I'm a minimalist. I ride my bike to work, and everywhere else. I use it for exercise, too. In my room all I have is my clothes, my computer and a bed -- A hand-me-down bed. I hardly have any material possessions, besides those things. I find that minimalism keeps my life extremely simple and easy to manage.

I find that there's just too much shit in the world. Like, I mean shit. I watch a little bit of T.V. and all I see is shit. Advertisements, buy this, buy that, this is good, this will work for you, etc. I think there's a culture in the U.S. where we MUST have everything. It sad, consumerism. I'm sure most people can go on with their daily lives without all the shit trinkets they keep.

It goes without saying that minimalism has helped me in my finances. I used to buy shit all the time, but after become more minimalist, I just funnel whatever I would have spent on crap I didn't need over to my retirement accounts.

I'm far from being a minimalist. I have 2 young kids and my house is awash with toys, clothes, various crap that has no use but I haven't gotten around to dumping. My wife procrastinates a lot which means we get piles of paperwork which are placed in "to do later" stacks, cluttering up the kitchen.

I'm a lazy man, my house is a mess.

I like looking at pictures of neatly organized things, such as http://thingsorganizedneatly.tumblr.com/ while sitting upon a bag of clothes labelled "clothes - too small" in my office with my laptop propped up on a leaning tower of yellowed and stained bills from companies that went out of business years ago. I like to imagine living in a neat house while strolling to the kitchen, kicking misplaced shoes out of my way as I go. I fantasize of shelves that are not buckled under the strain of inherited antique crap. Oh for a wardrobe free from shirts that no longer fit, "You're too fat for me now" they seem to taunt.

At night I dream of oversized skips, filled to the brim, being cast into a landfill and then burned. In my dream I watch as the melting plastic from the unused toys fuses the clutter of my life into one rancid ball before Chris Hadfield launches it into space in the general direction of the sun. The clip is uploaded to YouTube and called "Can space solve my space problem". It gets a billion hits.

I'm not a minimalist, but I don't live a life of over-abundance either. My wife and I have very different experiences when it comes to selection. A large number of options does stress her out, and she has mentioned that she is worried that she won't pick the best one. For me, I figure that a large number of options means saturation, and as a result, I care less about my selection. A large number of options doesn't bother me.

I like to have a cozy furnished living space. I like rugs, paintings on the walls, music, interesting items from some place I have been. To me, the texture of this is not distracting, but energizing. Nature is not a minimalist. All you need to see that is to look closely at a patch of earth. I enjoy complexity.

I can appreciate the need anti-consumerism aspect of the minimalist approach, and I practice it. But I think the aesthetic decisions of minimalism needn't be related. Personally, I am tired of the future minimalist design that has reigned for so long. Give me some rococo (BTW, I think so much of that is a byproduct of mass-production rather than taste).

That said, I eat oatmeal for most lunches, and I don't have cable or reception on my TV.

This to me is the most important paragraph:

The options at mealtime are a microcosm of the lifestyle options available to the ordinary, free Western citizen. We have never been freer to live how we want to live, which is wonderful and empowering but simultaneously taxing and intimidating. I want to take advantage of the freedoms provided by the incredible time we live in without getting paralyzed by too many options and endless unmade decisions.

I consider myself a minimalist, but I often worry that I'm not taking advantage of all the best options and opportunities available to me. I've dealt with this push/pull mainly by giving up being minimal in some areas, or perhaps only minimizing somewhat in others. (Of course, being "minimal" can mean entirely different things to different people.) I wish I could figure out a better way to mediate these without having to compromise.

I'm not a minimalist, but minimalism is very alluring to me, though not at all for the reasons the author writes about. He feels anxiety over having so many options that he's worried he won't choose the best one? What an absurd sentiment. How does choosing to limit yourself to one option fix that? If anything it makes it worse. The source of his anxiety lies in misplaced values. His version of minimalism is basically putting those misplaced values on a pedestal.

For me, the appeal of minimalism is in less clutter. The feeling really sunk in the first time I moved out of my apartment on my own and realized I had a metric fuckton of shit to move. I'd like to know that, if I wanted to, I could pack up and move all my things in a single car off to wherever. Not to mention having all that stuff cramps my living space. Things become disorganized easily, space gets absorbed, my house gets ugly, etc. etc.. I fret about tossing things, but most things I could toss and never miss them. There's definite zen in not having material things to worry about.