The Endgame

Newsletter #22 - Minimalism

This newsletter looks at issues and events from the endgame point of view. The endgame is a chess concept. In the endgame only a handful of pieces are left on the board. Few moves remain. Victory or defeat is close. Options are limited and diminishing.

Toronto, April 30, 2023

Minimalism

Less is more.

Many people have said this. In modern times, the best-known person to say it was German architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, seen here in old age with an unidentified woman:

I don’t find grand artistic expressions of minimalism very interesting. I’m more interested in how minimalism replaces excess in personal lives as individuals age. As you become old the desire to divest tends to replace the urge to accumulate. (I’m talking, of course, about members of the prosperous middle class who have the luxury of choices.)

The age of accumulation begins when you leave childhood. You depart the family home and get a place of your own. Later, if you create your own family, you will have to replace your one-bedroom condominium with something larger requiring more furniture and elaborate accoutrements. As you clamber up the career ladder and become affluent, you will want to express your prosperity in the things you buy and display. A fancy car. Antique furniture. Expensive white goods. Fine china. A summer cottage on a lake. A bigger house, perhaps one with a portico.

And, willy-nilly, stuff piles up. There is no better example than books. If you’re a bookish sort of person, after a while your bookshelves will groan. I’m looking at you, Anna Porter! I still have my childhood books, given to me by my mother (favourite—Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame), and the first book I bought with my own money, a paperback biography of Winston Churchill that cost 35 cents.

One day the age of accumulation comes to an end. The wish for simplicity crowds out the embrace of complexity. There’s too much stuff! What’s the point, anyway? Who are you trying to impress? The kids are gone. Your career is kaput. Your needs are few. What you now crave is comfort and control.

Comfort means buying services rather than goods. As a friend said, “I don’t want things, but I do want to fly business class.” Control means command of where you live. Control of where you live is easier if the space is small. It’s not just that in a small space there’s less to clean and maintain and fuss over and worry about. A big reason why many old people like to live in small spaces, even one room or a “tiny house,” is that they can easily see all of it. No nasty surprises in the adjoining room. There is no adjoining room.

You decide to give your stuff away, or sell it if you can. This is not a run-of-the-mill decision to fashionably “declutter.” It is not about being tidy. Nor is it Swedish Death Cleaning (defined by Amy Poehler as “cleaning out your crap so other people don't have to when you die.”) This is sculpting a new identity for yourself.

But giving stuff away is not easy. No one wants a lot of what you’ve got. Books? Good luck with that. An eight-place fine china dinner setting? The kids aren’t interested. Antique furniture? Not on your life. Sculpting that new identity is tricky. Minimalism requires a dumpster.

Here is a photograph I took last week on a visit to Buffalo. I think it sums things up, in a strange sort of way.

P.S. My new book is Antisemitism: An ancient hatred in the age of identity politics.  Listen to my conversation about it with U.S. broadcaster Andrew Keen.