For years, I completely misunderstood minimalism.
I used to think minimalism was about living a frugal life, eliminating as many possessions as possible, and creating a clean aesthetic. Flashy colors should be banished, I assumed. Just like owning multiple versions of the same item, physical book copies, my smoothie maker.
I couldn’t have been further from the truth.
Minimalism, as I learned through countless harsh lessons, isn’t a reversed arms race to own less. Minimalism is actually about… curation.
Minimalism Isn’t What It Seems
About a year ago, a friend and I stood at an airport’s duty-free area where we faced a shelf of fragrances that occupied the wall like an army of soldiers. The fluorescent light pierced through the fragrance bottles’ splashy colors — cotton candy pink, ocean blue, whiskey bronze — and stung right into our eyes. A classical case of marketing by paralysis.
Eventually, my friend took one of the bottles and examined it like an item at a flea market. “True minimalists,” she said, “don’t need perfume.” And then, she added something that would change how I think about minimalism. “Seriously, what’s the use in spraying yourself with overpriced soap bubbles?”
I just laughed. But the more I poked at her question in my mind’s examination room, the more I disagreed. Minimalism, it occurred to me, must be more nuanced than the ruthless elimination of stuff. For instance, I’ve only ever bought three fragrances in my entire life. And of course, they weren’t absolutely essential, but whenever I wore them, I felt refreshed and more confident. So although they weren’t “minimalist” according to my friend, they definitely enriched my life. And isn’t that what minimalism should do — enrich our lives?
How can we resolve this paradox?
My suggestion is that it can be minimalist to own and use perfume (and other non-essential items). But only as long as these things are bought, used, and maintained with intention. If we accept this approach, it also becomes obvious that minimalism needn’t require a capsule wardrobe or a radical decluttering project.
But this is what so many people (myself included) seem to get wrong about minimalism: in a frenzy, they throw away as much stuff as they possibly can, creating a surgical aesthetic, only to realize later that they’ve sterilized their lives. Completely disinfected from discomfort. Devoid external stimulation.
So what might a more genuine, effortless form of minimalism look like?
To answer that question, we must first understand how we got sidetracked.
How We Killed Minimalism
When you type minimalism into Google, Instagram, or YouTube, what do you see? Here are rooms with no furniture but an eggshell-colored couch. Here are people telling you how to declutter 98% of your possessions. Here is an online shop selling minimalist fashion, furniture, and home decor.
Let’s un-pretzel all of these mismatched puzzle pieces — and find out why they have nothing to do with minimalism.
First things first: what you see online is an extreme, unachievable version of minimalism. This is because the internet is in an endless competition for attention: the more extreme or shocking the content, the more likely people are to click on it. So of course, sensational titles (“I SOLD ALL MY STUFF!!”) get more clicks than the humble alternative (“I donated 15 items I didn’t need any more”). And of course, hyperbolical thumbnails (spartan-like rooms) get more eyeballs than realistic ones (slightly cluttered yet functional spaces). Extremity is the only way minimalism can stand out in the attention economy.
But unfortunately, it’s a radical distortion.
The result was that modern minimalism took a strange evolution: it overly dramatized the importance of objects (or rather, the absence of objects). Everything became about ruthless decluttering, owning as little as possible, and creating empty spaces. Today we think of these things as trademarks of minimalism. But actually, this object-focused thinking was never the point. Why?
Because an obsession with less can be just as toxic as an obsession with more.
And so, object-focused minimalism gave birth to many perilous side effects. Chief among them is McMinimalism: the unwanted child of marketing and minimalism. It’s a crusade that turned minimalism into a commodity by plucking products out of thin air, labeling them as “minimalist,” and aggressively selling them on the shrines of malls and online stores. Worse, every McMinimalist product carries the slimy subtext that your life will magically improve once you buy it.
The idea is genius, albeit destructive: declutter all your possessions and replace them with “minimalist” alternatives. Consumers keep consuming. Corporations keep cashing in. I have fallen for this trap longer than I’d like to admit — that is, until I realized the obvious truth: just because a person’s life looks zen and minimalist doesn’t mean it has these qualities. Far from it.
So when people boast about owning 50 items or less, it’s not just unrealistic, but it also misses the point. Minimalism has never been so much about the number of things you own as your relationship with those things.
