MINIMALISM: Official Netflix Documentary (Entire Film)

Foreign Much of our lives are lived in a fog of automatic habitual behavior. We spend a lot of time hunting, but nothing does it for us and we become so absorbed in hunting that it makes us miserable. I had it all. I always wanted to have everything I was supposed to have, everyone around me said you are successful, but in reality I was miserable, there was a big void in my life, so I tried to fill that void the same way many people do. He does it with many things. It was filling the void with consumer purchases.

I was spending money faster than I was making it trying to buy my way to happiness. I thought I would get there one day. I mean, happiness had to be somewhere around the corner. I was living on paychecks. on a paycheck living for a paycheck Living For Stuff but I wasn't living at all in a time when people in the West are experiencing the best standard of living in history why at the same time is there such a longing for more? Think of it as a kind of biologically based delusional craving that autocraving is a good strategy for keeping animals alive, including the first human animals in really harsh conditions, but nowadays it creates a disconnect, you're like a puppet whose Strings are being pulled by Mother Nature and evolution dates back tens of millions of years.

We still feel uneasy. We are still always clawing and clawing for more. This is why lottery winners are miserable. That's why homeowners have three-car garages. The first car creates an incredible exponential wave of happiness and joy. The utility of the car arises because we get tired of the first car and as humans we are programmed to feel dissatisfied, it is truly an addiction and we are encouraged to maintain the addiction through technology and information. American culture for the most part has these blinders on, there's definitely this illusion of what our lives should be like, whether it's advertising or your Instagram or Facebook account, it's this illusion that our lives should be perfect, it's natural to use the lives of other people and even imagined lives, you know, the candy we see in advertisements as criteria.

You open Vanity Fair or Esquire and you see very sexy, glamorous lives and then the projects for most people seem to become, do you know how I can get that? or the closest I'm going to get, there can be an immense amount of dissatisfaction. trying to live that way and many of us see no alternative but to live that way advertising has contaminated and infiltrated the culture it's in our movies it's in our television shows it's in our books it's in our doctors' offices it's in Taxis are at the bar Sitting next to you, the person you think you're having idle chat with might have been placed there by a liquor company.

It has been a slow evolution. This is not something that just happened. It is something that has been sold to us. the last hundred years, slowly but surely, by those who want to make a lot of money, no, that's what I call a hot car, they make us believe that you really need these things, with each passing year, there are more stimulants, more pressure, there are more options. more media, there's more noise, there's always noise and by streamlining and simplifying and just letting people know that they have a choice, it's that wake-up call that's really valuable at a very critical time right now, it's gotten to a point. in my life in which I don't know what was important anymore, at some point, when I was approaching 30, I noticed something different about my twenty-something best friend, Josh, he seemed happy for the first time in a long time, like truly happy and ecstatic. but I didn't understand why, since we'd both worked at the same corporation, we'd both wasted our 20s climbing the corporate ladder together and he'd been just as miserable as me, so I did what any good best friend would do: I cut him out. to a really nice lunch.

I think we went to Subway and I sat him down and asked him why the hell are you so happy? He spent the next 20 minutes telling me about this thing called

minimalism

before I discovered

minimalism

, I think my life. He looked like almost anyone else. He had a lot of stuff, hundreds of thousands of books, DVDs and VHS, closets full of expensive clothes. All of these things I brought into my life without questioning them, but when I started to let go, I started to feel freer, happier and lighter. and now as a minimalist every possession has a purpose or brings me joy I have a bed and a chair and a radio and I have some furniture in my dining room in my kitchen I have appliances I don't have excess things everything I look around me and I have to be able to justify myself to myself, not to anyone else, just justify myself.

Does this add value to my life? And if not, I have to be willing to let Ryan go and I just finished writing a book about The last five years of Our Lives went from corporate guys in suits and ties to minimalists, so now we're going on tour for 10 months this year and promote that book, but we're really going to promote a message that we really believe in, a simple, living message of living more deliberately with less and I'll need a jacket, we'll see where the journey takes us, so you presented this as a talk 12 minutes and an eight minute reading because I don't want to feel rushed to speak, it's all set.

I was born ready cute hello thanks for posting my name is Ryan Nicodemus and this is Joshua Fields Melbourne and together we run a website called minimalists.com so today Josh is going to read our new book but first I'm going to tell you a story about how we became minimalists, we have never been excluded, so as long as one person shows up, that's all that matters. I feel very good. We've had events where we've had two. People show up and that was amazing because we got to spend time with two people and add value to their lives in a different way.

