💾 Archived View for fungihirn.flounder.online › gemlog › 2021-03-13_minimalism_and_anticapitalism.gm… captured on 2021-12-17 at 13:26:06. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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I worked late yesterday evening but still woke up way too early for a weekend out of (very recent) habit, so I was too lazy to get out of hammock, but too awake to fall back asleep, and too much able to understand part of the phone conversation of my upstairs neighbor. I ended up grabbing my phone, but Mastodon quickly ran dry since I had checked it barely 6 hours earlier. But then I remembered I had a gemini client on it! And so I spent the next two hours jumping from gemlog to gemlog until my battery ran out.
A surprising amount of logs were talking about minimalism. I guess that's to be expected amount people who would enjoy using a minimal protocol. It made me want to write down what my flavor of it is.
First I guess I have been cheating at it. From when I started university and moved in a 9m² student room to now while I'm finishing my PhD, I've moved every two years in average. A couple of times I first brought all my stuff back to my parents' place during summer, and then I could move in the new place taking only the important things with me. I could cram all of the clutter in the closet of my old room and more or less trust that I could still access it if I went there. In the meantime my mum has been decluttering herself and my sister's stuff has been replacing mine, so from time to time I am asked about an old object and I have to chose if I really want to keep it. I don't think so much of it left now.
I came to minimalism from two points: knowing that I will have to transport everything on my back at some point (or bother some people with a car if I'm moving within the same city), and a political alignment towards anticapitalism / anti-consumerism / environmentalism. I'd like to keep everything I have alive as long as I​ can.
Even if I have a salary now, I don't want to increase my standard of living; it's perfectly fine now.
Instead of a bed I'm sleeping in a camping hammock padded with blankets. I had bought while I was staying in Sweden so I could go out in the forest with it in my backpack and spend the night. When I moved last time, I brought all my stuff doing back and forth bus trips in an evening, and went to the city center to buy a stand for the hammock that I (painfully because it was a 20kg box) also transported by bus, so the same evening I has something to sleep on.
I do tend to keep every box and jar I get as food packaging or when I have to buy some more important stuff. I build two small shelves out of carton boxes that I​glued together and painted, and honestly I love them. The food packaging often ends up as pots for plants that I grow from food scraps or seeds, and I love having lots of big plants in my flat.
I don't really know where I'm going with this anymore. I had coffee, I'm facing the rare rays of sunshine reaching my balcony, and the inspiration is gone. Sorry for the not very coherent rambling! I thought about just deleting it, but I spent an hour already writing that, so it hurts me a bit to just scrape it. I guess I'll just publish it anyway.