Minimalism is rubbish, innit? (Philosophy & Politics, I.M.H.O.)

minimalism is a watchword and people
manage to make money talking about it on YouTube I don't dig it I don't support it I don't have any reason to come on and um insult and denigrate my fellow vegans who were into minimalism however some vegans very close to my heart um rep this cause so I've got to come out and explain what I do not wrap the cause I am NOT a minimalist and I am NOT Pro minimalist I'm in fact an team in most this may be my most controversial video since I came out and admitted that I am anti digital nomad Digital nomadism was another one of these catchphrases watchwords excuses for the unexamined life okay let's start I got three headings here I'm gonna dress minimalist murder number one um in economics there is a contrast between efficiency and robustness these are not universal terms is not like there's one definition for all these words are used in economics but it's still worth knowing about um very often you'll have an efficiency expert in economics who walks into a hotel and sees a bunch of people sitting around doing nothing and he says fire those people you're making the hotel more efficient however you may be making the hotel less robust the guy who you see sitting there doing nothing he may actually legitimately be sitting there doing nothing as part of his job however when something goes wrong in the hotel when one of the guests has a heart attack it needs to be put into an ambulance when one of the guests has too much to drink and vomits all over the beautiful carpeting in the hotel bar or the hotel lobby whatever it is this guy is sitting there doing nothing may have to jump into action maybe he jumps into action simply replacing a number another member of staff because somebody has to leave their posts to deal with that crisis maybe his skill is simply that he knows how to drive a van maybe he is not the most impressive person stuff maybe he is worse at every in the hotel than every other member of staff so when he's on the front desk he's worse than the front desk person when he's in the back room doing stock he's worse at the other than the other people at doing stocking the shelves he's bad at being a bartender he's bad he but maybe he is bad at every single job in the hotel but nevertheless he is essential to the robustness of the institution not to its efficiency robustness and efficiency are totally different and in some ways contradictory concepts in economics and very very often you do have a company that gets rid of its capacity to do extraneous things and then when there's a crisis when there's some kind of unexpected change in the market they find that although they became very efficient at doing just one thing under one set of circumstances and at one set of conditions they have in fact lost the robustness to needed to adapt they have lost the robustus they need to cope with unforeseen circumstances now I chose to use an example starting off in human resources it's very easy to hate the guy who seems to be sitting there doing nothing in the same way when we switch into inanimate objects it's very easy to look at the mess in a garage it's very easy to look at an old box of tools that are disorganized and miscellaneous and say I don't want the mess I don't want the fuss I don't want the redundancy but what you see is eliminating redundancy just like this guy in the hotel may in fact be eliminating robustness there is power in having a garage full of miscellaneous disorganized tools maybe tools you didn't buy maybe tools that have been there since your grandfather gave them to you maybe you have a couple different boxes of tools that are just organized by size and when there's a problem an unforeseen problem you didn't think you'd have you can go to those boxes and rummage through them and find what you're looking for this is totally antithetical to minimalism minimalism as an aesthetic minimalism as a life style man and minimalism as a philosophy and believe me I'm aware there's more than one definition of minimalism out there I'm gonna get to one of them a little bit later in this video in fact the type of robustness the being prepared for unforeseen circumstances which is built into for example the clutter of an old kitchen drawer a kitchen drawer that doesn't just contain tools that you bought yourself it's not minimalistic it's not sleazy but we may contain tools that your mother gave you and your grandmother gave you it may contain some tools you forgot you owned the tools you think you'd never use there's an old melon baller there's an there were three different types of can opener and there why do you need three types of can opener you don't need them or you don't think you need them and then there's some circumstance when you think god how do I open this thing how do I cope with this problem and you open up that drawer and you start going through you start rummaging around and you find that stuff the the so-called minimalist lifestyle in fact is eliminating this robustness from your life and this type of robustness it can apply to things like books having reference books you can get a handle on it can reply to it can apply to tools it can apply to people what you may think of as redundancy and mess and clutter can in fact be crucial to productivity um I actually once when I first got involved with Buddhist philosophy and Buddhism as a religion uh there was a woman in my life not my girlfriend not by any stretch of imagination my girlfriend we had a somewhat bizarre relationship but I can't call it romantic but I remember there was a woman in my life and she asked me quite ferociously she wasn't anti Buddhist but she was kind of anti organized religion she said why would you why would you ever want to identify yourself with Buddhism like even if you want to study yet why would you call yourself a Buddhist I now call myself an expletive um and I remember what I said to her was you know to me Buddhist philosophy is just like discovering you know having studied so much European philosophy Western philosophy it's like you're in an old house and you open a drawer you never thought to open