In other words, we pursued the wicked clone of minimalism while killing off the original. Real minimalism isn’t a product we can buy. It’s a way of being we must experience.
But how can we rewire our thinking around minimalism? And how can we come to terms with it in a hypercapitalist meat grinder?
A Central Question for Genuine Minimalism
The first thing we can do is stop being the pawn in the chess game of consumption. We needn’t rush forward or eliminate other pieces; we can simply hold our ground. Owning less, owning more — it’s all the same if we don’t stabilize our position first. And the key to that is transforming our attention.
Non-minimalists might ask, “What am I lacking?”
Object-focused minimalists might ask, “What can I get rid of?”
A more attentive approach to minimalism might center around the question: “What do I already have?”
Notice the difference? The first two questions are two sides of the same coin; they trigger scarcity by alluring vanity metrics. The latter question, in contrast, fosters abundance.
“But that’s still object-focused thinking!” you might argue. Well, not quite. Because the hidden power of this question is that it shifts our attention from the objects themselves to our relationship with objects. It’s a subtle shift from quantity to quality. The effect is like taking off glasses that had the wrong prescription. Suddenly, we naturally stop buying stuff we don’t need and quit decluttering more than we can afford. We discover gratitude for objects, detachment from materialistic thinking, and beauty in the ordinary.
To me, that’s what minimalism is actually about.
Perhaps this also explains what I meant earlier by curation. It’s not that we mustn’t buy stuff; it’s more that we should see objects as art to be savored instead of things to be consumed. Even the most expensive perfume can only be as valuable as your perception of it.
To be fair: modern minimalists have talked about this. Marie Condo, for instance, has taught us that we should examine our possessions and ask if they “spark joy” (and throw away the rest). Radical minimalists have spread a similar message: declutter everything to then see what you really value. But the huge problem with these approaches is that they suggest a feeling of not-being-enough. They tie contentment to certain conditions.
But the truth is, we don’t need to start a huge decluttering project or create a minimalist aesthetic. We can tap into minimalism today.
Kyle Chayka, author of The Longing for Less has an excellent stance on this. In a piece for the NYT, he writes:
“A stand mixer can be as beautiful as the Mona Lisa. Historically, minimalism tells us to focus on what doesn’t at first seem pleasant or beautiful and turn it into art instead of creating a worldview based only on what we already like.”
True minimalism, then, is the ability to resonate with the beauty around us — especially when it’s unconventional or ordinary. It’s like becoming the museum curator of your own life. And I don’t know about you, but I’ve never visited a museum that boasted about exhibiting as few artworks as possible.
Curating the Museum of Minimalism
Ever since I’ve been seeing minimalism through the curation mindset — as a way of building a museum of my life — it feels like I untied a knot in my mind. It’s only now that I realize how unhealthy it was to feel guilty about buying stuff I found genuinely beautiful. How un-minimalist it was to mindlessly declutter stuff just for the sake of decluttering.
Curation teaches us that all minimalists share the same goal: intentionally create a museum of life that sparks awe and clarity. But it also shows that these museums can be diverse and multi-faceted. In fact, they should be. How boring would it be if all museums followed the same layout, displayed the same pieces, and had the same architecture? How dull would it be if all curators had an identical preference for art? How outlandish if the galleries one-upped each other by trying to exhibit as few pieces as possible? And yet, weirdly, modern minimalism seems to strive for these goals.
We can also learn that the curation process naturally varies among minimalists. Some people may turn to the Swiss army knife of minimalism: decluttering.
Others might pay more attention to the new pieces that enter their museum. For instance, I’ve found great joy in buying more and more physical books because they’re a great source of beauty in my life. In turn, I quit buying new clothes as fashion doesn’t allure me.
Still others will focus on rediscovering existing pieces. As in: What do I already have? This also is the reason why I wrote several essays on minimalist purchases. It helped me grasp the hidden beauty of ordinary things— and discover more of them in daily life.
But whatever curation style we choose, one thing is clear: we must abandon the misconception that minimalism is about owning as little as possible. A minimalist life isn’t defined by the absence of objects but by the attention that goes into their curation. It’s about seeing ordinary things in an extraordinary way.
So: what will your museum look like?