How to Live Better with Less with The Minimalists

0:02 A listener production. This is Crappita Happy and I am your host cast done. I'm a clinical and coaching psychologist and mindfulness meditation teacher and of course author of the Crappita Happy books. In this show, I bring you conversations with interesting, inspiring, intelligent people who are experts in their field and who have something of value to share that will help you feel less crappy and more happy. Joshua Fields Milburn and Ryan Nicodemus are the Minimalists, best friends since primary school. They both discovered in their late twenties that their successful careers, high incomes, and lavish lifestyles were not making them any happier, In fact, quite the opposite. First, josh and later Ryan embarked on an endeavor to declutter their lives and have now spent the last decade or more sharing the message of how to live a more meaningful life within less through their website are Theminimalists dot Com, their books, their podcast, and two Netflix documentaries. They've shared their message with an audience of over twenty million people. To be clear, this is much more than a conversation about decluttering. This is about re examining our lives, our relationships and getting honest about what we value so that we can live a life that is more authentic and that allows space for what is truly important. Here's my conversation with the Minimalists,

1:33 Ryan and Joshua. Thank you so much for being on the Crappy a Happy Podcast. Thanks for having us. We're excited to be here. Thank you so much. You guys are the Minimalists. You've been the Minimalists for over a decade. Now, you've got two Netflix documentaries, a series of books, a podcast. You've reached over twenty million people with your message. Congratulations on that. I would like to start by going back to the beginning and asking how you first got onto this idea of minimal and what really struck you about this as being a good idea in the first place. I guess we have to start at the beginning, right. We were both born in nineteen eighty one, so we're forty years old this year, and we grew up really poor in Dayton, Ohio in the States, and you know, sort of almost the cliche version of poverty and crappy, right, it's poverty, it's government assistance, it's not having much money, but there's also alcohol, abuse, drug abuse in the home, physical violence in our homes as well. And Ryan and I were pretty discontented growing up, and we thought the reason we were so discontented is our parents didn't have any money, right, And so of course, when I turned eighteen, I went out and I got a corporate job. By the way, Ryan and I have known each other since we were fat little fifth graders, and so I turned eighteen, I went out and got a corporate sales job, and spent the next dozen years climbing the corporate ladder, and by my late twenties, by age thirty, I said, sort

3:04 of achieved everything I ever wanted. The six figure salary, the luxury cars, the big suburban house with more toilets than people. I really had all the stuff to fill every corner of my consumer driven life. I was living the American dream, which has permeated your borders as well, right, Yeah, and so it's permeated the borders, Yeah, pretty much every country in the world. There's one hundred and ninety three countries in the world, and probably one hundred and ninety of them are trying to live the American dream. And the problem was it was actually a nightmare. I was working seventy eighty hours a week. I was stressed out, I was discontented, and I was buying a lot of things to pacify myself. And Ryan was doing the same thing.

3:46 In fact, we worked at the same corporation together. He saw that I was making good money in my twenties and I thought, well, this is sure to make me happy. And so by the time I was nineteen, I was making fifty thousand dollars a year. But I was like, well, wait a minut that's not making me happy. Maybe I need to adjust for inflation. Maybe it's seventy five thousand or one hundred thousand dollars, you know, six figures. That must be happiness, right. Well, the problem was, as I made more money, I spent even more money and racked up a ton of debt along the way. So I made really good money, but spent even better money. And that was a recipe for misery. And two events happened to me when I was in my late twenties. My mother died, my marriage and did both in the same month.

4:29 And these two events forced me to look around and start to question what had become my life's focus. And I realized I was really focused on all of the wrong things. All of the so called success and achievement in our culture. What is that It's through the accumulation of trinkets, stuff, cars, clothes, walk in closets full of shoes and all of these things that are supposed to make me happy. But they weren't doing their job. They weren't filling the void that I had created. And so when those two events sort of happened back to back, it was like a one to two punch, same month, right. I looked around and I realized, like, oh, I need to simplify my life. That's where I stumbled across this thing called minimalism.

