So much of our life is
lived in a fog of automatic, habitual behavior.
We spend so much time on the hunt,
but nothing ever quite does it for us.
And we get so wrapped up in the hunt
that it kind of makes us miserable.
And I had everything I ever wanted.
I had everything I was supposed to have.
Everyone around me said, "you're successful."
But, really, I was miserable.
There was this gaping void in my life.
So I tried to fill that void the same way many people do,
with stuff, lots of stuff.
I was filling the void with consumer purchases.
I was spending money faster than I was earning it, attempting
to buy my way to happiness.
I thought I'd get there one day.
Eventually, I mean, happiness had
to be somewhere just around the corner.
I was living paycheck to paycheck,
living for a paycheck, living for stuff.
But I wasn't living at all.
At a time when people in the West
are experiencing the best standard of living
in history, why is it that at the same time
there is such a longing for more?
I think of that as a kind of biologically-based delusional
craving, that auto-craving is a good strategy
to keep animals alive, including early human animals,
in really harsh conditions, but these days, today, it
creates a disconnect.
You're like a puppet whose strings
are being pulled by Mother Nature and evolution
reaching back tens of millions of years.
We still feel restless.
We still are always scratching the coin for more.
It's why lottery winners are miserable.
It's why homeowners have three-car garages.
The first car creates an exponential, awesome rush
of happiness and joy and utility.
The second car comes about because we tire
of the first car.
And, as humans, were wired to become dissatisfied.
It's an addiction, really.
And we are encouraged to maintain the addiction
through technology and information.
American culture
has, for the most part, these blinders on.
There's definitely this illusion of what
our lives should look like.
Whether it's advertising, or your Instagram,
or Facebook feed, it's this illusion
that our lives should be perfect.
It's natural to use other people's lives,
and even imagined lives, you know,
the confections we see in advertisements as a yardstick.
You open Vanity Fair or Esquire and you see
very sexy and glamorous lives.
And then the projects for most people seems to become
how can I get that or as close to that as I'm going to get?
There can be an immense amount of dissatisfaction
trying to live that way.
And many of us see no alternative
but to live that way.
Advertising has polluted and infiltrated
culture.
It's in our movies.
It's in our television shows.
It's in our books.
It's in our doctor's offices.
It's in the taxicabs.
It's in the bar sitting next to you, the person who you think
you're just having an idle chat with could have been placed
there by an alcohol company.
It's been a slow evolution
this is not something that just happened yesterday.
This is something that has been sold
to us over, say, the past 100 years,
slowly but surely, by those that want to make a lot of money.
Now that's what I call a good-looking car.
They want us to believe that you really
need these things.
Every year that passes, there's more stimuli,
there's more pressure, there's more options,
there's more media, there's more noise, noise, noise.
And by streamlining, and simplifying, and just letting
people know that they have the option,
it's that wake-up call that is really valuable in a very
critical time right now.
It got to a point in my life
where I didn't know what was important anymore.
Then at some point when I was approaching 30 years old,
I noticed something different about my best friend
of 20-something years.
Josh, he seemed happy for the first time
in a really long time, like truly happy, ecstatic.
But I didn't understand why, because we had both worked
at the same corporation.
We had both wasted our 20s climbing the corporate ladder
together, and he had been just as miserable as me.
So I did what any good best friend would do.
I took him out to a really nice lunch--
I think we went to Subway-- and I sat him down
and I asked him a question.
Why the hell are you so happy?
He spent the next 20 minutes telling me
about this thing called minimalism.
Before I discovered minimalism,
I think my life looked like pretty much anyone else's.
I had a lot of stuff.
Hundreds, thousands of books, DVDs and VHSes,
closets full of expensive clothes.
All of these things that I brought into my life
without questioning.
But when I started letting go, I started
feeling freer, and happier, and lighter.
And now as a minimalist, every possession serves a purpose
or brings me joy.
I have a bed, and a chair, and a radio.
And I have some furniture in my dining room.
In my kitchen I have appliances.
I don't have any excess stuff.
Everything that I look around at I
have to go and justify to myself, not to anyone else,
but justify to myself, does this add value to my life?
And if not, I have to be willing to let go.
Ryan and I just finished writing a book about the last five
years of our lives from being these suit-and-tie corporate
guys to minimalists.
And so now we're going to get on the road for 10 months
this year and promote that book.
But really promote a message we really believe in,
a simple living message of living more deliberately
with less.
Oh, I'm going to need a jacket.
We'll see where the journey takes us.
So you presented this
as a 12-minute talk, 8-minute reading.
Yeah.
OK, cool, because I just
don't want to feel rushed through the talk, that's all.
Right.
Ready?
I was born ready.
Nice.
Hello, thanks for coming out.
My name is Ryan Nicodemus and this is the Joshua Fields
Millburn.
And together we run a website called theminimalists.com.
So today, Josh is going to read from our new book,
but first I'm going to tell you a story about how
we became the Minimalists.
We've never
been shut out, so long as one person shows up--
That's all that matters.
I feel really good.
We've had events where we've had two people show up,
and that was amazing because we got
to spend time with two people and add value
to their lives in a different way.
I'm a hugger, man.
MAN: OK.
Thanks for coming out, man.
Thanks for coming out and seeing the talk, man.
MAN: Yeah, pretty cool.
Our pleasure.
MAN: Thank you.
Did you forget your Kindle and badge in there?
Oh, yes, thank you.
From the day I was
born until the second grade when my parents got divorced,
I had like the perfect quintessential mom and dad.
When my mom left my dad, she just
really went off the deep end.
By junior high we had a lot of people over at the house.
And later I found out they were in there smoking crack.
They would cook crack.
By the eighth grade, the SWAT team was kicking in our door,
busting my mother for selling drugs.
