I picked up this book from the library as I saw my friend reading it and I have read material from The Minimalists in the past. Having been a bit caught up in the ‘decluttering craze’ on and off for several years now, I am always looking for inspiration to free my home from useless and excess crap.
However, there is a problem here. There’s only so many ways to say ‘chuck out your crap’ or ‘live with less’ or ‘say farewell to anything that doesn’t spark joy’. (Well, there I just found 3 ways to say it.)
Seriously though, I kind of get what they were trying to do here with every chapter focusing on a different relationship – i.e. your relationship with stuff, with truth, with values, etc; but it just felt like too much of a stretch to make a whole book about how these different relationships fare better when you live like a minimalist.
Every chapter was filled with tired out tropes and attempts at pop psychology to the point that I just raced through the book to get it finished. A couple of the earlier chapters did have some gems, which were just enough to keep me reading. One of these was, ‘Removing things that absorb your attention makes room for intention’ – a nice link between living with less and living an intentional life.
A standout book about a single idea, well written, should be able to stand the test of time and be something you can read over and over when you need to be re-inspired. At least that’s what I’d prefer, rather than stringing along a concept just to make a word count (which is, arguably, what I’ve done with this review).
