I have a strange problem with most content on minimalism:
It’s all a bit too convenient.
See, the typical minimalist hero’s journey goes like this: (1) discover you feel miserable, (2) blame all your problems on your stuff, (3) get rid of as many possessions as you can, and (4) be happy. It’s a neatly traceable step-by-step process, often with before-and-after pictures to dramatize the effect. It’s a sacred ceremony to provide evidence that something was tidied, purged, and purified.
But what if these are empty promises? What if we fundamentally misunderstood minimalism? What if there’s a deeper form of minimalism?
These are some of the questions Kyle Chayka investigates in The Longing for Less. The answers finally tidy up the false convenience of mainstream minimalism. Which makes it one of the few books on minimalism I can truly recommend.
(All following quotes are from The Longing for Less by Kyle Chayka)
What Is The Longing For Less About?
The Longing for Less by Kyle Chayka is a treasure hunt for a deeper form of minimalism. Through travel logs, art commentaries, biographies, and cultural snapshots, Chayka aims to investigate the genealogy of minimalism and our unprecedented longing for less.
In this sense, The Longing for Less is a huge decluttering project on a meta-level. It goes through all the modern ideas that have made minimalism so appealing and scrutinizes them one by one. But strangely, the book doesn’t leave you with clear, tidy answers. In fact, I felt confused when I flipped the last page.
What’s Chayka’s final stance? What is he trying to say? What’s the real definition of minimalism?
It took me a while to realize, but this confusion was exactly the point of The Longing for Less. After all, minimalism is supposed to ask myriad questions, not provide one-dimensional answers. It goes deeper than the stereotypical advice to “simplify your life” or “declutter your stuff.”
With that in mind, here are my five favorite takeaways from The Longing for Less by Kyle Chayka.
1. The Surprising Origin of Minimalism
What comes to mind when you think about the word minimalism? Clean interiors? Decluttering? Tidy, empty, monochromatic apartments? Marie Kondo? Whatever it may be — we tend to associate today’s minimalism with a certain aesthetic. A lifestyle. The modern minimalist is the type of person who owns very few possessions and orders them in a way that looks inoffensive, clean, and whitewashed.
But it wasn’t always like this.
Originally, minimalism was meant to be a provocation. An insult. As Chayka illustrates in The Longing for Less, the term was popularized in a 1965 essay by Richard Wollheim called “Minimal Art.” In it, Wollheim classified a new group of art pieces with “minimal art content,” meaning that these pieces contained almost none of the qualities that had traditionally defined Western art.
It was aggressive. It was quirky. It was revolutionary. And it was all these things at once.
The point of the minimalist art movement was to challenge our internalized preconceptions about art. The thing that united minimalist artists wasn’t a clean aesthetic but a revolutionary philosophy. They questioned — and rejected — the notion that art needs to represent reality, humanity, or an artist’s inner life. Minimalist art was simply there, speaking for itself. “Sensation replaced interpretation,” Chayka writes in The Longing for Less. “The meaning of the work of art resided with its viewer rather than its maker.”
Alas, mainstream minimalism slaughtered this idea.
These days, bone-colored snapshots swamp social media. Skeletal furnishings have become a template for trendy hotel lobbies. Designs can only call themselves minimalist when they’re serene and clean. In this frenzy, it has become increasingly difficult to say what minimalism is actually about.
“When a word or style is everywhere, it tends to lose its original meaning. There are more than thirteen million posts tagged with #minimalism on Instagram and around ten new images appear every minute.”
So, the original idea of minimalism (as an art movement) was to remove barriers between the self and the world, challenge our perception, and appreciate things for and in themselves. The modern, Pinterest-y version, however, prescribes an overly clean aesthetic, forbids chaos, and better sparks some joy.
Should we be worried?
In The Longing for Less, Chayka argues that this estrangement from deeper minimalism caused a sort of cultural sickness. Modern minimalism has become an incentive to consume more, not less. It’s devouring us.
2. The Deceptive Commodification of Minimalism
By pure chance, Chayka raises an issue I wrote about long before reading The Longing for Less. Back then, I called it McMinimalism. It’s this idea that minimalism has turned into a product, commodity, and source of profit. The proof is all around us: sleek furniture, grayscale fashion, and, of course, the overwhelming influx of minimalist books, podcasts, and blogs — all these products market minimalism as a ticket to salvation.
“What [minimalist products] all offer is a kind of mythical just-rightness, the promise that if you just consume the perfect thing, then you won’t need to buy anything else in the future. At least until the old thing is upgraded and some new level of possible perfection is found.”
