Image From top, the before look; chandelier under the sofa; progress; results. Credit... Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

When he reached college age, Mr. Ho’s parents sent him to Chicago to study at Roosevelt University. At 25, he married a local chef, Jenny Smith, and a few years later the couple moved to the resort town of Lakeside, Mich., where they successfully ran a restaurant together. They built a big house in the Prairie School style, and Mr. Ho grew afflicted with the desire to add on and acquire. He collected tools; he traveled abroad to buy furniture.

“You build a house, then you put in a pool,” he said. “Then you need a peony garden. Then you watch ‘Martha Stewart’ and you realize a peony garden needs a fence. Then you think, ‘I should also have a rose garden, too, and if I’m going to have a rose garden, I have to have 30 varieties.’ I once bought a $3,600 cedar tree because, you know, I needed something for the corner to create a transition from the oak tree to the anemone because the sedum on the brick walk just wasn’t going to cut it. People think like that, and I did.”

And then, abruptly, he didn’t. One evening in 1998, while checking the stability of a ceiling fan in the restaurant, he suffered a seizure and slipped out of consciousness for 20 minutes. “The background went black and these white blades were taunting me with a kind of resolved madness,” Mr. Ho said. After a series of tests, doctors found nothing wrong with him, but the experience sent Mr. Ho into a depression, one result of which was the decision to live a less-encumbered existence. He and his wife sold the Michigan house and much of what was in it. He kept, for instance, only one of his six sofas. In Maine, where they had enjoyed vacationing, he would write and his wife would make rugs.

Mr. Ho first tried to bring his anti-consumerist ideas into focus through stand-up comedy. It was then that he changed his name from Dan Drilon to Dan Ho, because Ho, he felt, just sounded funnier. He hoped to have a radio program, but that didn’t happen, so in 2003 he started a witty, sporadically published magazine called Rescue, which he funded himself.

Image Dan Ho preaches a gospel of stylish parsimony. Credit... Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

He filled it with thoughts on food (slice open a baguette and stick a chocolate bar in it), cleaning tips (pass a paint brush over your computer keyboard every now and then) and folksy admonitions: “If you have enough sheets, towels and blankets to warrant an entire closet I can guarantee that you’ve missed some really good opportunities to do something else.”