mnml lifestyling and the Minimalism Movement

Minimalism in architectural design requires MONEY and extreme attention and even devotion to detail.

It requires much over-focusing on tiny things such as walls intersecting with floors in perfectly straight tape-lined fashion.

If  ‘Grand Designs’ has taught me nothing else, it is that minimalism is a huge money and time suck.

People sink thousands and thousands of dollars into their bespoke barrenness.

And thus we arrive at minimalist designs new baby sister, minimalist lifestyle.

Where people brag about spending their days focusing on the things they love  – the great tenet of minimalist lifestyle being the removal of all unwanted distractions from life (including a 9-5 apparently) allowing for true devotion to important things.

But it seems in reality the minimalists spend much of their days focusing on how sparse their space or their life is and how they can further sparsify.

And then writing about it.

But more to the point they search for the perfect gear/shoes/laptop which is invariably expensive, and they over-focus on the details of the item – going to great lengths to regale blog audiences with the details and justifications of purchasing it, finding themselves seemingly enraptured in the minutiae of it.

Minimalist design differs from minimalist lifestyle perhaps most profoundly in that minimal lifestylists claim that their subculture is not about a visual, a superficial or surface appearance – where minimalist design embraces this as an important and deliberate facet.

It would seem minimalist lifestyle is pursued with the kind of mad vim usually associated with minimalist design, so perhaps the movement of mnml, the movement for voluntary simplicity, the movement for living functionally, should be taking notes from the brash, bold and beautifully barren minimalism movement that preceded it.