 1:13
  Wayne: Have I lived minimalism so long that I'm a dangerous person to get too close to?
• 1:19
  Wayne: To love, because you may be cut off summarily with not much explanation.
• 1:25
  Wayne: I thought it would be useful and appropriate for the podcast if I read some passages from the book.
• 1:32
  Wayne: One of the things I tried to do in the book is to be brutally honest about myself and not try to make myself look good necessarily, and especially not to contrive dubious reasons and rationalizations for why I behave the way I behave.
• 1:49
  Wayne: I think I succeeded, but of course other readers might feel differently.
• 1:55
  Wayne: As one easy metric, if you look at the two ratings on Amazon.ca, one is a five and one is a two.
• 2:05
  Wayne: The book is very short, and many people have pointed out how appropriate that is for a book on minimalism.
• 2:12
  Wayne: I didn't set out to make it that short.
• 2:14
  Wayne: I just wrote and said all that I wanted to say, and my writing style in general tends to be very spare anyway.
• 2:22
  Wayne: I begin the book with a description of how I helped my mother move from one house to another, and what I learned or validated from that experience.
• 2:33
  Wayne: Quote I helped my mother move from a small house to an even smaller apartment in 2011.
• 2:42
  Wayne: It was alternately instructive, educational, frustrating, angering, funny, and a whole suite of other emotions to see how a lifelong hoarder, pack rat, collector, how a collector, let's say, not only has built up her collections, but also makes the decisions on things that can be discarded.
• 3:05
  Wayne: There were three main reasons my mother gave for keeping things, even things which she had never used in years and might never use at all.
• 3:15
  Wayne: First was utility.
• 3:18
  Wayne: The idea is that something might be useful at some point in the future, and so it makes sense to save it for that eventuality.
• 3:26
  Wayne: Part of this rationale and mindset comes, I think, from how my mother grew up, born during the depression, raised in a poor family, and then a single mother of three while she worked as a waitress.
• 3:40
  Wayne: She did not really have the luxury of throwing things away just because they didn't seem to be very useful at the moment.
• 3:48
  Wayne: If you acquired something, and especially if you spent money on it, you tended to keep it.
• 3:54
  Wayne: Part of the problem with this reasoning, though, and the reason it often results in a lot of things being hoarded, is that those carefully saved things never do get used at all anyway.
• 4:08
  Wayne: They're just carted from house to house as the person moves, with the supposition that they just might be used someday, but they never are.
• 4:18
  Wayne: Sometimes because the things are not that useful, and sometimes because the person forgets that she had them in the first place and maybe even goes out and buys new ones anyway.
• 4:30
  Wayne: With my mother it was a similar explanation with the stationary bike.
• 4:35
  Wayne: She admitted that she had not used it in eight years, but she was surprised that I was suggesting that it be given away to the thrift store.
• 4:44
  Wayne: The truth is that it likely would never be used again anyway.
• 4:48
  Wayne: She has other forms of exercise.
• 4:51
  Wayne: Second was obligation.
• 4:55
  Wayne: The collector sometimes feels that she has to keep certain things out of obligation, a typical situation being when the thing was a gift, even if it might no longer have any sentimental value or practical utility.
• 5:09
  Wayne: At one point during the move, when I asked her about one thing, my mother said she was keeping it simply because her daughter-in-law had given it to her.
• 5:20
  Wayne: The reasoning might have been that her daughter-in-law would be hurt if she knew that my mother was discarding a gift from her like that.
• 5:28
  Wayne: Or there may be just this deep sense of obligation in my mother, without any regard or worry about what anyone else might think.
• 5:37
  Wayne: A collector's sense of duty.
• 5:40
  Wayne: And third was sentimentality.
• 5:44
  Wayne: This is the big one, the one that most people would cite and recognize.
• 5:50
  Wayne: People tend to keep things big and small and in greater or lesser quantities because there is some kind of sentimental attachment.
• 5:59
  Wayne: Sentimentality can override nearly all other factors convenience, beauty, utility.
