We have a box of old band t-shirts in the back of our closet. We haven’t worn most of them in five years. But every time we open that box, we can tell you exactly which show each one came from — the venue, the opening act, the friend who was standing next to us. So no, we’re not going to tell you to throw them away.
That’s the first thing we want you to know about minimalism for beginners: it is not a rule about throwing things away. It’s a practice of paying attention to what you actually use, what you actually love, and what’s just there because it’s always been there.
When we first started trying to live with less, we made the classic mistake. We went room to room with a trash bag and got rid of anything we hadn’t touched in a year. For about three weeks it felt amazing. Then we went looking for our grandmother’s pie dish and realized we’d donated it because it didn’t “spark joy” in that particular moment, which is a terrible test when you’re tired and annoyed and just want the project over with.
Don’t Start With Your Sentimental Stuff
Here’s the actual advice we wish someone had given us: start with the boring things.
Start with the cabinet under the bathroom sink. The half-empty bottles of shampoo you didn’t like. The expired sunscreen. The three hairbrushes when you only ever use one. Start with the kitchen drawer full of takeout chopsticks and soy sauce packets. Start with the box of cables where you no longer remember what half of them plugged into.
Nobody has an emotional attachment to a soy sauce packet. That’s the point. You build the muscle of deciding “we don’t need this” on things that don’t hurt, and you learn that the world doesn’t end when you let something go.
Then, after a few weeks of that, you start to notice something. The things you reach for every day — your one good coffee mug, the jeans that fit, the pen that writes smoothly — those become clearer. You can see them because there’s less noise around them.
The Rule of the Loved Object
We have a simple rule now. If we own something, we want one of two things to be true: either we use it, or we actively love it. Not “we might use it someday.” Not “it was a gift so we feel guilty.” Use it or love it.
Our grandfather’s old pocket knife sits on our desk. We don’t carry it. But we love it, and we can tell you why — he used it to whittle little boats for us when we were seven. That’s a real reason. “It was expensive” is not a real reason. “we’ll fit into it again someday” is not a real reason. Guilt is not a reason to keep something in your home.
The honest caveat here: this rule does not solve the hard cases. It just makes them smaller in number. You will still stand in your hallway holding a box of letters and not know what to do. That’s fine. Keep the box. Minimalism is not a contest you win by owning the least. The moment it becomes a contest, you’ve missed the whole point.
Buy Less, Not Just Throw Away More
Nobody likes to hear this part, but it’s the part that actually works. Getting rid of stuff is the easy half. The hard half is not bringing new stuff in.
For a full year, we tracked everything we bought that wasn’t food or toilet paper. At the end of that year we looked at the list and realized maybe a third of it was things we’d genuinely forgotten we’d bought. A garlic press we used twice. A book we bought because someone recommended it and never opened. A plant that we killed within a month.
So now we have a pause rule: anything over about thirty dollars, we wait a week before we buy it. We write it on a list on our phone. If we still want it after a week, we let ourselves get it. Nine times out of ten, we don’t. The wanting was the itch, and the itch passes.
You Don’t Have to Live in an Empty Room
There’s a version of minimalism you see online that looks like a beige hotel room with one plant and a meditation cushion. We have never lived like that, and we don’t think you should either.
Our living room has a bookshelf that’s full. There are art prints on the wall from friends. There’s a couch with a blanket our sister knitted, and honestly it’s kind of ugly, and we will never get rid of it. A home should feel like a person lives there. The goal was never emptiness. The goal is that everything around you either serves you or tells the truth about who you are.
Start with the soy sauce packets. Leave the band t-shirts alone. In six months, you’ll know the difference between the stuff you love and the stuff that’s just in the way, and you won’t need us or anyone else to tell you which is which.