It was a drug that overtook my mother.
Josh had a very similar childhood to what I did.
My very first memories of my father
are extinguishing a cigarette on my mother's chest.
Shortly after she left my father she started drinking.
It was my biggest fear that I was going
to get taken away from her.
When she was sober, she was a phenomenal mother.
I think she kind of felt trapped.
My mom always complained about money.
She didn't have any money.
I remember being poor growing up.
And I remember thinking, when I graduate high school,
I want to start on a path that is going to take me somewhere
other than a struggle.
Half a mile,
turn left on the San Pedro Drive.
We're currently on our way
to NPR for a radio interview.
Those are our peeps.
That's our demographic.
Howdy.
You're looking for Rick Daniels.
I think so, yes.
You're the Minimalists.
We are indeed.
Yes.
How are you?
I'm Scott.
I'm Ryan.
I'm a hugger, man.
Oh.
Nice to meet you, buddy.
Thanks for having us.
Joshua.
I think my light bulb
moment was when I was showing my guys how
to sell cell phones to a five-year-old,
I was like, what am I doing?
This mentality of getting a better promotion,
getting a better house, getting a better car,
getting a bigger paycheck, being able to buy more expensive bar
tabs, and to do that I had to sell cell phones
to five-year-olds.
There's a template out there.
You can call it the American Dream, or keeping up
with the Joneses, or whatever.
That's just a template.
It's not the template.
And once we realize that, I think
we can create our own template that works just for us.
The American Dream has a long history
that started out as a concept that was
really more about opportunity.
The US is a land of opportunity where
somebody can start out at the bottom, work hard, and do well.
There's no question that what it means to have made it
or to have achieved the American Dream in the United States
has increased tremendously in material terms.
$100,000 a year plus kind of income
became more and more an aspirational norm
across the society, because that's
what's portrayed as normal on TV, a six-figure income.
Beginning from about the mid-1990s,
Americans went on a buying spree that was probably
unprecedented in human history.
And a lot of it had to do with the cheapness of products
coming mostly from China, whether we're
talking about fashion, electronics,
all types of household goods.
So stuff's cheaper, but it's also more available.
You can order stuff 24 hours online.
There are big box stores.
We ended up accumulating a lot more stuff.
So much so that even though you have
about three times the space per person
that we used to in the '50s, so a lot more space,
we've got so much stuff, we need space on top of that,
and so there's a $2.2 billion square foot personal storage
industry which is ludicrous.
So you have people
living in these enormous homes, and if you really look at it
people don't use the space that they have.
Someone did a study that showed a heat map of where
people traveled inside their homes
over the course of a normal day.
It was a family of four and they were in a very average home.
And what they found is that people used about maybe, maybe
40% of their space.
Nobody used the dining room.
No one use the living room.
There was a big porch.
No one use the porch.
You know, I mean, I'm not saying this is the way everyone lives.
Some people use dining rooms, but it creates this big vacuum
that you have to fill so people are
throwing all this crap into their homes
that they don't need.
We're living our life
depending on the space we've got rather than creating our space
to fit our lives.
It's so easy to go wrong, and you wind up
with three dining tables in the same house.
Well, you got to run pretty fast to eat at three
tables at the same meal.
Nothing is more responsible than living in the smallest
space you possibly can.
We've probably sold or donated I'd
say at least 90% of our stuff.
I mean, you can't bring all your stuff into a tiny house.
I was commuting about two hours a day
and then sitting in a cubicle for 10 to 12 hours a day.
I had gained a lot of weight.
I was unhappy.
And I was kind of like, what's wrong with me?
I should be happy.
I've got all this stuff-- nice home, great husband.
And Logan was like, well, you know, you could probably
quit your job if we simplified and moved into a smaller
apartment.
And I was like, what the hell are you talking about?
I don't want to get rid of my stuff.
I found a YouTube video with all the tiny houses
and I was hooked.
Hi, Earl.
What's up, dude?
I think the biggest thing for me, at least in the beginning,
was the financial side of things.
When we looked at our budget and the numbers, I was like, well,
let's just give it a go.
If I hate a smaller apartment, we can always upsize.
I think there is this element of affordability,
simplicity, and sustainability that just makes
tiny houses seem like the perfect solution
to a problem we haven't yet figured out,
which is, how do we go from working all
throughout our lifetime to enjoying
a lifetime with a bit of work here and there?
For a long time when people were looking
to buy their first house, they looked at their budget
and they said, how much money do I have to spend?
Oh, I have $500,000, let me buy whatever $500,000 can get me.
And the big mistake there was that these individuals
didn't have $500,000.
They had a loan that would guarantee them that amount.
And, of course, after a few years of people
buying houses that they weren't actually buying,
they were just hoping to buy someday,
the entire housing market collapsed.
We're down 1.7% here,
a loss of 37 points or so.
Apple shares are just getting hammered this morning.
We're down by between 3% and 4 and 1/2%
generally across these markets.
Let's talk about the speed
with which we are watching this market deteriorate.
It was the worst day on Wall Street
since the crash of 1987.
This could be the most serious recession
in decades.
And that means life, as most Americans know it,
is about to change.
In some cases, dramatically.
I think where that has left us
in the wake of a recession is with a really, really
strong appeal to buying a house outright.
The vision that really came out of LifeEdited
is just like, hey, I think we've got to take a step back here.
We're very much
a mission-based company, the mission
being to do more with less.
So the LifeEdited prototype apartment
started with me buying a place, 420 square feet, in New York
and coming up with a really aggressive program.
What I was asking for was a lot.
Live at home for a couple, be able to have a sit-down dinner
for 10 or 12, be able to have guests over in a civil manner,
and be able to work at home with some sort of standing desk.
Very quickly I realized that small space made so much sense
environmentally, but it also made sense
on many other levels.