5:14 Online. I found the whole community of people who were living more deliberately, and there were different people. Some people had kids. Leo Bibalta had six kids and he was a minimalist, right. And then you had a guy named Colin Wright who was a parapatetic, traveling minimalist and everything he owned fit in his backpack. And he had Courtney Carver and her daughter and the sort of minimalist family. And I realized, like, oh, wait a minute, there are all these different flavors of living with less. Maybe this is applicable to me as well, because I didn't aspire to be like any of those people, but I did aspire to find some of the maybe uncover some of the peace, tranquility, equanimity, freedom, that those people were experiencing. And then so I spent about eight months implify my life, got rid of about ninety percent of my material possessions. I don't know if you know this, but the average American household has about three hundred thousand items in it. Now, that would be all well and good if it was making us happier and more content and joyous, but it's often doing the opposite. It's making us compare ourselves to other people, which is of course the thief of joy. And so I realized that this competition, this comparison, this more and more more, was not working now.

6:32 And so it wasn't about the pursuit of less. It was more about letting go subtract. Letting go isn't something you do. I learned that early on. Letting go is something you stop doing, right, You stop clinging to everything, every material thing. But it turns out that these material things in my life, they were just a physical manifestation of what was going on inside me. And so all this external clutter, the physical clutter, meant that I also had all this internal clutter, mental clutter, emotional clutter, of spiritual clutter, relational clutter, career clutter. But letting go of the stuff made room to start questioning everything in my life. But then people around me started noticing some profound changes in me. People at work started coming up to me and saying things like, Hey, what's going on with you? You seem less stressed. Hey, you seem so much calmer. And Ryan came to me one day and he said, why the hell are you so happy? And so I told him about this thing called minimalism. You know, I didn't jump up and say, look at me. I'm a minimalist and you should be a minimalist too. It wasn't about proselytizing.

7:35 In fact, Ryan and I, even now, even with we have books and all this other stuff, we're not trying to convert anyone to minimalism. I don't want to convince you to become a minimalist, but I understand that if you are discontented by the status quo, then perhaps simplifying will make room for those more important questions. I don't think it's possible to really convert someone into minimalism. But you know what Josh and I try to do is just share a recipe that has worked for us to help us get out of that crappy situation. My situation was like Josh's, working sixty seventy, sometimes eighty hours a week, forsaking some of the most important aspects of my life, my health, my relationships, my creativity. I certainly wasn't contributing. I wasn't really growing any way. I was chasing a lot of ephemeral pleasures, whether it was a nicer car, or a nicer house, or a bigger paycheck to buy those things. Drugs and alcohol soon started to creep into my life. I was kind of in this tornado, and when I saw this change in Joshua, I just knew that I wanted to have something in my life that he had in his life, which was that tranquility.

8:53 It was peace, It was a bit of a calm, a calm emotion that he was emitting. So when he told me about minimalism, what I heard was common sense. And you know, unfortunately these days common sense it's not too common, and I certainly wasn't. I was not. I did not have common sense myself. So I just saw some practical things that I thought I could apply to my life. So I got really excited. I'm like, oh wow, minimalism, like this sounds great. Man, All right, cool, I'm in. I'm a minimalist, all right. Like, now what do I do? I didn't know where to start. So Josh kind of explained to me his journey. But for me, I needed faster results. I couldn't spend seven or eight months decluttering my life. I needed faster results, something to really change my state, to change my perspective. So Josh and I we came up with this crazy idea called a packing party, where we decided to pack all my belongings as if I were moving, and then I would unpack only the items I needed over the next three weeks.

9:56 So Josh came over and he literally helped me box up everything my clothes, my kitchen, where my TVs, my towels, my frame, photographs, some paintings, my toiletries, even my furniture. Like we literally pretended like I was moving. Look, I just want to interrupt that that's a huge thing today. Yeah it is, Well, you know, I'm like one of those people who I will always like dive in head first if I feel like that's what I have to do again to like change my state. There's like a Tony Robbins thing where he always talks about the best way to interrupt these these negative patterns that we have or these these impulses is to really change your state. So I saw an opportunity with this packing party to do just that, and it totally did. I mean, after those three weeks, I had eighty percent of my stuff still sitting in those boxes, just sitting there unaccessed. And that's really where the minimalists dot com started.

