Live and Learn #77 – Unlearning Minimalism & Leaving Pai

Hey there my dear friends,

it is really hard to write these newsletters regularly. I want to write about things that pass through my mind, like the stream of consciousness that is always there, producing interesting and often novel thoughts and ideas, connecting knowledge. But then sometimes this type of writing feels too jumpy and disconnected to be published. It is not quite good enough to be sent out to you, and that often frustrates me.

But then I also think that many of these ideas floating around in my brain could be meaningful to be expressed, even in their proto-state. There is a balance to be struck here between expressing an idea quickly and as a sort of draft—capturing it as it happens, and then editing it down, distilling it into something more powerful later on. It's just that I feel like I am bad at this second step. I loathe this type of writing, but it is often the more important and necessary part that gives an idea the "umph" it deserves. Unfortunately, this tightening of words—this enhancing of clarity feels like work to me. I don't really enjoy it and therefore often avoid doing it entirely.

I think that in the spirit of these digital postcards, I want to exercise this freedom to write slightly "unfinished" things, ideas that are more like drafts, and then maybe take the time to edit them down into something more, later on.

Notes on Minimalism

I've been thinking about minimalism lately. It is something that I have started to unlearn. There's a weird tension between the idea that I don't need a lot of stuff to be happy, and the fact that my brain still loves to possess beautiful things: stones, feathers, weird mushrooms, and shells I have found in the forest. This process of collecting, gathering, and taking things home is deeply ingrained in my psyche, and it is a part that I have repressed, quite strongly, for some time now.

But the collection of items on my desk in Pai shows me that this is stupid, and the same is true for the books on my bookshelf at home.

Collections of things make me happy. And this pattern repeats even more so in the digital realm: The ongoing project of collecting beauty and then the giant collection of links in the needlestack and the collection of quotes or something like the diatoms blogpost. All of these are collections of things, and I think it is fair to say that I am a collector.

The act of collecting things makes me deeply happy, and there is no point in denying this.

If I find something beautiful in the real world and it positively enhances my life, then I shouldn't try to get rid of it just because I am adhering to a philosophy of minimalism. Sure, there is a pureness to minimalism, an aesthetic quality of not needing anything but the bare essentials. But that is also a form of virtue signaling. And it is a lie, or at the very least, something that is not entirely true. It is not true to who I am.

Fundamentally I seem to be happier when I own beautiful things. Because I like knick-knacks, and flowers, and stones and gems and all that, even if they aren't immediately useful... and pretending that I don't need this, that I don't care, is wrong.

As a kid, I was swimming in a mountain of these shiny, beautiful things, drawing excitement and wonder from them. They made me happy, day in, day out, and then I somehow lost that, locked it away. I don't remember exactly when "I" decided that "less stuff is always better". I am not quite sure where this idea came from and who implanted this in my head originally, but it is something that I am starting to unlearn because that seems healthier and more aligned with who I am.

There is nuance in an idea like minimalism, and it shouldn't be applied to everything, all the time.

Some stuff should be kept.

The problem is with clutter, the stuff that shouldn't be kept. Things that don't make me actively happy should go—immediately. The sooner the better. If there is something that every time I look at it, I cringe, even just a little, I should not tolerate that thing in my life. It is not ok for it to be there. But what is clutter? That's a highly personal question.

I remember this image vividly from the essay Flounder Mode by Brie Wolfson.

A shelf like this while being in a weird way utterly useless, is somehow at the same time deeply meaningful. It is not clutter because it is meaningful to the person who collected these items, and there is something marvelous about this. It makes you wonder how did this get here? And you can almost imagine the story that answers this question. There are a myriad of beautiful memories on this shelf, kept intact by the physical objects, that serve as a permanent reminder of this reality that has now passed.

There is still some tension here, where all of this feels like a slippery slope. I am afraid of losing the resilience that comes with minimalism. Where I would need my stuff to be happy, where I start to cling onto things and attach my happiness to them directly, but somehow this does not seem to be the case (yet).

