The Barter Project

Purging: Bullshit.

I know the title’s strongly worded, but titling this has been the only thing keeping me from posting the entry, so this is it. While neither witty nor child friendly, it’s fitting. 

I don’t usually mention individual movements. However since I started writing, Simplicity and Minimalism have obviously become hot topics, making news in national and international print and web publications. There’s a new blog every day- a post every hour-an eight word zen tweet ever ten minutes offering a list of ways to simplify a certain area of your life, closet, transportation, mailbox, pocket change, whatever. There are terabites of ebooks and career bloggers telling people what to do, using the Tim Ferris bible to offer you a lifetime money back guarantee on their pdf because they know only 3% will ever use it. There’s guest posts, cross blogs, e-workshops-it’s a niche industry…and I call bullshit. 

I’m really saddened by the amazing potential this new movement had, but has now lost. We started well enough, getting rid of our things and sharing our experiences. We made international connections and found friends in all corners of the world. But where we should have taken the path less traveled- made our posts about simplifying and/or minimalizing and moved on, used the freedom of less stress to figure out how to truly do amazing, great, cool things and share them with others who were starting to do the same, we’ve started exploiting the trend and become exactly what we’re preaching against: we’re selling a movement, we’re the Coca-Cola of lifestyle design.

I write out of frustration in part. Every day, it seems more people are spending so much time writing about and discussing simplifying and minimalism. This is bound to happen as it gets more popular, but these people are new to the movement; they’re teenagers in a highschool auto class that have opened a muffler shop after doing their first oil change in second period the day before. They’re putting a nice big picture of themselves in the left hand corner of their blog to be relatable, they’re not dating their posts to create timeless content, they’re neatly listing their posts to make things easy to read, and they’re guest posting to up readership. They’re releasing a free 10 page ebook, and following it up with a 90 page ebook for $35 four months later (with an anytime money back guarantee). They’re following a now textbook approach to writing about simplicity, because the passive income of a blog or ebook has become the standard “minimalist” job. Most importantly they’re making simplicity complicated and confusing, spending all of their free time writing about or reading about how to have more free time. 

Think about it this way: Do many people go through law school with the main goal of teaching law? Would you willingly sign up for a course that’s being taught by someone who graduated from the same course just days before? I wouldn’t, but that’s what’s happening. Frankly, the whole movement’s starting to sound like a late night infomercial selling the same three things repackaged 35 different ways to make 35 times the profit. 

So with that, I want to challenge everyone out there to purge the bullshit. Stop writing about how to follow less people on Twitter, and start writing about how to help people that have never seen a computer, let alone made a Twitter account. Start working with your hands, start using your connections to create a global network of artisans that make everything we need to live a wonderful life without supporting outsourcing and the corporate evils I read about so much. Share new ideas, not things you’ve already read in other places. Simple and minimalist business isn’t making money from work without spending time- it’s spending time doing work without thinking about money, because you love it so much. Through these movements I truly believe this is possible for everyone (including those poor virtual assistants everyone’s hiring to do their work). I’m not saying we don’t need teachers, because there are those who truly write things we should all take to heart. However, in order for this to really work, we need to move past the puppy love and use our new simple lives to create something bigger, something sustainable. These fundamentals have been accepted by hundreds of thousands of people, which is 80% of the battle. We’ve made the blueprints and designed the infrastructure- it’s time to start building.