One of the things
that we really want to do is design homes
around A, how people live, and B, what's truly important,
creating more social homes, homes that actually
bring people closer together.
It was kind of an incredible experience,
because going from the 1,200 square foot space,
I had never felt more calm in my life.
There was less stuff to think about.
Our overhead was lower.
This is when I first started to say,
you know, this LifeEdited thing, this philosophy,
maybe there's something to it.
A beautiful future for us
would be to do development that does really well
financially, has a much lower footprint,
and have lots of developers copy what we're doing.
So that it really spreads, and we
start to change how we live as Americans
and just change this desire for the bigger
is better philosophy.
I think we've only begun to re-examine what it
means to be successful in life.
But it's no longer that white picket fence.
It's no longer that McMansion.
I think that people are beginning
to recognize that they've maybe been tricked,
and that they maybe have more agency over their options
than they once thought they did.
We're out sharing a recipe.
You know, we're not out here trying to proselytize.
We're not trying to convert anyone to minimalism.
But I do want to share a recipe and see
if there are ingredients that other people can get value from
and apply those ingredients to their own life.
There is this underlying discontent,
and I think that it starts to manifest in our stuff.
And what I'm finding as we go out on the road,
and we talk to so many people, everyone
is looking for more meaning in their lives.
We're at the Tucson Book Festival.
We're getting ready to go sign some books,
and then a little bit later we'll do our speech.
Man, look at all these people waiting to get their books
signed by us.
Let's sit on the outside.
This just doesn't feel like us.
If one person comes,
then we will go out to the front and stand there.
OK.
What's happening, man.
I love your stuff.
Oh, thanks.
I'm a hugger, brother.
I'm going to give you a hug.
Yeah, yeah, I follow you guys on Facebook
and you've got your talk this afternoon.
What time is it at?
We're at 7 o'clock.
Imagine a life with less.
Less stuff, less clutter, less stress,
and debt, and discontent.
A life with fewer distractions.
Now imagine a life with more.
More time, more meaningful relationships,
more growth, and contribution, and contentment.
So it's funny because people will inevitably come up to us
and they'll be like, now I'm not a minimalist like you.
I've got this book collection and I love books.
And I've got a nice big library, and I
love the way the books smell.
I love turning the pages.
I love how they feel.
I love lending them out to my friends
and then we talk about the books later.
And I'm like, hey, keep your books.
It sounds like you get a lot of value out of your books.
And that's what I would say with any type of collection.
If you get a book or whatever,
that's great.
Make sure you minimize it afterwards.
But I'd love to get a hug from you as well, you know,
we're big-time huggers.
So they're free and transferable.
Make sure you grab one from us afterwards.
I was 27 years old.
I was the director of operations for 150 retail stores.
It was December 23, 2008, I got a phone call from my mom.
I sent it to voicemail because I was in a meeting.
At 7:00 PM, going through this barrage of emails,
and I realized I had several voicemails.
One was from my mom, and she'd been sober for a while,
but I could tell in the message she had been drinking.
On her voicemail, she just said, honey, it's me.
Can you call me back?
She told me the doctors had found something.
And she found out she had stage 4 lung cancer.
She went through chemo and radiation.
At stage 4, you usually don't get out of that.
I got to hospice.
My mom was still in the bed.
It was the first time I cried in my adult life.
Sobbed uncontrollably.
I kept saying I'm sorry.
I didn't even know why at the time I was saying it.
It just was the only thing that I could say.
I really wish that I would have spent more time with her.
"My mother's death still hangs in the air around me.
And now, during the same month, my six-year marriage is ending.
But even while Rome is burning, there's
somehow time for shopping at IKEA.
See, when I moved out of the house earlier this week toting
my many personal belongings in large bins and boxes,
and 50 gallon garbage bags, my first inclination
was, of course, to purchase the things I still
needed for my new place.
You know, just the basics.
A shower curtain, towels, a bed, and, oh, I
need a couch and a matching leather chair,
and a love seat, and a lamp, and a desk, and a desk chair,
and another lamp for over there.
And, oh, yeah, don't forget about the sideboard
that matches the desk and a dresser for the bedroom.
And, oh, I need a coffee table and a couple end tables,
and a TV stand for the TV I still need to buy.
And now that I think about it, I'm
going to want my apartment to be my style, you know,
my own motif.
So I need certain decoratives to spruce up the decor.
But wait, what exactly is my style?
And do these stainless steel picture frames
embody that particular style?
Does this replica Matisse sketch accurately
capture my edgy but professional vibe?
Exactly how edgy am I?
What espresso maker defines me as a man?
Does the fact that I'm asking these questions preclude me
from being a, quote, 'man's man'?
How many plates, and cups, and bowls should a man own.
I guess I need a dining room table, too, right?
And a rug for the entryway, and a bath mats.
What about that one thing that thing that's
sort of like a rug but longer?
Yeah, a runner.
I'm going to need one of those.
And I'm also going to need-- hell, what else do I need?"
My name is Sam Harris.
I'm an author and neuroscientist,
and I'm interested in how our growing understanding
of ourselves scientifically can, and must, and really
should change our conception of what
it means to live a good life.
Gratifying desires in a starkly materialistic way
is really an interesting phenomenon.
You have this thing that you were obsessed about.
But then, the new version comes out,
which is a new and improved in a dozen ways.
When it comes to the newest, hottest,
most crave-worthy status symbols,
you can bet customers will wait long hours to snag one.
And now you no longer care
about the one you have.
In fact, the one you have is a source of dissatisfaction.
I think we're confused about what's going to make us happy.
Many people think that material possessions are really
at the center of the bull's eye, and they
expect that gratifying each desire as it arises
will somehow summate into a satisfying life.
