The Rise and Fall of Minimalism: Why It Couldn't Fix Consumerism

10 years ago, minimalism went viral and in the span of one month took over the internet. The idea captured the attention of people all over the world. Marie Condo had your mom's friends arguing about whether their spatulas brought them joy. And my documentary, Minimalism, went on to stream over 100 million times. >> Our next guests are pioneers of the minimalist movement. >> Minimalism. Minimalism. Minimalism. >> Everyone was talking about it, especially white people. But as quickly

as it climbed, it was gone. So, I'm starting a series on this channel exploring what happened. I'm covering the criticism, the aesthetic, the scary trends, and our never- ending pursuit to find meaning. Consumerism is a symptom in many ways of these other things going wrong. >> This isn't a rehash of old ideas. It's a look at what's changed, whether minimalism still has a place, and a look at why things seem to have gotten so much worse.

This video is sponsored by Squarespace. More on them later. take away. >> So, at the end of the documentary, there is this very big buildup. It is sentimental, if not a little bit heavy-handed. But really, the idea behind it is this story of optimism. It's that David might beat Goliath. Minimalism might defeat consumerism. But that's not exactly how things played out. Levi Hildabbrand has spent the past few years doing deep dive videos into everything that's broken

with consumer culture. the Stanley Cup craze, the Le Boooo phenomenon, the psychological tricks companies use to get you to spend money you don't have on things you don't need. Like you talk so much about consumerism and and a lot of these wild trends that happen. How bad has consumerism gotten over the past 10 years? I think consumerism has 10xed in the last 10 years, but I think it has actually been an exponential growth curve postco. It's

like we just got an injection that I I don't think we could have ever predicted. Something about the combination of isolation, social media addiction, and the sort of fracturing of our social circles because of all those things. It just led to more consumerism. The problem is still there and yet it has morphed into something else. It's so much easier to consume now. Now it's one-click purchases instead of Black Friday sales. >> Tik Tok and Instagram and

all of these other platforms are so good at plugging into the human brain's desire for more and the dopamine hits and the fears and the fear of missing out. And we're fighting against the current, like a really strong current. Whereas in the ' 50s and 60s and 70s, the current maybe was a nice thing that we could swim up against pretty easily, now it's a raging torrent. It's hard to fight against that as individual minimalists. >>

We're always at this crossroads between wanting to be well-meaning and having to recognize that we live in a capitalist society. >> I think minimalism is like one of the only guiding philosophies that's come out in like recent memory that tapped into something that I think people really want, which is like rules. >> Yeah. We just we don't have any guidance and minimalism for a second gave us something like that. >> Second, just one little second. >>

No. And and for some people it still does a caveat. >> I spoke with Juliet Shore, economist, sociologist, and one of the original voices of the documentary that I think was most influential in helping us understand the problem with our culture. >> Is this okay? >> It might be a little bit bright. Is Is that a light on you? right there. I asked her why minimalism wasn't able to fix the world. Yeah. So, 10 years on,

minimalism has helped inspire millions of people to live with less stuff and to find purpose in their lives. But apparently, it wasn't enough to fix all of the problems in the world to end excessive waste and conspicuous consumption. Why do you think minimalism wasn't enough? Well, I don't think a cultural movement, which is what I would classify minimalism as, is is going to ever be enough to really transform society. And part of it has to do

with the fact that over this 10 years, there's been an intensification of one of the key underlying trends uh that drives consumer dynamics, and that's inequality. It's it's just much harder as the world gets more and more unequal for people to have a more balanced consumer life. If you look at the places where people consume very differently, where there isn't a lot of status consumption, where there isn't a lot of debt, etc., they tend to be

much more equal societies. Does it just come down to capitalism because it's just all about profit at all costs? It's about just making as much money as possible. So I don't think that it's just capitalism. I mean you have capitalist societies where people are quite frugal where they save a lot. You can think about the Japanese. I mean they're a very high saving society for hundreds of years like a really strong sustainability ethic. I mean, they're