I will understand. I am a man who hugs. Okay, thanks for coming. Thank you for coming and seeing the. Talk man, yeah sure, yeah, my pleasure, thanks, did you forget your Kindle Land badge there? Oh yes, thank you from the day I was born until the second grade, when my parents divorced. I had like the quintessential perfect mom and dad when my mom left my dad, she really went crazy in high school, we had a lot of people in the house and then I found out they were in there smoking crack, they would cook crack in 8th grade, the team SWAT was kicking our arresting my mother for selling drugs was a drug that overcame my mother Josh had a very similar childhood to the one I had my first memories of my father putting out a cigarette on my mother's chest ly after she she left my father she started drinking My biggest fear was that they would take me away from her.

She was sober. She was a phenomenal mother. I think she felt trapped. My mother always complained about money. She did not have money. I remember being poor while she was growing up. I remember when I graduated high school thinking that I wanted to start a path that would take me somewhere that wasn't a struggle. Half a mile turn left onto San Pedro Drive. We are currently on our way to MPR for a radio interview. They're our friends, that's our demographic, hello, are you looking for Rita Daniels, I think so, actually, how are you? I'm Scott, I'm Ryan, I'm a hungry man, nice to meet you buddy, thanks for

film

ing too.

Joshua, nice to meet you, I think my lightbulb moment was when I was showing my boys how to sell cell phones to a five year old. I thought, what am I doing with this mentality of getting a better promotion and getting a better house? get a better car get a bigger paycheck be able to buy more expensive bar tabs and you know, to do that I had to sell cell phones to five year olds there's a model out there that you can call it the American dream or keeping up with the Jones or whatever, that's just a model, it's not the model and once we realized I think we can create our own model that works just for us, the American dream has a long history, it started as a concept Which actually had more to do with opportunity.

America has a land of opportunity where someone could start at the bottom, work hard, and perform well; There is no doubt that what it means to have achieved or achieved the American dream in the United States has increased enormously in material terms a hundred years ago. A thousand dollars a year plus some kind of income increasingly became an aspirational norm throughout society because that's what is presented as normal on television: a six-figure income starting in the mid-1990s, Americans went on a shopping spree that was probably unprecedented in humanity. The history and a lot of it had to do with the cheapness of the products that come mainly from China, whether we are talking about fashion, electronics, all kinds of household items, so things are cheaper but they are also more available.

You can order things online 24 hours a day at their big box. In stores we end up accumulating a lot more stuff, to the point that even though we have about three times the space per person that we had in the '50s, we have so much more space that we need space on top of that, and so on. There's a 2.2 billion square foot self-storage industry, which is ridiculous, so you have people living in these huge houses and if you really look at it, people aren't using the space they have. Someone did a study and showed a heat map of something like that. where people have traveled within their homes over the course of a typical day it was a family of four and they were in an average house and what they found is that people were using about maybe 40 of their space, no one was using the dining room, nobody used the living room there was a big porch, you know, nobody used the porch, you know, I mean, I'm not saying that's how everyone lives, some people use the dining rooms, but it creates a big void that you have to fill so that people are pulling. all this junk in your homes that don't need outside depending on the space we have instead of creating our space to fit our lives, it's very easy to make a mistake and end up with three dining tables in the same house, well, I have to run Pretty quick to eat or three tables in the same meal.

Nothing is more responsible than living in the smallest space possible. We have probably sold or donated. I would say at least 90 percent of our stuff, I mean, you can. You didn't bring all your stuff to a small house. I traveled about two hours a day and then sat in a cubicle for 10 to 12 hours a day. He had gained a lot of weight. I was not happy and I asked myself: what's wrong with me? I should be happy to have all these things, a nice house, a great husband, and Logan was like, well, you know, you could probably quit your job if we downsized and moved to a smaller apartment and I was like, what the hell are you talking about? ?

I don't want to get rid of my things. I found a YouTube video, saw the tiny houses, and was hooked. Hmm, hello, Earl, what's up? I think the biggest thing for me, at least in the beginning, was the financial side of things when we looked at it. our budget and the numbers. I thought, well, let's try it. If I hate a smaller apartment, we can always expand. I think there is this element of affordability. Simplicity and sustainability make tiny houses seem like the perfect solution to a problem we have. I still haven't figured out how we went from working all our life to enjoying a life with a little bit of work here and there for a long time, when people were looking to buy their first home, they looked at their budget and said how much money do I have to spend?