It is clear that, as human beings,
we have strong attachment initially
in our lives to people who are caring for us.
And sometimes it feels like those attachments spill over
to objects as if they were as important as people.
I'm not so sure that we have such a great relationship
with things.
Give me that box!
Get off of me!
Why are you being so aggressive?
You're scaring me.
I was talking to the author and sociologist
Juliet Schor.
And I said, the problem with our society
is that we're too materialist.
And she said, actually, if you think about it in some ways,
we're not material enough.
We are too materialistic in
the everyday sense of the word.
And we are not at all materialistic enough
in the true sense of the word.
We need to be true materialists, like really care
about the materiality of goods.
Instead we're in a world in which material goods are
so important for their symbolic meaning, what they
do to position us in the status system
based on what advertising or marketing says they're about.
The status quo in the fashion industry
right now is driven by fast fashion.
Maybe when our moms are shopping for clothes
or are grandmothers, there were four seasons a year.
Or maybe even two seasons.
You dressed for the cold, you dressed for the warm.
Now we work in a cycle of 52 seasons per year.
They want you to feel like you're out of trend
after one week, so that you will buy something new
the following week.
There have actually been accounts
of big fashion retailers baling all of the clothes from one
week together, slashing through them with scissors-- destroying
them-- and leaving them on the side of the road
so that nobody can resell them or even wear them.
They want consumers to buy as much clothing
as quickly as possible.
The era of fast fashion
in which we are making clothes in sweat shops
so we're not paying the true labor costs,
and we're not paying the ecological costs
of these things, drove the price of apparel
down so far that used apparel became worthless.
I like to think rice and beans cost more than used apparel.
In historical terms, that's the world upside down.
And that represents the economics
of such an extreme and profound unsustainability.
For a scholar of these things, it's
kind of breathtaking and horrifying.
Fast fashion is what's happened to apparel and then
increasingly to the home consumer goods sector.
Almost anything in the home now becomes an object
of fashionability, and that's been
a just dramatic transformation.
If you think about the concept of fashion,
it embodies in it the idea that you can throw things
away not when they're no longer usable,
but when they no longer have that social value
or they're no longer fashionable.
I think people buy because they're
trying to fulfill this void inside of them.
I know that because that was me.
But no matter how much stuff we buy,
and how many different fads that we try,
we don't become a more whole person.
We keep looking.
This hunger never gets fulfilled.
I think it goes to the bottom line fact
that you can never get enough of what you don't really want.
In other words, deep down, we don't really
want more goodies, more toys, more cars.
We want what they will bring us.
We want to feel whole.
We want to feel content.
This mindless consumption, this same thing
that's not making us happy, is also causing
the degradation of our habitat.
We can afford to have 350 parts per million of carbon
dioxide in the atmosphere.
We're closing in on 400 parts per million.
It's caused by the burning of oil, of natural gas, of coal,
of all the fuels that we use to power our consumer
economy, to power the making of crap that we don't need.
This is real, and we really
have to do something about it.
We're not going to ever
be able to achieve the environmental gains that we're
seeking while still expecting our lives to be the same.
We're going to have to give up a lot.
The secret is that a lot of that we're not actually
going to miss.
It has been like four plus years
that I've technically been homeless,
though I go to new countries and rent flats,
so it's maybe in between homes.
Or maybe home full.
I just have a lot of homes, just not in one place,
not for very long.
It's always interesting.
You go on a date or something and have
to explain, oh, yes, I'm homeless.
Maybe I shouldn't lead with that.
When I first started reducing the number of things
in my life, and started getting rid of essentially everything
that didn't fit into these bags, I
went through and took photos of everything
that I owned in the world and counted.
And as a result, I found out that I had
51 things in the entire world.
I started living this way about four years ago.
I was running a branding studio.
I had always wanted to travel the world,
and I had never left the country.
And that was kind of a sign of my failure in a lot of ways.
So I started up a blog, left my career behind in Los Angeles,
and started looking for something new, something
a little bit different, and something a little bit more
in line with what I wanted out of life.
And now I carry everything that I own on my back
much like a hermit crab or turtle.
I was able to get rid of everything
that I owned that didn't fit into carry-on luggage, which
was an immense decision and not something
that I expected from the get-go.
I realized very quickly I wouldn't need as much
and came to the conclusion that anything I left behind
would probably be left behind forever.
What did it at the end of the day,
knowing this path had been well tread,
the direction I was going, and these very, very successful men
and women with all of this money, and all this prestige,
and all this professional background behind them,
they weren't happy.
They're very successful, but not in an absolute sense.
They're dollars and cents successful.
It seemed far more likely that I could find something,
find a definition of success that would actually get me
to a place where I was both successful and just incredibly
happy.
It does look like money
can buy happiness in some sense.
In global research below $70,000 US a year,
adding greater material well-being
is linked to greater psychological well-being.
But when you start pushing past that rough threshold,
money doesn't buy happiness.
You can have more money, but you're not happier.
Jim Carrey has a quote
where he says, "I wish everyone could
become rich and famous so they could
realize it's not the answer."
The first response is always this.
Well, it's easy for Jim Carrey to say.
He's rich and famous, right?
And I'm like, wait a minute, who else could say that?
It would take someone rich and famous to be able to say,
it's not worth it.
We all need to have our basic needs met.
Having a house, food on the table, you know, being safe,
that's really important to recognize,
because not everyone has those things.
You think that more money is going
to, say, give you security.
The problem is, is that you don't necessarily
have control over making more.
One thing you do have control over is spending less.
What you do have control over is having less,
and that by having less, you automatically
stretch what you do have.
It's not so much about financial gain for me
as it is about financial freedom, which is the ability
to wake up in the morning and spend one's day as they
see fit.
Part of why we consume a thing is that we work for so long,
and a lot of people aren't finding
fulfillment in their jobs.