not perfect, but in comparison to the United States, which is really an outlier on the scale of how quote unquote consumerrist it is, it's also just so much more unequal than places like Japan or much of Europe. This argument that more inequality leads to more consumption is one that we didn't touch on in our documentary and a point that I've rarely heard in discussions around consumerism, but it explains a lot because when it comes to inequality,

few countries do it quite like America. Most people know there's wealth inequality in the US, but they underestimate how bad it actually is. So, when surveyed, Americans thought wealth should be dispersed like this. It's not a perfect distribution of wealth. It's definitely not communism. It gives incentives for people to work harder for a better outcome without leaving too many people behind. But here's what wealth inequality looks like in reality. The poor and the middle class are

barely distinguishable. And the top 1% and even the top.1% have so much wealth that it's hard to imagine. People are working really long hours. They're working more than they ever have before. They're making less money than before. Why does that cause them to buy more stuff? Well, they're not necessarily making less money. Less and less of it is going toward ordinary people. More and more of it's going to the people at the top. There's a real

range there, which is the higher up you go in the income ladder, the more of that productivity growth you're seeing. So, you've got that widening distribution. the people at the bottom increasingly scraping by, but you you've got a a big group of people in the United States who are not earning less. You know, maybe it's the top 20% or so and they are they're earning more and they're spending it. Billionaires and now a trillionaire own fleets

of private jets, spend hundreds of millions of dollars on yachts. Space tourism has become a hobby. Some weddings now cost an estimated billion dollars with private performances from the biggest celebrities in the world. This spending by the wealthiest triggers what economist Robert Frank called expenditure cascades. As the top earners pull further away, everyone below feels the ripple. Middle inome families stretch to keep up and lower inome families go into debt just to access the basics like

a car repair, groceries, healthcare, and utilities. Home ownership has become one of the biggest signs of just how unequal things have gotten. Housing costs have outpaced household income by a huge margin. Once a symbol of the American dream, owning a humble single family home has become out of reach for so many. >> There was a moment maybe a year ago where I was standing in the grocery store in the soup aisle doing some uh financial calculus

in my head over whether I could afford lentils and toilet paper. And I just thought to myself, this isn't life. This is a slow motion hostage situation. Then I got home and I opened Instagram and some tech bro was talking about leveraging your time to increase your value. And I'm thinking, dude, I just leveraged my dignity for some off-brand beans. So wealth inequality isn't just about billionaires hoarding yachts. It's about that weird sinking feeling that somehow

despite everything you've done right, you're still losing. I've seen a lot of the criticism and push back that minimalism has had. A few years ago, we released our documentary for free on YouTube and the comments started piling in. One of the most upvoted comments among them said, "There is a difference between choosing to live a minimal lifestyle while being actually able to afford much more and being compelled to live a minimal lifestyle due to not being

able to afford much at all." I agree these are two very different problems, but they are both people trying to solve for an unbalanced and unfair system. The problem isn't people deciding that they want less than their peers because they know that it won't make them any happier. The problem is the system itself and the fact that we should have never gotten to a place where someone has a trillion dollars while someone else is choosing between

toilet paper and lentils. Maybe it's my algorithm, but I've gotten the sense that people are starting to become fed up with a system that's making the rich richer while leaving the rest of the population behind. In many societies across the world, especially in America, effort doesn't come close to equaling fair outcomes. As one YouTube comment put it, if working hard got you rich, the donkey would own the farm. These outcomes didn't happen by accident. This is

how the system was designed to work, and it's going to take something much bigger than minimalism to stop it. So, I've been making YouTube videos for over 9 years now. I know I'm very old, and I've been able to do this sustainably because I partner with brands who create products and services that I actually use. Enter my sponsor for this week's video, Squarespace. Here's why I recommend Squarespace to all my creator friends. So, first is that

