The new literature of minimalism is full of stressful advice. Pack up all your possessions, unpack things only as needed, give away everything that’s still packed after a month. Or wake up early, pick up every item you own, and consider whether or not it sparks joy. See if you can wear just thirty-three items of clothing for three months. Know that it’s possible to live abundantly with only a hundred possessions. Don’t organize—purge. Digitize your photos. Get rid of the things you bought to impress people. Downsize your apartment. Think constantly about what will enable you to live the best life possible. Never buy anything on sale.

Recently, I spent a few months absorbing the new minimalist gospel, beginning with Marie Kondo, the celebrity decluttering guru, whose book “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up” has sold more than ten million copies, and whose stance can seem twee but is rooted in Shinto tradition: having fewer possessions allows us to care for those possessions as if they had souls. I also turned to Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus, who call themselves the Minimalists and, under that name, run a blog, publish books, and host a podcast that is downloaded as many as three million times a month. I read the blog Be More with Less, which is written by Courtney Carver, who came to minimalism after being given a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis and views the practice as a pathway to love and self-care. Also on my syllabus were the books “Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less,” by Greg McKeown, for whom minimalism is a habit of highly effective people; “The More of Less: Finding the Life You Want Under Everything You Own,” by Joshua Becker, a former pastor who wants his readers to free up their time and money for charitable causes; and “Goodbye, Things: The New Japanese Minimalism,” by Fumio Sasaki, who writes with winning self-deprecation, admitting that his simple life style might make him seem like a loser.

As I waded through this course of study, I felt like a dirty sponge being irradiated in the microwave: I was trapped, unpleasantly, but a cleansing fire was beginning to rage within. I Kondoed my sock drawer, tenderly unravelling lumpy balls of wool and cotton and laying each pair flat. I made daily pilgrimages to Goodwill. When I went home to Texas for the holidays, I entered my parents’ apartment as a whirling dervish of minimalist self-satisfaction, hectoring them to toss out their kitchen doodads and excess Tupperware. Within hours of arrival, I had filled six large trash bags with clothes to donate. “See?!” I howled, irritating myself and everyone around me. “You get rid of the things you don’t need so that you can focus on the things you do! ”

I sounded, I imagine, like many of the converts to what might be considered the latest wave in an intermittent American impulse. In 1977, the social scientists Duane Elgin and Arnold Mitchell observed that, for several years, “the popular press has paid occasional attention to stories of people returning to the simple life.” Elgin and Mitchell believed that this smattering of articles reflected a social movement that could bring about a “major transformation of traditional American values.” They called the movement “voluntary simplicity,” and saw it as a potential solution not only to “growing social malaise” but also to ecological destruction and the “unmanageable scale and complexity of institutions.” They believed that a few million people were practicing full voluntary simplicity, and that as much as half the U.S. population was sympathetic to it. Estimating the “maximum plausible growth of VS,” they wrote that as many as a third of all Americans might be converted to the simple life by the year 2000.

That didn’t happen. But, in 2008, the housing crisis and the banking collapse exposed the fantasy of easy acquisition as humiliating and destructive; for many people, it became newly necessary and desirable to learn to rely on less. It is tempting to interpret the new minimalism as a kind of cultural aftershock of that financial disruption, and perhaps it is, in part. But, at the same time that Kondo and her cohort have popularized a form of material humility, minimalism has become an increasingly aspirational and deluxe way of life. The hashtag #minimalism pulls up more than seventeen million photos on Instagram; many of the top posts depict high-end interior spaces. Last April, Kim Kardashian West appeared in a Vogue video walking through her sixty-million-dollar California mansion, a stark, blank, monochromatic palace that she described as a “minimal monastery.” Less is more attractive when you’ve got a lot of money, and minimalism is easily transformed from a philosophy of intentional restraint into an aesthetic language through which to assert a form of walled-off luxury—a self-centered and competitive impulse that is not so different from the acquisitive attitude that minimalism purports to reject.

It is rarely acknowledged, by either the life-hack-minded authors or the proponents of minimalist design, that many people have minimalism forced upon them by circumstances that render impossible a serene, jewel-box life style. Nor do they mention that poverty and trauma can make frivolous possessions seem like a lifeline rather than a burden. Many of today’s gurus maintain that minimalism can be useful no matter one’s income, but the audience they target is implicitly affluent—the pitch is never about making do with less because you have no choice. Millburn and Nicodemus frequently describe their past lives as spiritually empty twentysomethings with six-figure incomes. McKeown pitches his insights at people who have a surplus of options as a consequence of success. Kondo recently launched an online store, suggesting that the left hand might declutter while the right hand buys a seventy-five-dollar rose-quartz tuning fork. Today’s minimalism, with its focus on self-improvement, feels oddly dominated by a logic of accumulation. Less is always more, or “more, more, more,” as Millburn and Nicodemus write: “more time, more passion, more experiences, more growth, more contribution, more contentment—and more freedom.”

“The Longing for Less: Living with Minimalism,” a new book by the journalist and critic Kyle Chayka, arrives not as an addition to the minimalist canon but as a corrective to it. Chayka aims to find something deeper within the tradition than an Instagram-friendly aesthetic and the “saccharine and predigested” advice of self-help literature. Writing in search of the things that popular minimalism sweeps out of the frame—the void, transience, messiness, uncertainty—he surveys minimalist figures in art, music, and philosophy, searching for a “minimalism of ideas rather than things.”

Along the way, he offers sharp critiques of thing-oriented minimalism. The sleek, simple devices produced by Apple, which encourage us to seamlessly glide through the day by tapping and swiping on pocket-size screens, rely on a hidden “maximalist assemblage,” Chayka writes: “server farms absorbing massive amounts of electricity, Chinese factories where workers die by suicide, devastated mud pit mines that produce tin.” Also, he points out, the glass walls in Apple’s headquarters were marked with Post-it notes to keep employees from smacking into them, like birds. Later in the book, Chayka examines Philip Johnson’s Glass House—a startling, transparent box in New Canaan, Connecticut—and concludes that its beauty manifests a “megalomaniacal possessiveness” over both the surrounding landscape and the experience of anyone who enters. This sort of aestheticized emptiness, Chayka argues, is “not particularly radical; it might even be conservative,” given its reliance on control and exclusion. Plus, the ceiling leaked when it rained.