And they need some way to tell themselves
that it isn't worth it, that it is
amounting to something more than a few numbers in a bank
account.
There's more.
There's more to life than bills, and money, and work.
How do you win?
You win by the traditional monikers of success.
You win by how many zeroes are at the end of your paycheck.
I remember I was sitting in a Barnes and Noble's, and I
was deciding what major I would study,
and all I was doing was leafing through this book.
It was a book that showed a degree versus earning
potential over time.
And that's when I zeroed in on finance and accounting.
My entire life became about winning with a capital
W. My entire life became about being the guy that
would be respected.
I had a series of vertical leaps from my 20s which landed me
to this place in 2008.
I'm making a ridiculous six-figure salary.
I've got a corner office.
And on December 31, 2007, my boss calls me into his office,
and he tells me that I'm getting a promotion.
And this was it.
This was the game changer.
This is me being a junior partner in this firm.
And everything that I had ever worked for
was going to be handed to me right then and there.
You know, in banking terms, I was minted.
And I remember just hearing this man say that,
and it was just a really bizarre kind of ethereal moment
where I was like watching this happen, you know.
It was almost-- and I walked out of his office,
and I walked back into my own, and I just closed the door
behind me and I just started weeping,
because I realized that I was completely and utterly trapped.
And that I would never be able to walk away
from that amount of money ever in my life.
And any dream that I had of living a life of purpose
and meaning, and being an adventurer, and somebody that
would actually take risks, and live
a life that's deliberate and intentional, those were gone.
When you see your life scripted out,
and you recognize that this is not anything I will--
why am I doing this?
This guy that's handing me this firm, I don't want to be him.
I don't envy his life.
Maybe this was never for me to begin with.
And maybe, if I don't leave right now,
I'm going to be that dude for the rest of my life.
And I just took the elevator down 28 stories
and that was it.
And ever since then, I decided that this life was going
to be mine, and it was going to be wildly,
flamboyantly my life.
Ready?
Here it is.
Nevada.
Nevada, Nevada!
Nevada!
Whoo-hoo.
Yeah!
We're back, Nevada!
Whoo!
Yeah.
That was good.
All those people are waiting,
and I'm not sure where they're supposed to be.
Cool.
I'm thinking-- do you want to take a look over here?
Sure, we can do that.
We're scrambling to find seats for roughly 30 people.
This is the most disorganized night
of the tour so far.
We're in Las Vegas.
Go figure.
And the space that we rented here, for whatever reason,
aren't ready for us, even though that we
paid the rent for the space.
Thankfully, there are some awesome people here
who are really helping us.
Somehow we're going to make this work.
Yes.
Wow.
Thank you very much.
You know it's funny, I used to think
rich was earning $50,000 a year.
Then when I started climbing the corporate ladder
in my early 20s, I quickly began earning $50,000.
But I didn't feel rich.
Something went wrong.
I had to go back to the drawing board,
and I found out that I hadn't adjusted for inflation.
OK, so we can
pontificate for only so long.
We're really here for you, as Ryan mentioned,
and so we'd like to do what we call questions and attempted
answers.
Hmm.
You're right, there are two sides of the spectrum.
I think we're ideally somewhere in the middle of that, right?
Because I don't think there's anything
wrong with consumption.
The problem was compulsory consumption.
Buying stuff because that's what you're supposed to do.
That's what advertising tells you do.
Or that's what the magic template is for happiness,
and then when you get it, you realize
that it doesn't make you as happy as you thought it would.
Yeah, that was a great comment.
Thank you so much.
Amen.
Let me grab a hug.
Yeah.
Yeah, thank you so much.
I tell you, your personality
and your straightforwardness, and answering
all the questions, that charisma value,
they was connecting with the people,
as you can see yourself.
It's like 4:30 in the morning.
Yes.
And we are going to go be on TV.
Good morning, 5:23.
A lot of us look forward to buying the latest
gadget or smartphone.
But this morning, I'm joined by two men who've
taken what they say is the simpler route
and are living a life of minimalism.
Hello
Hi, we're here for 5 o'clock
hour and 6 o'clock hour, Josh and Ryan with the Minimalists.
I was living the American Dream,
and I realized it wasn't my dream.
I looked around at all the stuff in my life
when my mother died and my marriage ended,
both in the same month, and sort of questioning
what was actually important.
What things were actually adding value to my life?
And I realized that many of the things
that I bought to make me happy, they weren't actually doing
their job.
OK, well, good luck to you.
Take it easy.
Don't do too much.
Don't buy anything today, all right?
Amen.
Good luck with that.
We'll be back in just a bit.
Minimalism is not
a radical lifestyle.
Yeah, I absolutely believe in quality over quantity.
So I'd much rather have one nice sweatshirt
than a closet full of ugly sweatshirts
that I don't enjoy wearing.
I don't own a lot of clothes now,
but all the clothes I do own are my favorite clothes.
So let's take a look at what I have packed
for 10 months of traveling.
I'm wearing my one pair of jeans,
got a couple of denim shirts.
I have a short sleeve, button-up oxford, two T-shirts,
a blow dryer.
Every good minimalist has a blow dryer.
And plenty of underwear.
Now here's the secret with underwear.
You have to have one color that's in the middle.
This is how you separate your dirty underwear
from your clean underwear-- with the red pair of underwear.
Toiletry bag.
Everyone needs a toiletry bag, obviously.
I also have a laptop with me, but that's it for 10 months.
We didn't really
have a plan, which is pretty much our story.
In 2010, when I was really digging into this decluttering
and simplifying, I thought about the one place
in my house that was the most cluttered,
and that was my closet.
And so I decided to create a minimalist fashion challenge
to use less than what I had.
So Project 333, the challenge for me
was to wear 33 items for three months.