• 6:07
  Wayne: The object has something in it of the person who gave it to the collector or has some other kind of association.
• 6:14
  Wayne: Throwing it out would be like an insult or an assault on that person or the memory of that person.
• 6:22
  Wayne: The hoarding of such objects is not really a practical problem if they are few in number or small in size.
• 6:31
  Wayne: But when they start to take up way too much space, they can not only pose a practical problem, they can also be a sign that the hoarder is tending not to let something go that should be let go, is not, as they say, moving on.
• 6:48
  Wayne: Unquote.
• 6:49
  Wayne: In one of the key chapters in the book called Leaving People, I start to consider whether my minimalist tendencies spill over from things onto people.
• 7:01
  Wayne: A lot of the focus is on people with whom I have had romantic relationships.
• 7:07
  Wayne: Here's another excerpt.
• 7:09
  Wayne: Quote Romance.
• 7:12
  Wayne: There's a story in one of Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard's books, The Sickness Unto Death, about the king who doesn't want a confidant, but also feels the need for one.
• 7:26
  Wayne: He confides in someone, but then has the person killed so that he, the king, can again be free of the burden of having a confidant.
• 7:36
  Wayne: Alas, when my minimalism prevails, I am like that.
• 7:42
  Wayne: I have similar fears.
• 7:44
  Wayne: I fight hard against my temptation or the need to acquire a few things.
• 7:49
  Wayne: I get them into my home, make a place for them, accept them, and over time some of these things become just things that I have.
• 7:58
  Wayne: I know where they are and they are accepted.
• 8:02
  Wayne: However, especially in those first days before I have fully accepted the thing, when it's still on probation, so to speak, there is always the chance, if not the likelihood, that I will get rid of it before it has a chance to insinuate itself into my heart and life.
• 8:20
  Wayne: The analogy with personal and especially romantic relationships is unfortunately obvious and apt.
• 8:29
  Wayne: You may edge your way into my minimalist life, but my tendency will always be to get rid of you.
• 8:35
  Wayne: Not because I necessarily dislike you, not because you're likely to do something wrong, not because I am bad or you are bad.
• 8:45
  Wayne: It is just my manner and my obsession, my way of being in the world.
• 8:51
  Wayne: I don't want anything.
• 8:53
  Wayne: I don't want anyone.
• 8:54
  Wayne: Things and people are messy.
• 8:57
  Wayne: One dark reason for my aversion to romantic relationships specifically is that I fear being swallowed up.
• 9:07
  Wayne: When I walk alone at night in the big city, I just love how the city envelops me, how I become unnoticeable and anonymous.
• 9:16
  Wayne: But I have a deep primal fear of the swallowing up that a woman can engender when she is in a relationship with me.
• 9:24
  Wayne: This is getting to the heart of the essential weakness and fear that motivate a minimalist, which in one sense drive him, but in another sense really hold him back from experiencing the full complement of what a normal loving life can offer.
• 9:41
  Wayne: In a way it's not the emotional issues that keep me from being committal, engaging in loving relationships, all of that.
• 9:49
  Wayne: It's mostly that I just like things simple.
• 9:53
  Wayne: If I could have love without it affecting my life in any way, which of course it and I can't, then I would be more willing to connect intimately with another human being.
• 10:06
  Wayne: My greatest and scariest minimalist ability is to cut people off from myself, let them go, cut them loose, cut myself free.
• 10:18
  Wayne: It scares me a little.
• 10:20
  Wayne: I know that deep inside this is what I want to do with virtually all my relationships, be rid of them, reduce them to nothing, relegate them to a status or an intensity which won't make me so anxious anymore.
• 10:35
  Wayne: This is especially true of my truly intimate relationships, which threaten the very foundation of my minimalist heart.
• 10:44
  Wayne: In addition to the romantic relationship, another one that I am particularly angered or threatened by is the PAL relationship, in which the friend does not really have an intimate interest in me, but mostly just thinks of me as someone to have fun with.
