A very helpful lesson I came across a few months back was to adopt minimalism to live a simple, happy, more meaningful life. While some people confuse minimalism with frugal living, the former is actually different from the latter. Frugal living requires you to be thrifty and spend money really carefully whereas minimalism requires you to stick to things that matter with you and discard the rest. With minimalism, you de-clutter your life and house of things that don’t mean much to you and invite peace and serenity in your life.
Many of us have stocked piles and heaps of things including clothes, gadgets, ornaments and many other objects in our homes. We have attached sentiments to some of these things; want to use them in the future; or at times just like keeping old stuff around. Being a shopaholic myself, I used to buy lots of stuff without thinking twice of their benefit or use to me in the present. Quite often, I never touched many of those things ever in my life and they kept rotting in my wardrobe and drawers. When I used to organize my room, drawers or wardrobe, I used to keep the unused or not-so-important stuff in separate bags for later use, but I never used them.
When I came across minimalism, I realized I was holding on to many things for no reason at all and they were cluttering my life. Then I went a step further and applied minimalism in other aspects of life and turns out, this approach not only helps in de-cluttering your house, but also your mind and life of unnecessary people, ideas and activities.
Quite often, we do things to please others and not because we enjoy them. Moreover, we keep certain relationships in our lives that poison our minds and life, and do us no good. Also, we hold on to thoughts that aren’t constructive and healthy for us. Minimalism is all about getting rid of every unimportant and meaningless thing from your life and focusing on only that matters. If your iPhone matters to you, keep it and get rid of the spare phone you have kept for no particular reason. Trust me, the moment you start getting rid of the extras in your life, your life becomes so much better and cleaner.
I started practicing this approach in a few aspects of my life and my life already feels great. About 2 months back I even started applying it to shopping clothes and honestly, the results have been amazing. I have stopped feeling the need to be happy by just purchasing more clothes and make purchases only when I really need to. This has provided me with a lot of freedom: freedom from unnecessary temptations, freedom from taking care of too many clothes and freedom from being the slave of my desires. Not only that but it also helped me increase my savings.
If certain areas of your life seem meaningless to you, go ahead and apply minimalism to them. I’m sure the results will be great. I’m in a bit of hurry since I have to put my son to bed so I won’t be able to go into details of minimalism right now but my next post will be on how to apply minimalism into your life.