This isn’t just ironic. It also creates a weird power dynamic that turns minimalism into a privilege.
One of my favorite examples from The Longing for Less is Diana Walker’s photograph of Steve Jobs in his Los Gatos home. Jobs sits cross-legged on a small square of carpet, barefooted. He wears his customary uniform — black sweater and jeans. Besides him, a large lamp shines a perfect halo around Jobs while a space-grey stereo lures in the background. The setting seems reduced to the essentials. It conveys feelings of zen, clarity, and superiority.
Except… it’s an illusion.
For starters, Jobs’s house was luxuriously spacious, making it easy for him to spread his possessions. And not just that: the “minimalist” items around him were unaffordable for the average person. That stereo system cost about $8,200. The lamp was an original designer piece by Tiffany. Jobs didn’t become a minimalist through humility and groundedness. Instead, he turned into a minimalist by ostentatious money reserves and his ability to orchestrate simplicity.
Today, we can observe the same phenomenon in the “minimalist” house of Kanye West and Kim Kardashian. It’s too easy to appear minimalist with boundless space and resources. Simplicity is bound to look good when every object on display might as well be a museum piece.
And there’s another problem. The products that seem the most minimalist often take advantage of a maximalist ecosystem. Most of the time, simplicity is a hyper-connected string in a web of morbid working conditions, environmental destruction, and satellite armies.
Chayka says it best:
“It’s easy to feel like a minimalist when you can order food, summon a car, or rent a room using a single brick of steel and silicon. But in reality it’s the opposite. We’re taking advantage of a maximalist assemblage. Just because something looks simple doesn’t mean it is; the aesthetics of simplicity cloak artifice or even unsustainable excess.”
The lesson is that most of the minimalism we see nowadays is an illusion. Minimalist evangelists camouflage chaos with money. And minimalist products veil unsustainability with sleek marketing.
But the illusion doesn’t stop there.
3. Clean Bedroom, Dirty World
It makes sense that minimalism has gained massive interest in the twenty-first century. One economic crisis has been following the next: the Dot-com bubble, the Great Recession, the refugee crisis, Covid-19, the war in Ukraine, and, of course, global warming.
In these uncertain times, many of us turn to minimalism not out of choice but out of necessity. In Munich, where I live, the rent per square meter is twice as high as the national average. The result: my room is ten square meters (108 square feet) big. And so, if I don’t want to drown in clutter and stay financially sane, I must reduce my belongings to the essentials. There’s no other way. Chayka, too, opted for minimalism because it was the only way to exist in his New York City apartment.
However.
If we’re not careful, this necessary frugalism (and modern minimalism as a whole) can become an ignorant coping mechanism. In The Longing for Less, Chayka points out that minimalism can evolve into a convenient avoidance strategy.
He writes:
“The minimalist is ultimately a pragmatist who has to reconcile the desire for a better, cleaner world with the limits of what one person can influence. It’s often an internal, individualized process rather than an external one: Your bedroom might be cleaner, but the world stays bad.”
Clean bedroom, dirty world.
I started embracing minimalism during a severe pandemic lockdown in 2021. At last, here was something I could actively influence. I just needed to invest time and effort into decluttering my life and — ta-da! — I felt calmer. I made a visible difference. It was like magic. But since then, it has become increasingly difficult for me to muster interest in political affairs. Compared to influencing the order and aesthetics of my tiny room, changing the political landscape seems vain.
Chayka writes:
“Minimalism is thus a kind of last resort. When we can’t control our material security or life path, the only possibility left is to lower our expectations to the point where they’re easier to achieve.”
I couldn’t help but think of Jordan Peterson’s #1 rule for life: clean your room. His rationale is that you must organize your room before criticizing the outside world. Work from inward to outward. But this is dangerous advice. We can — and should — be concerned with outward problems at least as much as the order of our houses. Keeping your room tidy is pointless if the world decays.
And it can blunt your receptivity to social injustices:
“The desire that everything be just right, matched with everything else around it in a unified whole, leads easily to intolerance.”
All this is not to say that minimalism as a whole is bad. It’s just that we mustn’t get sidetracked along the way.
Knowing this, what might a deeper form of minimalism look like? Here’s my favorite take from The Longing for Less.