10:50 It was. It was what that twenty one day packing party journey. It's really interesting to hear you both take such a different approach. I was when Joshua, when you say it took you eight months, I was like, oh, oh, thank God, Like, this is not something that we have to do in a weekend, you know, clear everything out of our house. So I guess different different approaches will suit different people when it comes to re examining, you know, the amount of clutter in our lives and how we might go about shadding. Some of that. That's What I really like about what Josh and I do is you know him and I. Yes, we're both minimalists. We live this lifestyle, but we have completely different approaches. We have completely different recipes. And our hope with our message with our book that's coming out, love People Use Things.

11:33 Our hope is that people can see this recipe and they can start to tweeze out ingredients for themselves. So whether it's an eight month journey, whether it's a twenty one day packing party journey, which people in our book actually did, we got some people to do that packing party journey and tell us about it, and we wrote about it and love People Use Things. But then there's kind of the middle of the road approach. It's called the minimalism game, and basically Josh and I we both realize how boring decluttering can be, so we decided to make it fun with a little friendly competition. So, you know, the middle of the road approaches this. You find a friend or a family member someone else who wants to declutter, and then you both agree to start on the first day of the month, and you both get rid of one item, and then on the second day of the month, you get rid of two items, then on the third day of the month, three items, and then on the all right, so you probably get the point, so on and so forth. It starts out really really easy, Yeah, until you get to like, you know, day number nineteen and you're like, oh, man, tomorrow, I got to get rid of twenty things, and then the next day twenty one things.

12:35 So it starts to build some momentum. Now, the person who goes the longest wins. You can bet something. I don't know, someone makes a dinner for the winner, or I don't know, the loser has to wear a silly hat. You can make it anything you want. But if both people make it to the end of the month, then both people win because they would have. Gotten rid of about five hundred items. It's a great start. I'm curious to know when you both, you know, hit upon this minimalist idea and you started to declutter, what was your initial emotional response? Was it freeing? Was there some angst and attachment? Like what was the the in the early days?

13:15 How did it feel? Freeing is a complicated word, right, because and we even write about that in the book quite a bit. Yeah, I think that jettisoning your excess stuff can be freeing, and but it can also be exciting, and let's not confuse the two. Right, excitement is not freedom. But I also think letting go of the stuff on its own is not inherently meaningful, right, And I think unfortunately sometimes we can get a little confused there and think, well, buying the stuff didn't make me happy, and therefore, but you know what, getting rid of the stuff must make me happy, And then well, no, that's like trying to fill the void by emptying the void.

13:58 The problem is the void all again. Either you've been lied to by advertisers, by marketers, by society, by culture, etc. Being told that you're inadequate, that you're not enough, that you're imperfect, right, And so yes, clearing the clutter it can be freeing, but not freeing in the sense that we traditionally think. Sometimes we think of freedom, what do we think doing whatever we want whenever we want. That's not freedom, that's tyranny. If I told my daughter eight year old daughter too, you can do whatever you want whenever you want. You just watch videos all day or play in traffic and eat brownies, right, and so that's not freedom. Real freedom involves a type of self restraint. And so when we're talking about minimalism, we're not talking about doing something that's going to make you happy. Doing less is not about the doing, it's about the less. Maybe that's the way that I would put it, because I think we can get really caught up and simply the exercise without the under understanding. There's this great story in the book of this couple, Jason and Jennifer Kirkendall in the stuff chapter.

15:07 You know, it's a relationship book, and so these seven different relationships. One of them is it starts with our relationship with stuff. You know, we're the minimalists, so it makes sense to start there. And Jason and Jeny they live in the Midwest and they sort of were living the American dream like me and Ryan. In fact, there are a lot of parallels between their story and hours. In fact, we've met dozens of hundreds, thousands of people who have a similar story whenever we go out on tour. And what was fascinating about them is they stumbled across this whole minimalism thing and they began letting go of the stuff. But really it was the letting go of the attachment that set them free because it is possible to just rent a dumpster and throw all your stuff in it and be utterly miserable because you didn't let go of the attachment. You didn't understand the attachment to the stuff. Because attachment, you know, this is what the Buddhists got, right, I mean, it's it's a fundamental tenet when when they talked about how attachment is suffering, right, well, yes, and we're getting dragged by that. It's by our stuff because we're clinging to everything. As I said earlier, letting go how something you do. It's something you stop doing.

