Revisiting minimalism: One month in a little backpack

During the month of December, I traveled around with just one small backpack and one handbag. This brush with minimalism left me with some thoughts and reflections.

When I was an adolescent, I had a phase where I would idolize the minimalist lifestyle to the point of committing to a black-and-white “personal uniform” just to aesthetically emulate the concept. More substantially, I was constantly aiming to constraint myself to the ownership of *insert any aggressively low number* items, convinced that a life of limitation is in fact a life of freedom. I became an avid reader of lifestyle blogs such as Leo Babauta’s Zen Habits and his “spin-off” mnmlist blog.

Looking back, I acknowledge that all of this naive enthrallment with this niche (at that moment) lifestyle choice was my own extreme declaration of my teenage self-hood. Around me, the world was still whirling in Western-influenced consumerism, with fast-emerging economies like the one in my home country picking up pace at their full-fledged embrace of the “buy buy buy” slogan. Where status symbol is so firmly linked to the things one owns, there is no end to the materialistic spiral, especially when “cheap” things abound in a high-volume manufacturing country like Vietnam. In the midst of this, I was vying for a different kind of “symbol” – to stand out and be “different”. There were bubbling thoughts about the messed-up trend of society towards worshipping brands, accumulation of possessions, and the blatant disregard for environmental and social costs. But altogether, my fixation on minimalism, in my judgment today, was half-baked, superficial, and image-oriented.

Minimalism as a societal trend came and went. I never quite grasped the full extent of how popular it was in the “mainstream” (my only reference points were perhaps Kim K’s home tour on Architectural Digest, and the virality of Marie Kondo’s adjacent tidying-up business). All I know is, my adolescent self, who predictably always sought to be “different” and “unconventional” (the irony!), gradually loosened the naive fixation on aesthetic minimalism, or on keeping counts of things. Perhaps, with growing responsibilities in my adult life, I’ve raised the need to “own” more – so my life is well-equipped and in turn well-functioning.

Recently I’ve been pushed to circumstances where I was once again reminded of how valuable and powerful minimalism can be in changing how I go about my everyday life. Out of sheer personal mishap (for which I’m completely at fault), I had to force myself to trim down my belongings and live on way fewer items than I had ever held on to during one full month of travel. From having a carry-on suitcase full of clothes and personal belongings, I was left with just the one outfit I was wearing, and a small backpack of toiletries and small miscellaneous items. In that one moment of absentmindedness, I set myself up for a challenge of trying to get by with as little stuff during one month as possible.

This situation also came at a period during which our society would actively participate in a shopping spiral: holiday shopping as a means of “caring” for your loved ones, “caring” for yourself. It’s always a poor excuse of a consumerist society to get people to spend mindlessly, and further enabling corporations to run rampant with their marketing and exploitation schemes. The stark contrast between the pile-up of stuff during this season and my forced minimalism really got me thinking about this lifestyle niche I had once been so enamored with, and what it means for society.

Practicality of minimal baggage

Always a relatively light packer, I have on so many occasions turned up with a luggage piece half the size of my travel companions’. As I went from having a roller carry-on full of clothes to just a backpack with all my belongings packed tightly, I for once noticed the difference it makes when I don’t have to lug around a suitcase, and could simply pick up the backpack everywhere I go. Rather than being a tourist bogged down by my clunky luggage, I showed up like any local with as much stuff as I would carry around day-to-day.

Given how much we were moving from one place to another, it was incredibly freeing to have this little baggage. Running to catch the train didn’t leave me out of breath and grasping for air. Showing up in a city way before hotel check-in time didn’t worry me about storage for suitcases. Even unpacking and packing my stuff at each destination was just a matter of picking up a few things instead of unrolling and rolling everything. This whole experience gave me a taste of how traveling with little stuff could be so exhilarating and enjoyable, and not a cycle of worrying about moving, storing, and safekeeping “stuff”.