4. The Case for Deeper Minimalism
Donald Judd, the minimalist artist whose concrete rectangles we’ve seen earlier, lived in a chaotic home. In The Longing for Less, Chayka describes a scene where he visits Judd’s house in Marfa, Texas — and, to Chayka’s surprise, stuff sprawled everywhere: countless stacks of books, rocks, shards, seashells, rugs, ceramics, arrowheads, cassette tape racks. (Unsurprisingly, Judd hated being called a minimalist, even though his pieces resemble minimalism’s modern aesthetics.)
Marie Kondo would probably disagree, but for Judd, chaos spawned inspiration.
As Chayka puts it:
“The whole place was a machine for finding inspiration and making art — the objects didn’t just cause joy; they were challenging, shocking, and discomfiting as well, reminders of the wider world outside.”
What I love about this is that Judd dissipated the borders between the space and the self. It shows that minimalism isn’t about confining yourself to a whitewashed template. It’s about change, quirkiness, and being challenged.
While Ms. Kondo might have trashed half of Judd’s belongings, they were essential to him — precisely because they didn’t spark joy and instead posed continual nudges of discomfort, creativity, and stimulation. “Minimalism,” as Chayka puts it, “is a practice that takes place over time — it makes simple things more complicated, not the other way around.”
Another great example is John Cage’s infamous 4’33”. It’s an absurd piece of music. Not a single note is played. Heck, the most exciting moments of 4’33” might include the performing pianist closing and re-opening the lid of their instrument.
But brushing this off as a prank or sheer stupidity misses the point of 4’33”. Because the point is that, as a listener, you’re not supposed to turn your attention to the stage, the performer. Instead, the real listening experience lies in the moment-to-moment happenings of your environment. It’s not about the piano notes. It’s about an unexpected cough, people wiggling in their seats, unruly whispers.
Sensation replaces interpretation.
With 4’33”, Cage radically redefined music. Rather than an elaborate composition, music might simply be the attention to sound. Seeing music through this lens allows you to hear it everywhere: the percussions of bird pecks, the drums of raindrops, the strings of crickets, and even the crescendo of a jackhammer.
But to experience this rethinking, we must first exit our typical comfort zone of music. We must allow silence to make us uncomfortable.
“To escape the ambience — to feel anything — we have to be willing to risk hearing something unpleasant and being taken out of our familiar comfort zones. We need to recapture the awe and the surprise of silence.”
What is deeper minimalism? It’s random. It’s ambiguous. It’s embracing your environment. It’s abandoning the illusion of control.
5. A Meta-Lesson From The Longing for Less
The most important lesson I learned from this book took a while to emerge. A few days after finishing The Longing for Less, I still agreed with Chayka’s conclusion:
“The art, music, architecture, and philosophy that I’ve described … isn’t concerned with perfect cleanliness or a specific style. It’s about seeking unmediated experiences, giving up control instead of imposing it, paying attention to what’s around you without barricading yourself, and accepting ambiguity, understanding that opposites can be part of the same whole.”
But soon I reconsidered.
Over the course of the book, I noticed that Chayka had compiled a tailored version of minimalism that might fit him — a millennial, journalist, author, and art critic. But with that, it’s also complex, specific, and inaccessible to many people.
Simultaneously, Chayka condemns the Kondo-style declutter and Pinterest version of minimalism because they are illusions of control. Fair enough. It’s true to some extent. But it’s undeniable that mainstream minimalism’s core ideas — less stuff, silent colors, simple living — aren’t all bad. They have helped many people find focus and clarity in a chaotic world. As a highly sensitive person, I find tremendous peace and calm in my tiny, white-walled room.
The lesson?
Minimalism should, above all, be mindful and explorative. Whatever definition of minimalism you choose, be intentional about it. Question it. Don’t just accept a neat template or definition of minimalism just because it sounds pithy. Instead, engage with the philosophy behind it. Rather than chasing the aesthetics, dare to challenge the ethics.
Chayka says it himself:
“[A deeper form of minimalism] offers no answers, let alone step-by-step guides, and it comes with risks. But it suggests another way of living that we can carry on into the future beyond the length of a trend.”
Once we allow minimalism to ask a rich array of questions rather than dictate one-dimensional answers, we transcend the trend — and enter a deeper philosophy of minimalism.
Ultimately, The Longing for Less isn’t the perfect book on minimalism. But rather than selling minimalism as a ten-step self-improvement strategy with guaranteed results, it changed and shaped how I think about minimalism. And among all the soulless minimalist content, that’s what makes The Longing for Less one of the few great books I’ve read on minimalism.
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