16:19 You stop clinging to the material possessions, You stop clinging to toxic relationships. You stop acting like busy is a good thing. Busy is what's making us miserable. It's the worst four letter word in the English language. You stop posturing as if all the achievements make you you. If you let go of the thing but not the attachment, then you will still get dragged. Yeah. So let's talk about that feeling cast that I had when I when I first experienced my my decluttering, or that packing party, when I was sitting there in front of all my stuff in boxes, I felt this overwhelming feeling of guilt, and it was guilt from a lot of different ways.

17:04 It was a waste of money. You know. I told myself that, man, if I worked. Really hard and made enough money, maybe I could retire at age fifty. Maybe I could retire in America, you know, at sixty five years old, or maybe sixty seven at this point. But I thought maybe I could retire, you know, about fifteen years early. But then when I looked at how I was spending my money, I was like, oh, like, I'm That's what I'm telling myself, but that's not what I'm doing at all. When I looked at my relationships with people, you know, I thought about the people that I was forsaking to work as much as I was working to pay for all this stuff that wasn't making me happy. And it made me think of my mom. I mean, my mom lived about thirty minutes away and I probably saw her four or five times a year birthdays, holidays, things like that. And it was interesting because I kind of had this this reckoning with what I thought my priorities were versus what they act actually were. Because if you would have asked me before that packing party, if you'd have been like, Hey, Ryan, what are your priorities.

18:05 I would have been like, oh, well, it's my health, because you know, you can't live a good life unless you have health. It's my relationships. You gotta have good people in your life. And you know, I would have rambled off some of these really nice sounding values, these nice sounding priorities, but when I looked at what I was actually doing with my time, I wasn't focusing on those things at on. I kind of had this light bulb moment of oh, like, my priorities are not what I say they are, it's what I actually do. So there was a lot of guilt that I had to get over when I kind of had this reckoning, and it was worth it though. For sure. It really is a question of values, isn't it. I mean that's what you really outline in this newest book Love.

18:47 People use things about examining all of the relationships. As you said in your Life, it starts with stuff, but it's really about being intentional in every area. Of your life. Yeah, you're right. We wanted to write a relationship book, like a traditional relationship book, and we kind of get there at the end of the book. You know, there's a it's my favorite chapter is Our Relationship with People. But what Ryan and I realized is that, oh, what what is the thing that was keeping us from thriving in our different relationships, be it intimate relationships, friendships, business relationships, whatever it was? What was what was adding to the discontent, to the misery.

19:27 What was crappy about these things? Right? And it was, Oh, it was all of these other relationships that were sort of getting in the way of our relationships, our relationship with stuff. But then of course our relationship with the truth. We're constantly lying to ourselves, we're lying to others, We're creating these narratives that don't exist our relationship with ourself. Right. Self care is really popular in the sort of zeitgeist today. But self care is you know, we can set that aside and realize, like, what is my relationship with the person I've spend every hour with, whether I'm conscious or unconscious, I am still there. I'm with me all the time.

20:09 And man, that is often a very tense relationship one. It's the most challenging one I think for a lot of people. I agree, Yeah, it brings up a lot of shame and guilt. Right, and so we tried to deal with that in the book. But then the fourth relationship is values. What is our relationship with our values? And as Ryan mentioned earlier that there are these sort of well, there are four different types of values. What Ryan was talking about a moment ago is this fourth type of value. I'll get there in a second. But we all have the same sort of foundational values. But then we have sort of these so like every house is built on a foundation, so health, relationships, growth, contribution, creativity, These are similar values that most human beings have. They may manifest differently for all of us. They take different shapes, but for the most part, we all have the same foundational values.