before and you find the most remarkable assortment of forks and knives and can openers and you know what it's a little bit dangerous if it's dark if you're not paying attention if you put your hand in there you might get cut but it's useful and it's useful ways you maybe can't quite anticipate you know I discovered Buddhist philosophy like a wonderful drawer full of forks and knives forks and knives and perhaps some kitchen tools we we don't quite have any use for now look one of the definitions circulating for minimalism is that you only own things you only keep things that give you joy so you can tell them glancing down normally I have no notes at all but I wrote that down because I didn't want to misrepresent the people might disagree with to me this is still consumerism that fundamentally that is simply consumerism with a different aesthetic buying and owning things that give you joy is consumerism period and the examples I had at the beginning of this video are actually not consumerist they're not based on things that give you joy robustness is about preparation it's about its it's not about efficiency it's not about productivity it's about being able to cope with unforeseen circumstances which to me is a set of criteria that aren't hostile to consumerism but are actually completely separate from and and different from consumerism whereas the idea of only owning things that give you joy this is a consumer fantasy that's all what is this is this is simply consumerism with this somewhat different aesthetic you know you can own a black t-shirt or a white t-shirt and it's still consumerism doesn't doesn't change anything just to throw in an example I mean I I did for many years I lived out of a backpack I had no choice I did humanitarian work I had no home I had to be able to relocate at any given time so each and every possession that I owned had to be examined carefully nevertheless my aesthetic was not minimalist it was pragmatist it was pragmatic I would say it was instrumentalist it was looking at the things in my life as tools and not to make me happy not enough for any of these you know aesthetic reasons not for reasons of self-indulgence but it reflected the same aesthetic of being prepared that frankly is part and parcel of why I work out of the gym you guys heard me say that before I don't work out the doom to be beautiful I work out of the gym so I'm prepared for the unexpected I'm prepared for violence I'm prepared for a fist fight or a knife fight that breaks out in the street I'm prepared to be thrown down a flight of stairs and get up afterwards that's the kind of preparation when I was doing humanitarian work I've been involved with humanitarian work of various kinds but I only had one job that actually involved sacks of rice been given to starving people like humanitarian working that really simple sense I remember I was packing up before leaving the capital city and my friend of mine there he saw the stuff I had kind of laid out like on and around the suitcase it was the final stage of putting stuff into the suitcase and you know when I got it I was going from the city to a town and then you go from the town to the remote village the real remote frontier where people were starving some of the time where they had extreme poverty and there was a very bright and eye catching steel chain not quite a chain a steel cable it's coated in bright red plastic so that it couldn't rust I remember this guy knew I mean I had no choice in this sense but to be minimalistic each every pound mattered everything I put in that suitcase matter don't have so much space in the suitcase only so much weight you can carry yeah why why are you taking that why are you taking a solid steel cable a solid steel rust-proof cakewalk I looked at him I said I don't know yet I could imagine a lot of situations being out in the middle of nowhere and Laos where that solid steel cable could be useful life or death situations all kinds of situations and just once our little Akane team called a car or a little third-world vehicle trundle trundling along we didn't get stuck where the road had collapsed but another vehicle in front of us had and I got out that tow cable it was a solid steel cable strong enough to tow a car strong enough to keep a boat tethered to the side of the river like you know there were all kinds of circumstances I can imagine including some I'm not gonna say on the internet where you might have to use a tool of that kind so you know this is a heavy solid steel object I carried with me not for any specific purpose but for many possible purposes all right if you call this minimalism why is it about maximizing your enjoyment in life to me well you guys call minimalism it's not pragmatism it's not this is simply another form of consumerism and this is simply a new meson valour for consumerism because all you're saying is that you're trying to be happy you're trying to enjoy yourself and your enjoyment of life includes a certain kind of carefree disregard for the future a certain kind of lack of preparation for the future a certain kind of lack of responsibility a lack of devil-may-care relaxed attitude okay so what like if you inherit you know your grandmother's house and let's say it has all those tools in the garage and it has the drawer full of miscellaneous tools and forks and knives in the kitchen so you're gonna dump all that out you're gonna get rid of all your reference books you're gonna get rid of the accumulation of perhaps a century or maybe several centuries in your grandmother's house of potentially useful objects so you're not prepared you know raising kids also involves all kinds of preparedness I remember I had this huge bin just full of different toys to play with with my daughter she gets bored of one toy you go to the bin you get something else out yummy I mean you know tools are not always necessarily of that that most pragmatic of varieties but why is at that all of your plans why is it that the way you define your life and your lifestyle what you buy what you own and what you use is simply linked to what gives you joy or in other words what gives you the most enjoyment this is