Oh, I have five hundred thousand dollars. Let me buy the 500,000 that they can give me and the big mistake was that these individuals did not have five hundred thousand dollars. They had a loan that would guarantee them that. amount um and of course after a few years of people buying houses that weren't actually buying they were just hoping to buy them one day, the whole housing market collapsed, we're down 1.7 percent here, a loss of about 37 points . Apple stock was just getting hit this morning, we're down three to four and a half percent overall across all of these markets.

Let's talk about the speed with which we are seeing this market deteriorate. It was the worst day on Wall Street since the crash of 1987. This could be the most serious recession in decades and that means that life, as most Americans know it, is about to change, in some cases dramatically. I think what that has left us with after a recession is a really very strong appeal to buying a home outright. The vision that really came out of life is like hey, I think we need to take a step back here. We are very much a mission-based company, the mission is to do more with less life.

Edited prototype. The apartments started when I bought a 420 square foot place in New York and coming up with a really aggressive program, what I was asking for was a lot of living at home so that a couple could have a sit-down dinner for 10 or 12 people. Couldhaving to entertain in a civilized manner and being able to work at home with some type of standing desk very quickly. I realized that the small space made a lot of sense environmentally, but it also made sense on many other levels, one of the things we really want What I do is design houses around how people live and B, which is really important , create more social homes, you know, homes that really bring people together.

It was an incredible experience because, from the 1200 square foot space, I had never felt more calm in my life there were less things to think about, our overheads were lower. That's when I started to say, you know, this edited life, this philosophy, um, maybe there's something to it, a beautiful future for us would be to make a development that works very well financially. a much smaller footprint and a lot of developers copying what we're doing so that it really spreads and we start changing the way we live as Americans and just changing this desire that bigger is better philosophy.

I think we've just begun to reexamine what it means to be successful in life. It's not that white picket fence anymore, it's not that mansion anymore, I think. that people are beginning to recognize that perhaps they have been misled and that they may have more agency over their choices than they once thought they had. Foreign a recipe, you know, we're not here trying to proselytize. I'm not trying to convert anyone to minimalism, but I want to share a recipe and see if there are ingredients that other people can value and apply those ingredients to their own life.

There's an underlying discontent and I think it's starting to manifest itself in our stuff and what I'm finding as we go out on tour and talk to so many people. Everyone is looking for more meaning in their lives. We're at the Tucson Book Festival. We're getting ready to go sign some books and then some. A little later we'll give our speech, man, look at all these people waiting for us to sign their books, let's sit outside, then we'll go out front and stay there, okay? You have your talk this afternoon, what time? Is it at seven o'clock?

Imagine a life with less, less stuff, less clutter, less stress, debt and discontent. A life with fewer distractions. Now imagine a life with more, more time, more meaningful relationships, more growth, contribution and fulfillment. funny because people will inevitably come up to us and say like now I'm not a minimalist like you. I have this collection of books. I love books and I have a nice big library and I love the way they read books. smell I love turning the pages I love the way they feel I love lending them to my friends and then we talk about the books later and I say, hey, keep your books, it seems like you get a lot of value from your books. and that's what I would say with any type of collection, if you get a book or whatever that's cool, make sure you minimize it afterwards, but I'd also love to get a hug from you, you know we're Big Time Huggers, so, they Yeah They are free and transferable, be sure to get one from us later.

He was 27 years old and the chief operating officer of 150 retail stores. It was December 23, 2008. I received a phone call from my mom and sent it to voicemail because I was in a meeting at 7 pm going through this barrage of emails and realized I had several voicemails, one It was for my mom and she had been sober for a while, but I realized in the message that she had been drinking on her voicemail. She said honey, it's me, can you call me again? told me the doctors found something, she found out she had stage four lung cancer, she went through chemo and radiation, stage four usually doesn't come out of it, I got hospice, my mom was still in bed the first time I cried In my adult life she sobbed uncontrollably he kept saying I'm sorry I didn't even know why at the time he said it it was the only thing he could say I really wish I could have spent more time with her.

