Every once in a while, I like to take a sabbatical from things. These self-imposed bouts of minimalism have shaped my relationship with items. A teenage summer adventure riding the Greyhound and hitchhiking through the Western United States and Canada, punctuated by a 230 mile, 20 day backpack through the Sierra Nevada mountains of California. A winter spent pedaling a touring bicycle up and down the rolling hills of New Zealand, cooking and camping gear, clothing and other essentials jammed into four backpack-sized panniers.
Shrinking your life inventory to carry-on size and transporting it under your own power will give you a new perspective on what’s needed and what’s not.
Then I come home. On the American scale of consumption, I’m pretty middle of the road. Apart from a couple of big-ticket items (pickup truck, motorcycle) and a pretty stacked collection of sports gear, I live a pretty simple existence. My auto-recurring Amazon Prime membership goes to waste: my only order since moving to San Francisco was for a pack of black socks and a cassette of Mach 3 razors. The guys at work make fun of my wardrobe repeats, the function of a limited closet; if I ever need a suit for work, I’ll have to go all meta on you and rent it through Rentcycle. I live in a bare room in an otherwise furnished apartment; girls are generally unimpressed when they see that I sleep on an Aerobed, which sits next to a nightstand I found on the corner of Page and Brodrick.
I credit the experiences above for informing my relationship with items. I look around, though, and realize that this “less is more” approach won’t work for everyone. We’ve been painted an illusory picture, where the average American thinks he or she can purchase his or her way to happiness. It’s bullshit, but what we’re left with after one hundred years of clever marketing (Happy Meals!), planned obsolecense (iPhone 4, iPhone 4S), and cheap credit (McMansion Expansion).
As a concept, minimalism is awesome. In practice, I don’t think it can affect change on the scale needed to save a rapidly warming world that’s running out of space for more landfills. What has been giveth, cannot so easily be taketh away.Do you want to be the one to explain to Joe from Muncie, Indiana that nirvana is to be found in cleansing himself of the items he’s worked his whole life to accumulate?
Now contrast that conversation with introducing Joe to the possibilities of Collaborative Consumption. A Tesla electric sports car shared via Getaround. Paintings borrowed from Artsicle. A power washer rented through Rentcycle. Now you’re talking about giving Joe more, rather than taking anything away.
I’m damn proud to say that, through my work at Rentcycle, I stand at the forefront of the Access Economy. I’ve invested time, money, and passion into making Collaborative Consumption the basis of the 21st century economy, so I’ll just come out and say it: I don’t want minimalism to be a part of that conversation. For this thing to work, I believe the focus needs to be on offering people more, rather than demanding that they live with less. For true, widespread adoption, the core message cannot be one of sacrifice.