Renewed perception of “needs”

In everyday life and while traveling, many things can be considered “essentials” while in fact, not a lot is truly needed for getting by. For one month, I didn’t need a whole wardrobe to satisfy my whims of wanting to dress up in a new “fit” or switching up my style every few days. I did have to do a shopping trip at the beginning of my travels to get a change of clothes, some underwear, and enough layers to be weather-proof. But then for the whole month (note that it’s December in Europe, and the weather was gloomy and cold at times), my wardrobe consisted of:

• two long-sleeved shirts
• one short-sleeved tee
• two pairs of trousers
• two sweaters
• one jacket
• underwear/socks/pyjamas
• one pair of shoes

Laundry was an issue at times because of the constant movement that didn’t allow time for drying laundry. But no travel experience was ever ruined just because my outfits were slightly stained, or because I started smelling a tad bit from the unwashed clothes. In fact, I became much less occupied by the superficial thoughts about clothing or how I come across to others (except for when I caught a cold and wondered if I should get more layers to stay warm). I realized that even my original packing list (in that piece of luggage I left behind) which I had thought was so streamlined and minimal, was far too superfluous.

A curation mindset

The other reflection on stuff that I had during this trip occurred when I embarked on that little shopping trip the afternoon after my arrival. As I hunted for some clothes to last me a month, I tried to not buy indiscriminately just because this was an emergency situation. With much less luggage room, I wanted to get only the things that I would truly enjoy using and maintaining during and beyond the trip. I am for the most part a picky shopper, but with the limitations imposed on this trip, I thought even more carefully about how to make the items work for my circumstances. Is it versatile enough to be used in different contexts, scenarios, and weather conditions? Is it an easy-to-care material? Is it lightweight enough to be carried around with ease? And of course, if this is the only sweater/trousers/etc. I have, is it comfortable and pleasant-looking to be worn again and again?

This curation mindset emerged when I put a little more thoughts into the buying process and the context of the trip. I considered how to care for and maintain the items as an initial step, so I didn’t have to worry about it down the road. I evidently wanted these things to last their daily wear and tear. Ultimately, this led to a lot more enjoyment of using them, because I knew they were of good value, suited the circumstances I was in, and didn’t cause me more burden of caring for them.

Foregoing temptations

The last reflection I had during this month concerns something beyond minimalism itself. When I was going around, as the crowds shuffled along busy commercial streets, I was not exactly enticed to spend time and money to acquire stuff. My smug adolescent self could have once again had a little internal cheer about how I was morally superior for resisting the temptations of consumerism. In fact, I wasn’t that mentally strong. During this trip, I had moments where I was standing in bookstores, weighing how likely it is I can take just half a kilogram more and just a slim space in my bag for a book. I realized that we had all been sold an idea that certain things could define us. Me as a reader would have to acquire a book from a beloved author. Many of us bought stuff during this time of the year to fulfill our social role, because “gifting is caring”, and who would we be if we weren’t being a good, caring family member/friend/etc?

In my teenage years, I got it wrong by assuming that buying things was a moral weakness. If anything, consumerism is an engineered pattern, greased by the billion-dollar-worth industry of advertising and by the two-hundred-year legacy of reckless and opaque exploitation of nature and human labor since the Industrial Revolution. It’s not the consumers’ fault that the marketing of things has been so insistent, that manufacturing and extraction have been so blissfully oblivious to their own damages at best and deliberately abusive at worst. The consumers have some power, but we all know the system is run by much more powerful and resource-rich forces.

Lifestyle minimalism, in its former “glory”, attracted criticism on many fronts: on how it was inaccessible, superficial, and even an inadvertent driver of consumerist tendencies. In all these criticisms, the consumers are often blamed for their moral weakness – for their inability to restrain the urge to co-opt such a concept into the opposite of what it represents. The self-help gurus I used to read as a teenager would (and still do now) center their content around the problems with consumer behaviors and how to “fix” them. The larger issues remain unfixed, even if I happen to find myself playing a minimalist for a month, or longer, and even if I manage to convince a few, or many others, to do the same.

I might have enjoyed my freedom of not having to carry big luggage around and learned a lesson or two about my own consumption behaviors. I’m also left with more questions about what this means for the broader culture and economics of “stuff”, and how we can shift the attention from individual consumers’ behaviors to system-level manufacturing, production, and marketing of “stuff”. I will keep paring down the non-essentials and practicing the curation mindset in my life, but I also intend to examine the challenges of systemic consumerism, beyond how I and other consumers make our choices.