publishing a website is incredibly easy. From getting a custom domain name to picking out a beautiful template to using their drag and drop functionality, they make it so simple that even if you have zero technical experience, it's still really easy. But with Squarespace, you can also do a whole lot more. You can launch an online store, take client bookings, publish a blog, and review all of your analytics right from your dashboard. For me, one of the

best things about Squarespace and the reason why I've been able to use them over many different phases of my career is that they're able to scale with you. So, when I was first getting started out, I could just have a simple landing page up to collect emails for my newsletter. So glad I did that, by the way. And then now, as I'm scaling my business in a different way, I can add a course. I can add

digital products and tools, a link to my newsletter archive, my podcast. So, if you want to see why I trust Squarespace to build and publish all of my websites and do so much more, go to squarespace.com to start your free trial. And then when you're ready to launch, go to squarespace.com/mattella to get 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Thanks for considering. When you support Squarespace and use them to start your next website,

you're also supporting my channel, so it means a lot. You might be wondering why minimalism has faded into the background. If it was so helpful for people, why isn't anyone talking about it now? I think there are two reasons it's no longer a big part of the cultural conversation. First, there was this huge viral moment where lots of people were talking about it for the very first time. Some people loved it, other people hated it. It

made for really good conversation around the dinner table. But the novelty of it kind of wore off. That's not to say that people don't still find it helpful, and there aren't more people practicing it now than before. It's just really not as interesting of a headline. But there's another reason that I think is even more important why it's not talked about as much today. And that's because there is so much other stuff to worry about. Even

the problem of overconumption just seems in my opinion it seems like a small problem compared to these other problems now that we're having with authoritarian governments, social media, AI. Like these problems now seem to even outpace the problems of oh like we're spending too much on Amazon. It's almost like that problem is just like gone into the background because there's like we're having an existential crisis in so many other areas. >> Yeah, I would agree. It's

a I mean we call it a poly crisis in academia. Poly meaning many just many different crises. And of course there's also the climate crisis and the ecological crisis which you you know in addition to all the others that you mentioned. This sort of goes back to my point about a purely cultural movement can't solve those things. I mean consumerism is a symptom in many ways of these other things going wrong. It's a symptom of a

increasingly unequal society in which power is out of balance in which ordinary people are losing power to elites and large corporations and inequality is a key result of that in which those elites have captured the state and so people are disempowered with respect to their government. >> What are the steps you think that we should be taking to start to bring about more equality in the system? Well, there's sort of two two uh pathways. I think

we need both of them. One are the things that are now much more on the agenda, at least in some of the blue states, which are these millionaire or billionaire taxes and kind of redressing the regressivity in the tax system that the Republicans have put in there really for decades, but especially since the first Trump administration, just a massive redistribution of wealth toward the wealthy. But the other part of it is getting an economy that works

more fairly instead of like the market works in a certain way and then the government has to come in and redistribute because it just you know it's giving way too much to some people and not enough to others. We got to change that because a purely redistributive system is not really sustainable. You want those market outcomes to be a lot fairer to begin with. putting in some limits on say CEO pay, building power for ordinary people,

building power for you uh workers in unions is is really key. Building the power of community groups as well and democratic power so we can also make laws to to to cure the fact that we have these monopolies. So, we've got this small group of very powerful corporations that just has too much market power. You know, it used to be when a corporation got too powerful, it got broken up because it would abuse consumers and workers.

We think about the period after the Second World War. I mean, it was imperfect in many ways. I mean, I think the racism and the sexism were really key to the negative parts of it, but the positive parts where we had really high levels of social capital involvement in public life. It was a period where the government was becoming more not less democratic in which working people were had gained a lot of power and it was

the period of what we call the great compression when inequality lessened over a period of decades. Many good things came out of that including that meaning and purpose that you're talking about. People were not working nearly as many hours. They were not in debt to that same extent. Material aspirations were in balance, much more in balance and it just, you know, yielded a better life. I think there are two main reactions to the system that's been