20:57 But then we have these structual values, you know, the sort of planks in your house, that the structure that determines the shape of your house, and that's those tend to be individual. And then we have surface values, things that add value to our life. Sometimes these are even considered just preferences or interests. And then, unfortunately, we spend most of our time focusing on the fourth area of values, the imaginary values, those lip service values that Ryan was talking about. We pretend so many things are worthwhile in our lives. But if you show you might say your values are all the nice things that Ryan said about health and the people, et cetera. But if you show me your calendar and your bank statement, how are you spending your time and your resources? I can tell you what you really value. And that's true with anyone. However, we're spending those most precious resources of ours our time, our attention, our finances, well that is, those are our real priorities in our life. That's what we actually value. Unfortunately, we're spending a whole lot of time on things that we don't want to spend time on. The fifth relationships our relationship with money. Of course, that's rather contingentous. It breaks up relationships and businesses and marriages, et cetera, and it makes us miserable. We go into debt to buy things we don't need, to impress people we don't even know.

22:23 And then the last two areas we have our relationship with creativity we can't talk about. Really, we're all creators. We've been told by the media that we are consumers and by business big big businesses and corporations that we are consumers, but fundamentally we are creators. We have been creators for millennia. And yes, it's true that we do consume some stuff. There's a question about that, and certain things add value to our life. Ryan and I are not aesthetics. We're not saying get rid of your stuff and live with nothing, become a monk. What we're trying to understand is, Wow, what adds value to our lives, and then let's get rid of the stuff that doesn't. Remember. Once in one of our live events, someone. Came up said, it seems like you guys didn't get rid of anything important, and Ryan just looked at him and he goes, yeah, that's right. That's the whole point of the whole minimalism thing. We shed the access so we can make room for what's truly important.

23:18 I hope that you're enjoying this conversation and realizing the benefits of positivity in your own life. If you are enjoying the show, please be sure to like and subscribe so that you get notified when you apps drop and head on over to Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen and leave us a rating and review. You talk the bit that really struck me in the book. I haven't finished reading it, but you talk about how you, Joshua got rid of your TV. First of all, you just moved and you didn't have a TV. And then you needed to get the internet connected, and you're delayed getting the internet connected, and then ultimately you put the phone away, and just those three like, well, they're three huge things, but the television, the Internet, and the phone, and suddenly there was all of this space, which I think many people would initially find deeply uncomfortable because they're so used to being busy and distracted. But what that opened up in terms of the space to create and connect and all of those really important things. But I guess for the average person, how do we It's about looking at well, how do we You don't have to get rid of your internet and your phone and your TV, but how do you make more of that space? How do you use those things less and more meaningfully?

24:41 I like to think that this book as not a how to book. We have certainly have some sort of rules in there that we share loosely and some best practices, but it's really a Y two book. I mean, look, our addictions are showing. You know, if you look around next time you're in a checkout line, going to see your heads tilted downward, faces lost and glowing screens. Our technology is turning us into zombies. It's weird because a generation ago, nearly everyone was what what were they doing? They would just light up a cigarette next to you, even at the office or on an airplane, and it seemed completely normal. But now if someone did that next to you, you would be like, what the heck are you doing?

25:25 This is this is insane and it's unthinkable, right, But it's just been replaced by the captivating glow of all of these screens that are around us. Scrolling is the new smoking. And so. There's this great comedian Ronnie Chang. He has this jokey he says he's an immigrant, and he said, it feels like every night in America is a competition to see how many screens we can get between our wall and in our faces. It's the TV, and then it's like my laptop, and then the tablet, and then the phone, and then the apple or whatever, and it's all of these things. Well, why are we doing that? Because we were afraid of something. We're afraid of boredom, which is weird because what if we were to reframe that, it's not boredom.

