big rule

jbk@discuss.tchncs.de to 196@lemmy.blahaj.zone – 845 points –
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Why would you do that though? If minimalism is about having to much excess, wouldn't you have tools built to last?

That requires you to be able to afford higher quality tools that are built to last. If you can't afford the higher upfront cost, you'll end up spending more over time, and it creates a vicious cycle.

It's like the organic food trend - it costs a lot more to eat healthy.

The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.

  • Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms

Ever since I read through the Discworld series, I always think of this when I see comments like the one above. GNU, Terry Pratchett.

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You're thinking of the more nebulous "decluttered lifestyle". Minimalism is an aesthetic design choice. Think of those houses where like there's no shelves, no storage tucked out of the way.

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