still consumerism and this is still maximizing it's not minimalism its maximalism it is simply maximizing your enjoyment of how you spend your money how you spend your time how you live a life of passive capitalist self-indulgence and that's not an ethic or an aesthetic that I'm interested in and I think we can contrast that to an approach to use a word that's that's associated with the philosophy of John Dewey but it's being used by many philosophers we can contrast that to instrumental ISM instrumentalism would be looking at things as a means to an end so why do I have this tool why do I have this solid metal of tether why do I have this you know drawer full of tools there are means to an end no they're not part of my identity I understand the part of minimalism is a rebellion against the concept that the things you own define who you are okay but my response to that is say no the things I own don't define who I am but they define the challenges that I'm prepared for they enable me to cope they enable me to solve problems and I want to own things that will be problem solving including problems that I can't foresee and that I can't anticipate I'm interested in robustness and ever guard these things merely as means to hand but finally my third and final point here is that I really think the danger of minimalism and when I see it invoked in the vegan political context is that I regard this minimalism as a form of phony asceticism a full a form of phony asceticism it's a form of phony asceticism that really just becomes an accoutrement for a life of self-indulgence and because of my background and put a scholarship I have seen a lot of that I have seen a lot of phony asceticism invoked as glorifying a life that principally is still just about wealth about one's own happiness about indulging one's own moods and fantasies and desires it's based on gratifying one's own desires and that has nothing to do with the things I care about passionately which to some extent are ethical and to some extent or idiosyncratic you guys everybody say I care about the fact that Cree in a jib way are going extinct in Canada another indigenous language in Canada is Ottawa the Ottawa language at this point it already is extinct maybe there are 10 people who can still speak that language maybe not even 10 some of our languages I care about that it's partly ethical it's partly intellectual it reflects all kinds of things but I completely admit that's partly idiosyncratic it has nothing to do with owning things and it has nothing to do with refusal to own things to me the aesthetic you're painting over the top of a consumerist life within capitalism it's at best irrelevant to all the things that for me are definitive and shape my direction in life in terms of humanitarian engagement in terms of my political motivations in terms of vegan activism or in terms of my involvement with humanitarian work with language research with history with politics with any of these things by just say again that's not just dumb it's dangerous and maybe I'm uniquely qualified to say how that kind of delusion is dangerous because of my background in Buddhism but yes the story you tell yourself that by becoming a minimalist or by becoming a digital nomad you know the digital nomads are even closer to the permanent vacation paradigm that you are doing something morally different from an and morally superior to someone who you know shall we say accumulates or curates a collection of things I do think it's dangerous and I do think this it ultimately becomes a way for middle-class people to look down their noses and sneer at the clutter of someone who may really have good reason to have a meal do you repair cars if you do something productive with your possessions like repairing cars then you probably have a house full of clutter you have a garage full of clutter throughout full of miscellaneous tools and what have you and you know I think that in 2016 with the rise of digital technology I think that in reality what we're looking at is a hyper self-indulgent middle-class who have become totally alienated from the means of production from the reality of what it is to roll up your sleeves and repair your own car what it is to be prepared in all those ways big and small whether it's the steel tow cable or the you know container what have you and who think that ultimately to their superior to their own parents because they've chosen this mode of you know living in luxury that ultimately makes them more fragile more brittle less prepared to deal with unforeseen circumstances not only is it that they can't fix their own car they won't be able to cope with anything without logging into their computer going onto the internet and ordering the tools they need on Amazon and then waiting for them to arrive to close this video you know for me um of course I mean it's needlessly if you guys watch this channel you know me at all I don't define my life but my possessions but there is a real sense in which you need to have the humility to recognize the practical ways in which your possessions do to find your life I can't be a scholar of Buddhism without owning certain books and I did own those books in the past and I physically carried those books with me and I had the books shipped from Sri Lanka to Thailand and from Thailand to Canada if you want to be a serious scholar of Buddhism there are some heavy books you must possess and carry around and there is a very real sense and we I lose my identity as a buddhist scholar and i lose the capacity to do original research and buddhism when i give up those books when i threw those books away which i had to do in the same way that i think a craftsman loses part of us identity when he loses his tools and he loses the capacity to actually carve a piece of wood into a statue or to actually repair or something right so I understand minimalists wanting to rebel against the feeling that what they own defines who they are but my point my perspective in terms of instrumentalism is that instead we can just have a humble and down-to-earth attitude that what we own defines who we are in as much as what we own defines what we can do