26:12 What if it's peace? Oh my god, what are we afraid of peace? Yeah? Well, why are we afraid of peace? Well, because we feel inadequate, We feel like we aren't enough. And yeah, in the book, we dealt with a lot of things, a lot of sort of shame with being counter cultural, but also the shame before that, right, I mean, Ryan and I did a lot of things that we aren't proud of. The book deals with a drug addiction, alcohol abuse. I had a really good friend of mine call me today this morning, and you know, for the book, I actually sat down with Ryan's first time I've ever interviewed him for anything. We sort of just did this outline of some of the things that he went through throughout his twenties. And I had.

26:53 A friend call me today, a friend who knows both of us really well, and he goes, wow, I didn't know. I didn't know all of this about Ryan, Like I knew some of the edges. But this is the most personal that you guys have ever gotten. And the reason being is we all deal with this stuff. We all deal with some sort of addiction, whether it's technology addiction, drug addiction, alcohol addiction, food addiction that was my addiction, and so stuff addiction, consumerism, addiction, all of these addictions. We all deal with it, but we don't ever talk about it, right, we're ashamed of it. We deal with things like infidelity, which both of us write about in the book. These things come up in our lives because we feel as though we need to escape, and so had we had to unpack some of these these escapes in our own lives so that we could we could help people understand that this is not that in a way, it sounds cliche, but some cliches are actually profound.

27:48 You're not alone. You know. It's interesting we have this weird standard we hold people to, like especially those in influencer positions or role models or you know, government positions. We have this like standard that they have to be, you know, on this pedestal. They have to be more perfect than your average person. And what this creates is actually it creates a lot of disingenuousness. I mean, it creates a lot of a lot of lies, a lot of cover ups, a lot of things like that, when in reality, you know, when I look at the people I learned from the most, it's the people who have been where I have been and they overcome it and they find a way to move forward in a way that is redemptive, that leads them towards a more meaningful life. They don't give up, and they move past it, they get over it. And so you know, Josh and I really wanted to do that with this book, Like we wanted to show like, hey, we are not on this pedestal. We're not better than thou. We're not you know, there's nothing exceptional about us. I mean, maybe the only exceptional thing is is we decided to do something about our crappy lives and and change the.

29:01 Way we were living. But again, I mean, I think that's where people will get the most out of Josh and I story out of this book is realizing that, you know, Josh and I are just like everyone else. We just decided to do a few different things and live a little bit differently. One hundred percent agree. I think we all learn more and we experience more shifts within ourselves when we hear other people's lived experience and we can relate to other people's struggles. I mean, most of what you're talking about here I can personally relate to, and you talk about there's lots of things that I hear in your story, and I know the listeners of the show as well, we'll be able to see in their own stories, in their own lives. I think you know I was going to say to you guys, I'm not a minimalist. In fact, I'm probably a bit compulsive with clothes and books on my two Achilles heels are the things that I spend way too much money on, and I would make the distinct I don't know if you would make the distinction.

30:01 And this is just a side note, but I think there is a difference between being attached to the actual stuff. Because I love to have a good clear out, sometimes there's still a bit of attachment or we'll ever use that thing again. An attachment like you said, to the dopamine hit of the buying the stuff. You know, it's that compulsive shopping kind of thing, like I get a hit every time I shop, versus actually I just really am attached to all of these things in my house. There's a difference, right. Yeah, one's a chase, one's an attachment. I think they both will lead to misery. They'll both lead to feeling pretty quite crappy. But you're right, you're able you can keep things and not have an attachment to them. You know, I'm rather utilitarian, so I'm maybe a more extreme minimalist than some other minimalists. But that's just because I've identified what adds value to my life and I don't have a problem letting go of anything. One of the things we write about in the book, we have these sixteen rules for living with less, and one of the rules is called the willing to walk rule. There's this old movie from the nineties called Heat, and there's a character who I don't aspire to be like. He's actually the bad guy in the movie, but it's Robert de Niro's character, Neil McCullough I think his name was. And anyway, he has this great line he said, never bring anything into your life that you're not prepared to walk away from in thirty seconds flat. Now, while I don't agree with that literally, I can understand the sentiment behind that, because.