• 11:02
  Wayne: Unfortunately, I tend to see this as a lack of appreciation for myself, and so I am very inclined to find an excuse to be rid of this so-called friendship.
• 11:13
  Wayne: It's a seeming curious irony that as a minimalist who fears intimacy and anything else that might affect me, I would be bothered so much or at all by a relationship that nowhere approaches that kind of intimacy.
• 11:28
  Wayne: The reason is clear though.
• 11:31
  Wayne: This kind of relationship, even though it involves a real person whose company I might even enjoy sometimes, is quotter.
• 11:39
  Wayne: There's more thought that goes into the ending of a relationship with an intimate, but a minimalist can take down the pal like he is swatting a fly.
• 11:49
  Wayne: Something or nothing.
• 11:53
  Wayne: So I've been involved in perhaps half a dozen serious romantic relationships in my life, and in only one of them did the woman leave me.
• 12:03
  Wayne: In all the others I've left, and often without much, if any, cause.
• 12:10
  Wayne: I don't want to overstate the influence of minimalism in any of those breakups, but with most of them, one of the advantages accruing from the cessation of all that love, affection, sex, companionship, communication, self-esteem, confidence, and a thousand other things that go along with any good relationship, any good romantic relationship, one of the advantages was always being free of commitments.
• 12:39
  Wayne: I remember clearly one of the breakups when I was literally at her front door, leaving after an argument about something or other.
• 12:48
  Wayne: There I was right on the doorstep, half inside her house, and with the ability to make a decision one way or the other.
• 12:56
  Wayne: Go back into the house and talk this through and fight for the benefits of this relationship, or cut myself free.
• 13:05
  Wayne: I chose the latter.
• 13:07
  Wayne: Leaving will always be the tendency of the committed minimalist in all relationships.
• 13:13
  Wayne: A typical scenario is that any difficulty in the relationship, even something minor, even a one-off slight or mistake on the part of the partner, will cause me to consider my current options and reconsider my original choice.
• 13:29
  Wayne: In a way, I'm always looking for a reason to get out.
• 13:33
  Wayne: Part of it, of course, is just the desire to be rid of things and entanglements, but another part is that the fault or action on the part of the partner makes me think that I had it all wrong with my choice in the first place, and I will worry that things are only going to get worse now that the parade of faults has begun.
• 13:53
  Wayne: There is often a strong vein of paranoia thinking.
• 13:58
  Wayne: I might worry about a plot against me in such cases, that the woman was always hiding something and accidentally let her true self show through, and that I am being manipulated into something, whatever it might be.
• 14:13
  Wayne: That's one reason, for example, that I can tend to react negatively at what seems on the surface to everyone else to be the smallest provocation, or no provocation at all, and often even an action that's a blatant demonstration to everyone else of esteem on the part of the other person, but which I misinterpret in my disfavor and often as an indication, a hint, a revelation of something fundamentally wrong with the relationship.
• 14:46
  Wayne: The minimalist is someone who will interpret the smallest fleck of dust as an indication that the place, the relationship, is filthy.
• 14:56
  Wayne: That's part of what makes me so anxious all the time.
• 14:59
  Wayne: Either I am worried that the dirt will reveal itself, but years go by and I never see a hint of it, or I see a fleck, and in a paroxysm of destruction I will imagine the whole thing coming down, and I will participate in that destruction myself.
• 15:19
  Wayne: This is perhaps one of my worst tendencies, and of course it's inextricably tied to the fact of being a minimalist in the first place.
• 15:29
  Wayne: Minimalism is all about paring everything down to the least that it can withstand without becoming something else or nothing.
• 15:40
  Wayne: Unquote.
• 15:42
  Wayne: And maybe that's a good place to leave things.
• 15:46
  Wayne: The book is available in Kindle and in print versions.
• 15:50
  Wayne: I put the title and other information in the show notes.
• 15:53
  Wayne: I've also put my email address there.
• 15:56
  Wayne: If you email me, I'll send you a free signed copy wherever you are in the world.