Some good comments already but one thing I don’t like about minimalism is that I don’t otherwise have a creative outlet. Buying stuff gives me this. Choosing clothes, pens, pencils, paper, thread, linen/cloth (for embroidering), even a baking tin or a good knife so that I can be creative in the kitchen. Using a nice pen takes some of the drudgery out of taking minutes in meetings, for example. And taking a sketchbook and some charcoal to a park makes multiple days out from a few dollars. The alternatives would still involve consumption. Maybe I wouldn’t need to buy all this stuff for myself if we lived more communally or something. It’s the same with books. I buy books because the library doesn’t stock the ones I want to read and won’t buy them when I ask.
Some good comments already but one thing I don’t like about minimalism is that I don’t otherwise have a creative outlet. Buying stuff gives me this. Choosing clothes, pens, pencils, paper, thread, linen/cloth (for embroidering), even a baking tin or a good knife so that I can be creative in the kitchen. Using a nice pen takes some of the drudgery out of taking minutes in meetings, for example. And taking a sketchbook and some charcoal to a park makes multiple days out from a few dollars. The alternatives would still involve consumption. Maybe I wouldn’t need to buy all this stuff for myself if we lived more communally or something. It’s the same with books. I buy books because the library doesn’t stock the ones I want to read and won’t buy them when I ask.