31:35 What's the alternative? And I even apply that to relationships, even to my marriage. Not thirty seconds flat. That's a bit hyperbolic, right, But I do look and I say, what's the alternative to stay in something out of obligation to hold on to an object because you feel obligated. Well, that's a type of prison, right. And so if I'm in a relationship, whether it's a marriage or a business relationship or a friendship, whatever it might be, I want to be there because I want to be there. I will sometimes say that the thing you want is never the thing you want, And so what does that mean?

32:16 Right? We think that we desire possessions and people and prominence, but really what we really desire is the feeling that arises from those things. And I think if we interrogate our wants, we can really locate what we truly desire. It's fascinating. I think a lot of us say we want peace in our lives, but we behave in ways that attract all the chaos. And I'm saying this not from a place of judgment. I'm saying it from a place of identification because I see that in me, and I see that especially in the way that the way that I behave yesteryear.

33:02 Yeah, Cas, I'll tell you too. I mean, just you know, to add an accent to the fact that we're not on these pedestals, you know, as one of the minimalists, I still get that dopamine hit when I buy something. I mean, I probably like I buy a new phone when my phone breaks, you know, I don't. I don't go after the next upgrade just so I can have the next upgrade, but I want it. Every time I see that advertisement for the release of it, I'm like, oh, Wow, that's cool. It's got a HDR camera on. Wow it shoots in four K, and you know whatever it is, Like my impulse is to go get that thing, and eventually my phone will break or it gets like so outdated it doesn't run anymore or whatever, and I go get a new phone. And man, when I get that box and take off the plastic and open it up, like there is that dopamine hit. So you know, even as one of the minimalists, it's something I personally still struggle with and identify with. But I also know that if I chase that particular type of dopamine hit, it's it's going to it's gonna it's gonna lead me. Well, you know, when you go with the flow, you end up going, you end up getting to the fall, and I certainly don't want to end up there.

34:07 Yeah. Oh that's good to know. I was going to ask, has it had it been challenging to stay with this lifestyle for such a longe You know, that's a it's a commitment, isn't it Like it's a. Yeah, it's a big commitment. Well, you know when you when someone here simple, they think easy and simple and easier not necessarily synonymous. So yeah, I would say, yeah, you're absolutely right. When you decide to live a deliberate life, a more intentional life, when you decide to live a simple life, it's really difficult, and it's it's a lot of you know, it's a lot of things you have to combat, whether it's your impulses, whether it's society, whether it's your friends and family who are now judging you for living a simple life.

34:55 I mean, there's a lot that goes along with it. The one thing I will say, though, is, you know, just like with any other healthy habits we bring into our lives, once you get consistent with it, it starts to show, you start to feel it, and it starts to get a little easier. But certainly there will always be those challenges. Yeah, I was the only two things that I have that are similar, I guess in my own life one time was when I became vegan, and I'm not vegan anymore, still vegetarian, but I turned to veganism long before there were aisles full of vegan products in supermarkets, over ten years ago, and the other wise I gave up drinking almost a year ago. And in both cases they what it took. What I've realized is that what it takes is a shift from kind of information we all know we should drink less, for example, or we all can know the damage of animal agriculture. But it's when that information turns into insight or sort of knowledge becomes knowing, you know, when you have a fundamental shift on the inside and you see things in a different way, and once you do, you kind of can't unsee it. And then what I've found is that the that desire for those things just is really not there anymore because you see it in a completely different way. And I feel like that's what you guys are doing such a good

36:26 job of is helping us to see living with less in a different way so that more people can experience that same insight. Yeah, that's a great point. It makes me think about is we just moved to Los Angeles a little under four years ago, and as soon as I got here, I realized, like, oh wow, this minimalism thing I've been doing for the past several several years has been preparing me to live in LA because around every single corner is some name brand you know, clothing or suitcase or you know whatever. There's there are sports cars and Tesla's and Lamborghini's and Ferraris and all these career I mean, there's a lot of opulence here right It's Los Angeles, and I do look at that stuff, and I can even admire the beauty of some of these things. But like you said, like once I kind of saw it for what it is, like now when I see it, I can admire it, but I can quickly, or I should say, more quickly dismiss those impulses to chase after those things because I know where it leads.