And the 33 items included clothing, jewelry, accessories,
and shoes.
And that's where I usually lose people.
It was a great way for me to really see what I needed,
what I was using, and just if it would make a difference.
And so I was working in advertising.
I had a lot of clients I had to see every day.
I'd go to sales meetings, and for that first three months,
nobody noticed.
The story got picked up by the Associated Press,
because so many people were writing about it,
and practicing it, and trying it.
In this video I'm going
to talk more about how I plan my Project 333.
Project 333
And I thought, oh boy, this is it,
and they didn't notice.
So I probably went that full year
until I left my job with no one really
knowing that I was dressing with only 33 items.
I do this thing called Project 333,
and it just kind helps me keep my order really simple.
I went from this giant closet where I had,
I don't know, 100 sweaters to now having
this super tiny wardrobe and being able to share
a closet with Logan.
And that's made a big difference,
just I don't fret about what I'm going
to put on in the morning, because all the stuff
in my closet is awesome.
At least I think so.
There's something
about not being prepared for every moment that actually
helps you engage with your community.
Being pregnant, for instance, it's such a limited time.
I had a dress-up event to go to you,
and I said to David, let me go see if I can find a dress.
And I was thinking, gosh, this is really outdated.
I have two months left.
The event is next week.
What am I going to do?
So I called a couple of my girlfriends.
Hey, do you have any dresses I can go through?
But in the past, I definitely would
have bought what I needed when I needed it,
because that's what you do.
You prepare yourself, you know, for your situation.
The beauty of it is, it's become very communal.
Our friends ask us for stuff.
We've become closer to people because of it.
Mark and I got married in 2005,
and a year later I started feeling really bad.
I had a lot of vertigo, and tingling, and fatigue.
That following year got really bad,
and in July I was diagnosed with MS.
And at first we were both terrified.
MARK: It was hard.
It was hard.
That was a tough time.
I mean, immediately, my response wasn't
I've got to simplify things.
I'm a slow learner.
So I decided I had to really push hard
to prove that I was OK.
And so I worked more.
I worked out more.
I really pushed myself for probably that first month
and I felt terrible.
In any disease or sickness,
one of the biggest factors, one of the things
that contributes to these things in a negative way
is the stress in your life.
By getting rid of these things in our lives, these material
items, and all this excess that we used to live in,
good things happen.
Since then, I have not
had what I would consider a relapse.
I'm in better health than I was before I was diagnosed.
People always tell you, or at least they
did for me in the early stages of MS,
you have to listen to your body.
Like, listen to my body?
I can even listen to my family.
I don't know how I'm going to hear my body.
And so as I started to move that stuff out,
I was able to finally realize what
I had sacrificed by being busy, by engaging in constant work.
We have this capacity for focus,
but we're living it in a context where we are continually
moving from one stimulus to the next in search
of the dopamine experience where we're rewarded
by the next email, or the next re-Tweet,
or with the next thing that comes
into our phone rather often.
I think there's a price we pay for that.
It's really become an issue.
There was a Nokia study that says
the average person checks his or her phone like 150 times a day.
You walk down the street in any major city--
locked into their devices.
We are totally in the Matrix.
And it's easier to be mindless and just read the paper,
update your social media feed, and consume.
Because you can do anything you want,
you can potentially do everything you want.
But to do everything you want, you
have to sacrifice the things that really are important.
When it comes to the overwhelm, the easiest way to solve that
is to turn it off.
Really, just turn it off.
It was really powerful to realize that most
of my life was in a daydream.
I got here at ABC News when I was 28 years old.
I was really an ambitious young guy.
And my way of compensating for my insecurity
about being such a newbie was to throw myself into the job
and really become a workaholic.
And after 9/11, I raised my hand to go overseas and cover
the ensuing conflicts.
We were fortunate this week
to have our reporter Dan Harris on a trip organized
by the Taliban.
We arrived at night, a spine-rattling
ride down a single, mangled road into a city under siege.
I spent a lot of time in Iraq and Afghanistan
without really thinking much about
the psychological consequences.
And when I came home from a particularly long trip in Iraq,
I got depressed.
And then I did something really, really dumb,
which was I started to self-medicate
with recreational drugs.
It was enough according to my doctor
to provoke a panic attack on live television.
And we're going to go now to Dan Harris, who's
at the news desk.
Dan?
Health news now.
One of the world's most commonly prescribed medications
may be providing a big bonus.
Researchers report people who take cholesterol lowering drugs
called statins for least five years
may also lower their risk for cancer.
But it's too early to prescribe statins slowly
for cancer production.
That does it for news.
We're going to go back now to Robin and Charlie.
It raised the level of adrenaline
in my brain which, according to my doctor,
primed me to lose it on Good Morning America in front
of 5 million people.
5.019 million people, according to the Nielsen ratings.
That moment set me off in a weird and windy road that
ultimately led me to the last thing that I ever thought
would be useful for anybody, which was meditation.
We're ruminating about past and future
in a way that keeps us from really connecting
with the present moment in a way that values it as good enough.
Meditation is a technique of finding well-being
in the present moment before anything happens.
You can be happy and satisfied simply being aware
of the sensation of breathing.
Very rarely are we fully dedicated to one thing.
We're interrupting ourselves or allowing ourselves
to be interrupted by these streams of data
and what would, in any other context,
be thought of as distractions, but now we
think of them as just sort of all necessary parts
of our bandwidth.
If I leave my phone in my pocket
and it's on vibrate mode, unconsciously I'll
flinch when it vibrates.
I even flinch when it doesn't vibrate thinking it vibrates.
And that kills that little discussion.
Like those nanoseconds of distraction,
I think, has a hugely detrimental effect.
Everywhere I look, it's constant high frequency flinches.
