TL;DR
Holistic minimalism is about removing constraints from all aspects of life—material, emotional, and occupational—to increase flexibility and resilience. Unlike traditional minimalism, which focuses on owning less, holistic minimalism seeks fulfillment in the ability to thrive regardless of circumstances. By stripping away unnecessary constraints, we can lead simpler, more agile, and fulfilling lives.
I always think of my boarding school years with nostalgia, they were spent in a very Platonic and Roman Catholic institution. Every term, our parents would stock our trunks with provisions they thought would last the term. We knew better than them, and it was as though a plague of human locusts attacked all the trunks in the boys’s dormitories (I do not know much about the girls) and by the second week only, almost everyone had run out of provisions. I recall a single friend of mine who was so disciplined that he almost always had provisions. Perhaps it is the best testament of his character that he is a Barrister today. One would be in grave error to think that we were less happy the moment we outlived our stock of provisions. In fact, we were arguably carefree and happier; there was no worrying that the little you had will be stolen, and even being gifted a bar of chocolate was as liberating as finding gold.
An attitude that I and my peers picked up during these years is that of appreciating provisions, but never getting too attached to having them that we could not stand not having them. While we always appreciated having provisions and found them to be duly necessary, we were totally fine without them. We learned that if there were provisions one should enjoy them, but also that the world will not stand still the moment our stock was depleted.
We made our lives simpler by not needing these provisions to be happy, and we were not very far from the concept of minimalism, the driving idea of which is the idea that we can find freedom and happiness by ridding ourselves of excess and focusing only on what is important.
Although the most popular contemporary idea of minimalism is strongly associated with the ownership of material things, minimalism can be much more than just about physical things. We can, as some are in the process of doing, try to define a specific type of minimalism for each aspect of our lives; digital minimalism, financial minimalism, philosophical minimalism, to name a few. While such approaches have their merits, it can be more practical (and minimalistic) to have a simple, cross-cutting idea of minimalism that applies across all aspects of our lives; to define a holistic minimalism.
Holistic minimalism is the removal of constraints on one’s life.
Let us use the analogy of our lives as corporations (MyLife LLC) of which we are CEOs. By this analogy, our daily activities are business processes and the various aspects of our lives are business divisions.
Every time we have a constraint in a business division of MyLife LLC, we add a layer of red tape. While it may seem at first that constraints in single divisions are not a bad idea, when MyLife LLC has to act as a single, efficient unit, too many single-unit constraints can create immense conflicts and grey space that effectively grounds MyLife LLC. They say the sum is bigger than the parts, and for MyLife LLC and its single-unit constraints, that is a lived experience.
Effective corporations (those that can move with speed and agility without breaking things) either have little red tape, or have put in place systems that guarantee such effectiveness in spite of the red tape that is necessitated by unique operating conditions. Given how hard and brittle systems for managing more red tape are, every organization can be better off trying to be the former as opposed to being the latter.
The driving idea behind holistic minimalism is in fact, to try to have less red tape in our lives, so that we can be quick, agile, and break less things.
One obvious benefit of holistic minimalism is the resilience that it can offer to the many twists and turns of life.
Think of that friend of yours that has a thousand constraints; they cannot sleep in a bed that is not perfectly made; they must have a perfect cup of Ethiopian coffee when they awake with the just the right amount of sugar; they must shower in hot water for at least 30 minutes; they must use five different cosmetic products before they step outside; they cannot stand any amount of dust or traffic; they must have lunch in a sterilised bowl; they need an umbrella to walk in the sun; they can only enjoy music if it is being played with state of the art speakers; they must have a mojito before they sleep. Do you really envy them?
While the above may have been an extreme depiction of a constraint-laden life, the point I am trying to pass on is that seemingly unrelated constraints can come together to suck away the essence of life by seeping away clarity and narrowing the field of life’s possible paths in which we find peace and fulfillment. When we have too many self-enforced constraints, we chip away at our resilience.
To live a holistically minimal life is to strip our life’s contraints to only the essential.
My experiences with managing provisions as a boarding school student are a good way to talk about holistic minimalism because they underscore an important distinction between minimalism and holistic minimalism: unlike the contemporary idea of minimalism that seeks fulfilment in less, holistic minimalism seeks fulfilment in flexibility. I would like to imagine that my schoolmates who could not survive without provisions were not more happy than those of who could in the first two weeks, but that they were less happy after we all depleted our stock.
This is very much the case in life; to have constraints is to narrow the scope of our happiness. Because of how seamless it is to add constraints (sometimes it only takes the unchecked cultivation of habits), we must be proactive of ridding our lives of the constraints that take away the essence of life. This is not an attack on contraints. It is an attack on the passive cultivation of contraints, and the cultivation of constraints that take away more than they enrich our lives. It is a call to live a holistically minimal life; to be able to enjoy the abundance (or mere presence) of anything material, financial, emotionall, experential, but to not be less alive in their absence; to not create dependencies.
I hope you consider living your life on whatever pieces of this idea appeal to you.