37:34 Yeah, I think that the thing to point out there with the changes that you make is that they weren't really habit changes. I think habit changes won't change your habits. Human beings are infatuated with habit change. I think the Internet has really amplified that, right, but lasting change doesn't really work like that. I'll state it more plainly here. Changing your life won't change your life, but understand will. Yeah, the moment you recognize the source of your troubles, there's an awareness that flows through every fiber of your being, and your habits will change without volition because you try to change your habit every time. We've all tried this.

38:14 Right, I'm going to get up and go to the gym at six am, I'm going to drink sixty four ounces of water. All these things, and yeah, it lasts for a day or a week or maybe a month. Right, But then, of course we don't have that deep understanding. But once we see the problem in its entirety, not the solutions, not the symptoms, but the actual problem, we have no choice but to change. Yeah, exactly. I also teach mindfulness meditation, and so I know firsthand the challenge that people have with just sitting quietly with no distraction, no phone, nothing but their own thoughts. And it feels like the minute getting rid of your stuff is almost the same thing on a physical level. As you said, would you agree that when you remove all of the st you remove all of the distraction and people are forced to sit with themselves.

39:05 Yes, yeah, it's funny. It's this is absurd. We have to teach mindfulness and we have to teach people to let go of their of attachment. Right, that's not our default state. If you look at pre civilized people like the Hadza for example, over in Tanzania, they're not attached to stuff. You don't need to teach. Them to be mind My daughter, who's eight years old, they have mind fifteen minutes of mindfulness in her school every day, And at first I'm like, wow, that's wonderful, but that's absurd. You know what that really tells me. You're spending seven hours taking her out of that state, and then you're teaching her how to She knows how to be mindful. It's us parents who sort of, you know, beat the mindfulness out of their not literally obviously, but we we Parenting is detrimental to children. I think we adults have more knowledge, but our children and are far wiser than their conditioned parents. Not like an experienced wisdom, but like a human being wisdom. There's an inherent mindfulness there, right, you see this in children. Consequently, we are I think we're better served by learning from our kids than we are from parenting them. One of the most influential people in my life is a guy named Kapil Gupta, who is a philosopher, and he said, adults are fools. Children are wise. Children see every For children, everything is new.

40:35 Adults haven't seen a new thing in years. Yeah. How fascinating is that we have to teach ourselves to be mindful? I saw in the calendar this week, Ryan has a breathing exercise on the calendar. On Friday. I have a breathing app on my phone. How absurd is it that I have to have an app that tells me to breathe? Is the world? Is the world that we live in? Yeah, I've just been reading another really great book about breathing on that. I think that's fascinating that none of us are actually breathing how we're supposed to breathe. But that's a whole separate podcast conversation. Indeed. Indeed, Yeah, you guys, I'm conscious of your time. I really appreciate you being here. Like I said, I think that you're the work that you're doing. I really appreciate because it is helping. Certainly has helped me, and I know it will help listeners to make that internal shift from you know, just having this intellectual understanding that, yeah, we should buy less stuff because it's bad for the environment.

41:35 To actually, we should be re examining how we live our lives and you know, reappraising our relationships with with lots of things, as you have outlined in the book, to help us to live a more meaningful life, which is what we're all after. Hey man, thank you so much, thank you very much. Like I said earlier, I truly believe that for any lifestyle change to be sustainable, we really need to look at things in a whole different way. And Josh and Ryan's latest book, Love People, Use Things certainly has helped me to view this whole minimalism idea from a different perspective.

42:15 And if that interests you, you can grab it in all good bookstores now, And if you're keen to learn more about minimalism, there are loads of resources on their website, theminimalists dot com, or definitely check out their podcasts or their films on Netflix or any of their other books. As always, if you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to be notified of when I release new episodes. Leave me a rating or review, as it really does help the show to be seen and heard by more listeners, and of course tell your friends come and hang out with me. On Instagram I'm at cast Done underscore xo, or on facebookcast Done dot XO. My website is cast Done dot com and you can get on my mailing list there.

42:57 I look forward to catching you on the next episod So of Crapy A happy listener,