My Minimalism Experience

Picture by Katharina Dolinski from Pixabay

Formerly, I was the one who has big desire to have anything: foods, clothes, etc. Everything what I wanted should be in my own nevertheless I really do not need it. Everyhting that catches my eyes will be in my shopping list soon. No wonder if I can spend a lot of money by buying things.

Day by day, I realize it is such a bad habit. Slowly, I tried to change my mind and spend my money only on what I need. One day, I watched a booktuber channel in Youtube. That booktuber reviewed a book titled The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo, a Japanese tidying up consultant. She told everything about the book from the cover to its content. She repeatedly told a word that I never heard before, minimalism. First of all, I do not know anything about minimalism. I thought it is a concept, because it is ended by –ism.

To answer my curiosity, I googling everyhting about minimalism. I read some of articles and watched some of Youtube videos in which talk about this concept. In the end, I summarize that minimalism is a concept of conscious life, and the person who takes minimalism called a minimalist. The conscious life that minimalism offers is not about only on how we declutter our house and only buy things in need, but our behaviour and habit. How we act, how we behave to our environment and society and how we need to be open-minded person.

Without any further ado, I took and practiced this minimalism concept in my life, precisely at the end of 2019. I start with decluttering my own room. I collected every things that actually I did not need anymore, like used minimarket plastic bag, used paper, used stationery, etc. It takes a lot of my time just to cleaned up my own room. And after a while, I have cleaned my room up and collected full of three plastic bags. Can you imagine? I realized how crowded the room was. And now I can see the difference after decluttering my room. It seems larger, in fact it is still in the same room and I could feel the sun light and fresh air through the windows. Something that I did not guess before.

Minimalism do not affect only on my room cleanliness but also my shopping habit. Now I tend to spend money only on what I need. Instead of spending my money on everything that catches my eyes, I save the extra money for my future.

I realize minimalism has changed my perspective about social media. Basicly, social media is just a tool that we use to communicate others. But, it develops to be a place of spamming, spread useless content like pornography, hate speech, violence, etc. I realize that it can distract me and moreover can affect me to the negative side. So, I start to reduce using social media. Surprisingly, it gives me more calmness and brings me to build relationship with others in the real offline life.

By minimalism, I learn how to appreciate everything: things I have, people around me, and each positive things that come to my life. Minimalism has open my mind that life is not about how we have anything we desire with, how we collect things that actually we really do not need, but it reminds me how to build a conscious life - spend my time, thought, and money in the place that suppose to be. And the most important is it brings calmness to my life.