In 2009, Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus were childhood friends living in Ohio and working hard toward achieving the American dream. They had corporate jobs making six figures, suburban houses, and plenty of stuff. But it wasn’t all perfect: They also struggled with debt, addiction, and exhaustion. In the fall of that year, Millburn’s mother died, and his marriage fell apart. He started to realize that he was unhappy and unhealthy. “I wasn’t living the Dream,” he later wrote. “I was living a lie.”



THE LONGING FOR LESS: LIVING WITH MINIMALISM By Kyle Chayka Bloomsbury, 272 pp., $27.00

Scrolling through Twitter one day, he discovered a video by someone named Colin Wright, who owned very few possessions, traveled full time, and called himself a minimalist. Millburn was attracted to the idea and began working to simplify his life. He recruited Nicodemus, who had been feeling similar discontent, to the cause. At the end of 2010, dubbing themselves “The Minimalists,” the pair launched a blog about their journey. The next year, they left their jobs and self-published their first book. Blogging and speaking events brought media appearances, and their holistic message of eschewing materialism in order to find freedom garnered new followers. Whereas in the early days they would have been lucky to get 50 people at an event, by 2017 they could draw 500.

Millburn and Nicodemus call themselves the minimalists, but they aren’t the definitive article; they’re part of a larger trend that has swept the United States over the past decade. Before the duo’s conversion, people like Wright and Joshua Becker, a former pastor, were already chronicling online their adventures in living with less. Japan’s foremost decluttering expert, Marie Kondo, landed in the United States in 2014 with the English-language version of her book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, which has sold millions of copies and spent more than a year on the New York Times bestseller list. KonMari (as her method is called) mania, which instructs followers to keep only those items that “spark joy,” reached new heights in 2019 with the release of a Netflix reality-TV show, Tidying Up With Marie Kondo, that has overloaded thrift stores with donations.

Downsizing today isn’t just a process; it’s a lifestyle that comes with its own aesthetic—minimalism as visual brand. It’s the careful framing of the objects that represent you and therefore matter: white walls and lone lamps and burnished wood furniture and a carefully placed sprig of green. It’s the design of your iPhone as well as many of the photos you scroll through (on apps like Instagram and Pinterest) while using it. Minimalism is tiny houses, floor-to-ceiling glass condos, and the homogenized industrial-chic decor of coffee shops and work spaces that allows white-collar workers to travel between cities and countries without feeling as if they’ve gone anywhere at all. According to the website Apartment Therapy, minimalism is so vast that there are at least six distinct strands of it, from experiential to mindful, and more.

How did the United States, a nation whose credo is consumption, where the average household owns 300,000 items, and where bigger is assumed to be better, come to embrace an anti-consumerist, austerely styled trend—and one with the same name as a 1960s art movement? Or, as journalist Kyle Chayka puts it in his new book, The Longing for Less: “How did an unlikely avant-garde phenomenon become the generic luxury style of the 2010s, both an aesthetic commodity and an ascetic philosophy at the same time?” The book doesn’t completely answer that question, nor does it attempt to present a definitive history. Instead, Chayka wants “to uncover a minimalism of ideas,” tracing the thought that less could be more through movements and moments in art and architecture, sound and music, and philosophy. The minimalism he finds is not about getting organized in order to regain control (or the illusion thereof); it’s about exploring the artistic and existential possibilities of reduction.