<story><title>On Minimalism</title><url>http://chriseidhof.tumblr.com/post/9539831015/on-minimalism</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Udo</author><text>Anecdotal (read: personal) experience suggests that rich people are more likely to be minimalists. Case in point, my brother is extremely wealthy and even though he likes nice things, his houses are always very sparsely outfitted, his cars never have any personal stuff in them, everything is extremely clean and besides his laptop, he doesn&apos;t carry around any personal possessions.&lt;p&gt;Compared to that, I hardly scrape by in an absurdly small apartment, and until recently it was stuffed to the brim. My car is full of things. I&apos;m a slob. And all the poor people I know are too. Recently, I have started to throw away or auction off a huge part of my stuff and it feels really liberating (how many computers does a person need, anyway).&lt;p&gt;I wonder if being poor triggers people to hoard and/or to prefer complicated items. For example, I observed that rich people tend to have really simple furniture that is reduced to its core function, whereas poor people tend to have complicated-looking things and a lot of them. Poor households are absolutely cluttered.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>techdmn</author><text>My thoughts are that when you have plenty of money, you don&apos;t worry about getting rid of things.  If I find later that I really did need that thing, I can easily get another one.  On the other hand, if money is tight, it&apos;s hard to get rid of anything that has any value at all.  I might need it later, and not be able to purchase a replacement.</text></comment>
<story><title>On Minimalism</title><url>http://chriseidhof.tumblr.com/post/9539831015/on-minimalism</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Udo</author><text>Anecdotal (read: personal) experience suggests that rich people are more likely to be minimalists. Case in point, my brother is extremely wealthy and even though he likes nice things, his houses are always very sparsely outfitted, his cars never have any personal stuff in them, everything is extremely clean and besides his laptop, he doesn&apos;t carry around any personal possessions.&lt;p&gt;Compared to that, I hardly scrape by in an absurdly small apartment, and until recently it was stuffed to the brim. My car is full of things. I&apos;m a slob. And all the poor people I know are too. Recently, I have started to throw away or auction off a huge part of my stuff and it feels really liberating (how many computers does a person need, anyway).&lt;p&gt;I wonder if being poor triggers people to hoard and/or to prefer complicated items. For example, I observed that rich people tend to have really simple furniture that is reduced to its core function, whereas poor people tend to have complicated-looking things and a lot of them. Poor households are absolutely cluttered.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vacri</author><text>To some degree, to get ahead in business you must personally present as clean. This would carry over somewhat into your personal life - it&apos;s hard to be wearing thousand dollar suits to work while living in a rat&apos;s nest, I guess.&lt;p&gt;Personally, I like clutter. Random toys people give you, buildup of projects and jobs and whatnot. It personalises a place. I understand the appeal of not caring about items - I don&apos;t particularly care about most of my clutter - but minimalism is so... sterile. Walk into a minimalist&apos;s house and there&apos;s nothing really there of their personality, nothing particularly different from any other minimalist&apos;s house. I don&apos;t have a problem with other people living that way, but for me, it&apos;s just so sterile and sometimes even feels unwelcoming.&lt;p&gt;EDIT: I wonder if part of your rich/poor thing is that the rich have the opportunity to move around a lot for both business and pleasure and so can get a variety of memories and backdrops, whereas the poor see the same thing day in day out, and so personalisation of spaces (or making them more varied) is more important to them?</text></comment>