This anticipation of novelty
has the character of making us the lab rat is just
pressing the bar.
Meditation is a great, great antidote to that.
People around here at ABC News would ask me,
why are you meditating?
Parenthetically, what's the matter with you?
What happened to you?
Eventually, I started to answer, oh,
you know, because it makes me about 10% happier.
And I could see the looks transform from scorn slash
skepticism into interest like, oh, that sounds reasonable.
I'd like that.
One of the best pieces of advice I've ever
received in my entire life was from a meditation teacher
named Joseph Goldstein.
I was asking him about the utility of worry.
In the specific context I was talking about
whether it makes sense to worry about missing a flight.
And I was arguing to him that, look,
you Buddhists are always talking about how thoughts are just
thoughts.
They don't necessarily have any connection to reality,
but the fact is, if I missed my flight, I'm screwed.
And he said, you're unquestionably correct,
but there's a certain amount of worry that that makes sense
and a certain amount of worry that doesn't.
So on the 17th time that you're worrying
about missing your flight and all
of the horrible ramifications, maybe
ask yourself a simple question.
Is this useful?
Boom.
For a guy who'd spent his whole life worrying, and thinking
that my worrying was the edge I had over everybody else,
because I knew I was going to be more anxious and more
compulsive than any of my competitors,
I realized there is a certain amount of worrying
that is what I call constructive anguish,
and then there's useless rumination that's
just making you miserable.
It's not like I'm 100% mindful all the time.
You know, I still do an enormous amount of stupid shit,
and if my wife was here, she would give you
the 90% still a moron spiel.
There's just no question that I'm still
an idiot in lots of ways, but I'm less of an idiot,
and less of a jerk, and more thoughtful, and more focused,
and calmer.
We've been on tour all year,
and just when I start to think if we're getting through,
if we're making a difference, the Today Show gives us a call
and asks us to be on.
Now we have an opportunity to share this with millions
of people which is huge.
Dude, we're actually late now,
so we got to go.
Uh, the entrance is--
What's the address?
It's 35?
Yeah, but you'll see like the Today Show
stuff set up.
Oh, right there, there it is.
You sure this is it?
Yep, go downstairs.
Ooh, we're in it together.
From NBC News, this is Today.
With Black Friday, Cyber Monday,
boughs of holly, and stuffed stockings,
it can start to feel like the holidays are
more about more and less about what's really important.
Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus
have come to see things differently.
They are what you call--
The Minimalists.
In a hypothetical world,
what if one of you falls madly in love
with a maximalist who likes her stuff.
What are you going to do?
No, that's a great question.
My girlfriend, actually, I live with, I
don't think she would call herself a minimalist.
She's got about 20 pairs of shoes.
Oh, that's not bad.
That's nothing compared to what I own.
Hello?
But what I will say,
is that her and I have very similar values and beliefs.
We respect one another.
We love one another.
We appreciate one another.
It's a great lifestyle, great topic
for Today especially.
It's great to meet you both.
The Minimalists' latest
book, Everything That Remains, is in stores right now.
What a concept.
So the event last night was crazy.
We showed up, the store owner had about 30 chairs out.
I asked him to put out more chairs.
And he was like, are you sure you're going to be more chairs?
Ken Burns was here and he maxed out all my seating.
I got 60 chairs total.
And I said, yeah, I think we'll have about 50 or 60 people show
up.
Go ahead and bring the rest of the chairs out.
And we ended up having like 150, 200 people show up.
I mean, people were standing on the bookshelves wall-to-wall.
Thanks for coming out to support us, man.
Thanks for everything you do.
I think your story came at the right time.
Serendipity.
You guys are my inspiration.
Awesome, thank you so much for that.
I'm glad we could help.
Thanks for coming out, brother.
We're seeing more, and more,
and more people show up, so it's great to see
the message is spreading.
So we are on our way to LA.
It's going to be our biggest venue so far.
Expecting one of our biggest crowds, and really, I think,
LA is a city that could really use this message.
Cars, homes, and six-digit salaries.
It may sound like a dream life.
Joshua Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus on a world book tour
and here to explain why someone would just
give up all of this stuff.
Letting it go was really difficult.
I wish I could say it was as easy as renting a dumpster
and throwing away all my stuff, but it was really a process.
I love watching how it's spreading
like wildfire in a good way.
It's like a good plague.
A startling new study
shows a huge number of children under the age of four
have access to a mobile device, and some of those kids
started using them before they were one year old.
We're building more competitive, more interesting
environments for the consumer.
This means adjusting the signals they're
telling us about, their, interests,
and making sure we can control what message they see next.
Toronto-based ad exec
has written an op-ed in the Globe and Mail
saying it's time we stop advertising to children.
Advertising to children
has existed for so long.
What's changed, though, is the amount
of this advertising and the media
through which this advertising comes.
Historically, companies
which had products aimed at kids would go toward the mothers
in getting the mothers to want to buy the stuff for the kids.
What happens is the companies decide to go around the mothers
and go directly to the kids.
I don't know what the most common three words
are in American homes.
I don't know if it's I love you or if it's I want that.
5,000 advertisements we see every single day
from the moment we're born.
And they all tell us, hey, this is
what your life should be about.
It should be about accumulating more things
or it should all be about focusing on you.
If you guys have
walked around a kids' store lately,
but it's kind of incredible.
Anything you ever could have dreamed of has been thought of.
Advertisers have just realized
there's this huge market.
There are parents who want to give their kids the best,
and they're really working hard to go that angle.
There's a problem of both process and content,
and the problem of content is huge.
The products that are being advertised to kids are junk.
Welcome to Mutant Mania Wrestling.
120 new characters you can collect.
The secret is their Flexi-Spine!
It's a junk culture.
It's food that's bad for them.