created, especially when it comes to those who feel like they've been left behind. Many are feeling angry. They're voicing their opinion. They're protesting and trying to fight for change. But there's also another reaction I've noticed. It seems that people are becoming numb to it all. I think it's very easy to be disillusioned now when it comes to consuming intentionally to embracing something like minimalism when we see these billionaires having these multi-million dollar weddings and the amount

of excess that we see at the the top 1% let alone everybody else. It's like why like why should we care about sustainability? Like why should we care about you know these things that are you know helping to create a a better future like when the f the the present is burning down. Oh man this is genuinely a hard one to to to figure out daytoday because yeah like I I I think we've we've slid backwards

on a lot of really important stuff like we we don't care about the planet as much anymore. We don't care as much about where things are made. I would say we've even stopped caring as much about the quality of the things that we have, you know, because everything seemingly is sort of degrading around us. It's distressing. And I think the response to that distress is apathy. Most cases people go, "Oh, this is so terrible. Oh my

god, I just can't I can't I can't handle it." And then you go and you buy yourself a Stanley water bottle or you you keep going to Starbucks or whatever it is. you you just go for the comfort. And that's what convenience culture and consumerism is sort of relying on is this habitual subconscious or unconscious loop that you get in to soo yourself when everything's falling apart. The beauty of minimalism is that it gives you something

in return. Saying you should buy this thing because it's sustainable, that's a really hard pitch because you can't see the value of it. It's like, okay, I bought this bamboo toothbrush. It's more expensive and it functions the same there. It's it's hard to see why that's important to do. But with minimalism, you don't have too many things in your house. You don't have to spend quite so much time cleaning everything or you don't have so much

clutter in your mind because of the things that you don't have in your house. And so there's a bit more of a practical application I think that people can grasp onto. That's why I think it's not going to go out like a little poof of smoke like a lot of the trends that sort of it gets lumped into. Minimalism offered a personal solution to a systemic problem. It was enough to help a lot of people. If

you're watching this video, I'm guessing these ideas helped you in some way or another. But maybe it was never meant to fix the world or correct society's injustices. The reality is that minimalism is just a tool. As I talked with Josh about the limitations of minimalism, he referred to it as a hammer. It's not a religion. It's not even an ideology. It is a tool that I use similar to the way that I would use a

hammer. But I use that tool to create more space in my home, more space in my calendar, more space in my life, so I can make room for what's important. A hammer is a good metaphor. It can help us with individual tasks inside our home. It gives us utility and control and has a real applicable purpose. But if you want to fix these broken institutions, that's going to take something much bigger. Something like a wrecking ball,

like a like a metaphorical wrecking ball, not like a real one. If you look historically, it's often after a system breakdown, after a real crisis that we can get new structures. It's really hard to get them without that. I think >> it has to get so bad that people will say enough's enough. >> It took the Great Depression to get Social Security and the New Deal, you know. So, I I am optimistic. I think we're going

to come out on the other side with a much better society than the one we have. >> Well, I hope so. Jo, thank you so much for your time today. >> Thank you. >> So, two quick things before I go. One that's selfish and another that's about you and this series. First, if you like the graphics in this video, thanks. I like them, too. I'm really proud of them. I've been working with my friend Chris, who's

an amazing motion graphics designer. And we're actually building a tool to help other creators and people who make videos make graphics this good. And so, if you want to learn more about that, then join the weight list at editkit.co. The second thing I wanted to mention, and this is about you and about the series, um, this is the first time I've ever done this on the channel, but I'm making this series as we go, as in

I have not started writing episode two. I guess that that creates a bit of pressure on my part, but also it's quite exciting because I get to bring you into this process. And so, I want to hear from you. Who are the people that you want me to interview? What are the ideas that you want me to cover? Um, what are the problems and challenges that you're facing yourself? Jump into the comments. let me know and

make sure you you like the ones that that are resonating with you. That way I see them rise to the top. And I have to say if if a if a single person mentions my new sweater, I'm done. I'm not going to make another video. I'm going to quit YouTube and I'm not going to look back.