Some stuff makes me happy, but that doesn't mean that the absence of the same makes me unhappy. But then... maybe it does? Because I do miss my bookshelf, and I do miss my piano, and I will also miss this little desk and the collection of crystals and mushrooms on it... There is a clinging to these material possessions, and this clinging doesn't feel good, though it's not quite unhappiness either. It's a paradox, this idea of deriving happiness from something without growing attached to it. In a way, it's the paradox at the core of Taoism, Buddhism, and Stoicism, one that if understood intuitively leads to enlightenment or a sort of sage-like wisdom.

I wonder how all of this squares with the idea of traveling lightweight and not having a home, too. Stuff is bound to a place, and the more objects I possess, the harder it is to move all of them around. Therefore, keeping a great number of things ties me to a place.

I don't like this idea because it feels like "my" stuff is slowly creeping into my life, encroaching upon me, suffocating me, stifling my freedom, binding me, and my choices.

My freedom is more important than the happiness that having the stuff could ever give and therefore I need to be able to let go of things, so that I can travel, so that I can be free. This is also why I am much more liberal in collecting digital things because they don't weigh me down in the same way, and they are easy to take with me wherever I go.

There is also an idea here about going through phases of contraction and expansion in the amount of things I will be owning, and how this, too, has something beautiful to it. In the limit of how little we need to own to be happy, it reminds me of the Greek philosopher Diogenes, who lived voluntarily in a barrel.

Losing some things, gaining new ones, sometimes having more, sometimes fewer things in my life seems natural somehow. I think the problem comes when people never declutter and just accumulate stuff until they suffocate in it, never discarding things that don't make them happy anymore. When their things take over their life and become a source of stress rather than a source of happiness and joy.

There is also something to be said of Quality (in the Robert Pirsig sense of the word) here. Some objects are just better than others because they make us happier. Something about how they got to us, how they were made, a sign of craftsmanship, an aesthetic quality that might be hard to describe, a memory that they are connected to. This favorite tea set of yours, this particular book, the fossil you found as a kid, this one plushie... Although the Zen monks might disagree on this point of difference in quality ^^

When Banzan was walking through a market he overheard a conversation between a butcher and his customer. "Give me the best piece of meat you have," said the customer. "Everything in my shop is the best," replied the butcher. "You cannot find here any piece of meat that is not the best." At these words Banzan became enlightened.

Finally, I think that if you can leave your stuff behind, sell it, give it away, or just throw it away, and that doesn't hurt you, then you are still a minimalist, even if you own a lot of things at that very moment.

🖇️ Links 🖇️

Some content I have stumbled across in the last two weeks:

Conrad Bastable on the importance and role of monopolies in regards to innovation and how technological monopolies are counterintuitively good and how that ties into how Google started killing the internet as its monopoly started to crumble with the rise of algorithmical doomscrolling and a different model of monetizing human attention.

Also, in relation to this, I have re-read the Techno Optimist Manifesto by Marc Andreessen, which still gives the entire thing a positive spin.

Lastly, I have started reading a book by the curious name of "Turn Your Life into Art: Lessons in Psychomagic from the San Francisco Underground", and it feels like this book has been waiting for me for some time. It's at this sweet intersection of rationality and magic, and it's about doing something useful with your life—i.e. it's a manual for designing meaningful, transformative experiences for others. It feels like this is something I would like to do. Originally recommended by Ethan Maurice in one of his late-night newsletters, I finally picked it up a couple of days ago and have been devouring it so far.

✨ Quote(s) ✨

Am I seriously saying we are touched by the gods, that our souls have destinies they want us to fulfill? That the world is an enchanted place? No, but I’m saying we experience it this way. We experience it this way at the very core of our being. There’s no use denying it. What should we make of this? Does this mean we have to take gods and souls and destinies seriously? Or that, because of its siren call, we must reject enchantment all the harder in order to support rationalism?

– Caveat Magister - from the book recommended above.

Just as learning to die is learning to meet the universe on its own terms, learning to live is learning to meet the universe on its own terms — terms that change daily, hourly, by the moment.

– Maria Popova - (source)

Also from the same blog post:

The fact, and only the fact, that we are mortal, that our lives are finite, that our time is restricted and our possibilities are limited, this fact is what makes it meaningful to do something, to exploit a possibility and make it become a reality, to fulfill it, to use our time and occupy it. Death gives us a compulsion to do so. Therefore, death forms the background against which our act of being becomes a responsibility.