It's crappy toys that are gendered and violent.
I don't see the argument for subjecting children to this,
like there's no positive social benefit from it.
We just know there's a negative, and it's just
the political power of advertising
and the companies that do the advertising that keeps us
from doing something about it.
So I've heard someone say,
there's another word for minimalism--
it's called being a bachelor.
Yeah, I mean, I can see how people would think, oh,
that's really easy if you're not married and you have no kids.
How do I set an example of myself being married and having
six kids, which is totally unminimalist and very ironic?
How do I live a minimalist lifestyle
with those kinds of constraints?
Jacqueline and I
haven't been too prescriptive about like, no, you
have five toys, you know.
No, dude, you can only have one truck.
You can't have three trucks.
It's like, no, when I was a little kid,
I didn't have one GI Joe.
I had like 100 GI Joes.
We've welcomed things into our life,
but definitely with the intention
of thinking about what we're doing as opposed
to just consuming.
When you live with other people
and you're a family, you can't just make unilateral decisions.
OK, we're now getting rid of everything
and throwing the TV out the door.
There will be a riot.
That's a little bit frustrating, because you can't just
get your way.
But it's also a really interesting experiment
in how you can move together as a group
and learn about this together as a group.
At the very beginning
when we decided to live with less,
we knew early on that minimalist was just
going to look like the way we wanted it to look.
I remember going through getting rid of things
and finally saying, OK, Sam, let's go through your toys
and let's get rid of some of things you don't need anymore.
And he had no problem whatsoever.
My daughter is seven, and she is very different.
She loves every doll that she can get.
Like, she collects rocks, twigs, and anything else
she can find she collects and she hold on to.
You know, as parents we get to set some boundaries for her,
but ultimately we let her choose what she wants.
I think he certainly has
been at a different level of minimalism than I am.
He wanted to get rid of more than I wanted to get rid of,
and so there comes the compromise.
His side of the closet looks much smaller
than my side of the closet.
And that's OK with us.
I think one of the lessons that we've
learned through this whole journey
is just that our kids are really watching us.
And we can tell them that we want them to be certain people
but, man, they're picking up a lot more just
from how we live our lives.
This is the undercurrent of consumerism.
Removing some of that stuff provided a safe environment
where they're able to become what they most want to be
rather than what the world will try to convince them to be.
Good evening
It's clear that the true problems of our nation
are much deeper, deeper than gasoline lines or energy
shortages, deeper even than inflation or recession.
In a nation that was proud of hard work,
strong families, close-knit communities, too many of us
now tend to worship self-indulgence
and consumption.
Human identity is no longer defined by what one does,
but what one owns.
But we've discovered that only things and consuming
things does not satisfy our longing for meaning.
We've learned that piling up material goods cannot fill
the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.
This is not a message of happiness or reassurance,
but it is the truth and it is a warning.
We think we need those things,
because we've been told we need those things.
We've been told we need those things by our society.
It's been this kind of slow, little thing that's
just kind of trickled in and suddenly it
becomes the thing you do.
It really does come down to a value-based ideal.
You want to do the most amount of good
and get the most amount of value with exactly what you need.
Having too little is not going to give you that
and having too much is not going to give you, right?
Having that balance, having enough,
that's what you're looking for.
If I had to revise the American Dream,
it would be more about coming together in community.
It would be more about a society which
had much less inequality and more fairness
in which everybody had a chance, and that
is responsible toward the planet and our ecosystem.
To me, that would be an American Dream.
When you talk about not consuming,
people think, well, you're trying to take something away
from them.
But the truth of the matter is that I
think that what this movement is really about
is questing after a life that's good for ourselves
and good for the people around us.
So we're in LA right now.
We're here for our biggest event.
What we're trying to do is show people
that there is a different way for us to live.
The people you bring into your life,
you should always be hanging out with people
who have the same values, and that's really
what minimalism is about.
It's about living deliberately.
So every choice that I make, every relationship, every item,
every dollar I spend, I'm not perfect obviously,
but I do constantly ask the question, is this adding value?
Am I being deliberate with this decision?
Go see them tonight
at The Last Bookstore at 7 o'clock.
Thank you, Joshua and Ryan, for coming in.
I didn't realize it at the time,
but I was so focused on what my idea of success was.
My idea of success was making more money.
Consumer relationships were a priority.
Well, I didn't pay any attention to the people
closest to me, including my mom.
The whole point of this message,
the whole point of us sharing this story,
is to help people curb that appetite for more things,
because it's such a destructive path to go down.
I literally have used people to sell cell phones.
I've used people to get bigger and better clients.
And what I love about my life now, is I can be genuine.
And that there is no manipulation.
It is my very, very great pleasure
to introduce Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan
Nicodemus, the Minimalists.
Imagine a life with less, a life of passion
unencumbered by the trappings of the chaotic world around you.
Well, what you're imagining is an intentional life.
It's not a perfect life, and it's not even
an easy life but a simple one.
What I found with minimalism
is it's a way of saying let's stop the madness.
You don't need this stuff.
Like, it's not going to do it.
It's not the answer.
There's a movement growing,
and I don't think that there's a cap to it.
I'm now surrounded by people
who are inspired and creating massive social change
and impact.
Their depth and profundity of my relationship
is beyond anything I could have ever imagined.
When you recognize that this life is yours,
and that it is your one and only, and when that ceases
to be esoteric bullshit, when that's not hippie
poetry anymore, when the pragmatism of that statement
seeps directly in your bones, and you recognize that this
is it, everything changes.
I don't know
where you are in your journey, where you are in your life,
or wherever you're going on that journey,
but we are really grateful you are here with us tonight.
So if I could give you one takeaway, one thing
to bring away from all of this, it'll be this.
Love people and use things, because the opposite
never works.
Thank you so much for coming out.