– Viktor Frankl - (source)

Pair this with the book The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker.

🌌 Travel 🌌

I am sad because I left Pai a couple of days ago, and I can't believe that it has been an entire month since I arrived there. It feels both longer and shorter... at once, because Pai has a weird effect on time, where it stretches and contracts psychologically, so that the same time frame can feel different depending on how you look at it.

Days feel like they passed in minutes, but also in retrospect, those same days feel like entire weeks because they were so full of experiences. And then the same applies to weeks, where they feel like months and days at the same time.

And then the month had seasons: entire themes unfolding, a narrative arc and structure to it, making a single month feel like so much more, like a year has gone by. And yet, at the same time, it passed by in what felt like a mere blip in conscious experience. Blink, and you missed it, an entire month gone, disappeared, time never to be returned. At least I can be happy that the time was filled with beautiful experiences—lots and lots of memories, all of which I am deeply grateful for.

I miss my friends and the people I have met in Pai already. And all the good food, the 30 Baht noodle soup, the Suriyaki from the shop run by this old lady at the corner, the Rice Congee from walking street in front of the Seven Eleven, the Mango Sticky Rice from Nong Beer, the smoothies from Earth Tone, the smoothie bowls from Bom Bowls, the Mango Tahini Cake from Dreamscape... So many amazing things to eat and try, one better than the other.

The last weeks have also been immensely full in terms of activities and beautiful things: Kayaking through the spectacular Nam Lod Cave with its thousands of birds rushing into the cave at nighttime... Hiking up the beautiful river on the way to Hua Chang waterfall... Waking up early before sunrise to visit the river running through Pai during sunrise... Going to the small Chinese village in Yung Lai, watching the sun as it slowly creeps up over the distant mountains and the valley below gets covered in a blanket of fog... The sunsets with live music at Two Huts... The circus shows in Paradise and Dreamscape... The ecstatic dance and contact improv events or the entire music festival, Pai World Rhythms that happened... But then also the small details like the beauty of the flowers in the fields at sunrise, the cozy cat at the Two Sisters restaurant, or the butterflies sitting near the river, and the mystical shapes of trees and ferns, growing everywhere.

I can't believe that all of this has only been around two weeks of time, but looking back at the dates on the pictures, that's exactly how old they are, and somehow this breaks my mind... It feels like so much longer, I keep thinking, that it can't have been two weeks since I last published the newsletter and looked at pictures, and yet it has been no more and no less.

And now I am in Hanoi, and the contrast couldn't be more stark. Less nature, fewer people I connect to, fewer friends. There are so many people here, yet I feel weirdly lonely. It feels bizarre, capital "A" Absurd. But it's also a story for another time.

For now, I am just very happy that my best friend Marc is coming here soon and that then, not much later, another friend of mine, Harsha, will be coming too, and that then, we will be a little group, traveling together.

This thought fills me with so much excitement, it's ridiculous 😊

🎶 Song 🎶

Suzume by RADWIMPS

Youtube Music | Spotify

I watched some more movies by the Japanese director Makoto Shinkai lately, and I love how Studio Ghibli-like they are, but how they also hit very different somehow. The art style is so beautiful, and the music too. If you have some time to kill, go and watch Suzume or The Garden of Words. Or any of his other works. My favorite is probably Your Name.

I really like how almost every other screenshot of Makoto Shinkai's movies is an artwork in its own right. How blissful the overall atmosphere these movies create is. How expansive the scenes feel and how every other shot is a liminal space of quiet. A place of calm, of in-between, of rain and thunder, fields passing by, scenes of daily life that don't push the plot forward, but... simply exist... just as they are, for but a brief moment, inviting you to take a breath and enjoy them while they last. And how they are somehow—in their ordinariness—nonetheless infused with a bit of magic.

It makes me stop and appreciate the little details of beauty that can be found around me—every day. Stop, take a breath, and realize these details. How rain patters on a pond, how the leaves sway in the wind, how a ray of light falls through the clouds, or the sunlight reflects from the windows.

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That's all for this time. I hope you found this newsletter useful, beautiful, or even both!

Have ideas for improving it? As always please let me know. You can also just reply to this email and I should get those too :)

Cheers,

– Rico