My mother's death still hangs in the air around me and now, during the same month, my six-year marriage is ending, but even while Rome is burning, there is somehow time to shop at Ikea, look when I moved From home. Earlier this week, loading up my many personal belongings, large containers and boxes and 50-gallon garbage bags, my first inclination was, of course, to buy the things I still needed for my new place, you know, just the basics, a shower curtain, towels, a bed and, oh, I need. a sofa and a matching leather chair and a loveseat and a lamp and a desk and a desk chair and another lamp for there and oh yeah, don't forget the sideboard that matches the desk and a dresser for the bedroom and oh, I need a coffee table and a couple of tables and a stand for the TV.

I still need to buy and now that I think about it I want my apartment to be my style. You know my own reason, so I need certain decorative elements. I fixed the decor, but wait, what exactly is my style and make these stainless steel frames and bodies? That particular style. Does this Matisse sketch replica accurately capture my avant-garde yet professional vibe? Exactly how nervous I am. What espresso machine defines me as a man because the fact that I am asking these questions prevents me from being a dating man. How many plates, cups and bowls should a man have?

I guess I also need a dining table, an entryway rug, and bathroom rugs, and what about that? one thing, that thing that's like a rug but longer, yes, a runner, we're going to need one of those and I'm going to need too, well, what else do I need? My name is Sam Harris. I am an author and neuroscientist. and I'm interested in how our growing scientific understanding of ourselves can, should and really should change our conception of what it means to live a good life, gratifying desires in a markedly materialistic way is really an interesting phenomenon.

We were obsessed, but then the new version comes out, which is new and improved in a dozen ways when it comes to the newest, most popular, crave-worthy status symbols and now you don't care which one you have anymore, in fact, the one you have is a source of dissatisfaction I think we are confused about what will make us happy. Many people think that material possessions are really at the center of the bullseye and hope that by satisfying every desire that arises, it will somehow boil down to satisfaction. In our lives, it is clear that as human beings we initially have a strong attachment to the people who care for us, and sometimes it seems that those attachments extend to objects as if they are as important as people.

I'm not so sure I have a great relationship with things. I was talking to author and sociologist Julie Shore and I said the problem with that in our society is that we're too materialistic and she said actually, if you think about it in any way, we're not. material enough we are too materialistic in the everyday sense of the word and we are not materialistic enough in the true sense of the word we need to be true materialists and really care about the materiality of goods instead we are in a world in which goods materials are so important for their symbolic meaning what do they do to position us in a status system based on what advertising or marketing says are about the status quo in the fashion industry right now is driven by fast fashion, such Maybe when our mothers were buying clothes or our grandmothers there were four seasons a year or maybe even two seasons you dress for the cold you dress for the heat now we work on a cycle of 52 seasons per year foreigners want you to feel like you are out of trend after a week so you can buy something new the following week, in fact there have been stories of large fashion retailers rescuing all of a week's worth of clothes, cutting them up with scissors, destroying them and putting them aside off the road so no one can resell them or even wear them they want consumers to buy as many clothes as quickly as possible the era of fast fashion where we make clothes and sweatshops, so we don't pay the true labor costs and we don't pay the The ecological costs of these things drove down the price of clothing to the point that used clothing became worthless.

I like to think that rice and beans cost more than used clothes in historical terms, that is the world upside down and that represents the economics of such an extreme and profound situation. The unsustainability for a student of these things is something impressive and horrifying. This trend is what happened to clothing and then increasingly to the

entire

consumer goods sector. Almost anything in the home now becomes a fashion object and that has been a simply dramatic transformation if you think about the concept of fashion: it embodies the idea that you can throw things away not when they can no longer be used but when they are no longer usable.

They do not have that social value or they are no longer fashionable. I think people buy because we are trying to fill this void inside of them and I know because that was me, but no matter how many things we buy and how many different fashions we try, we don't become a more complete person, we keep searching, this hunger will never is satisfied. I think the fundamental thing is that you can never have enough of what you don't really want; In other words, deep down, we don't want more good things, more toys, more cars, we want what they will bring us and we want to feel.

In general, you want to feel satisfied with this senseless consumption, that the same thing that does not make us happy is also causing the degradation of our habitat. We can afford to have 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We are approaching 400 parts per million. billion is caused by the burning of oil, natural gas, coal, all the fuels that we use to drive our consumer economy, to drive the manufacturing of garbage that we don't need, this is real and we really have to do something about it. We will never be able to achieve the environmental benefits we seek while waiting for Our lives to be the same.

We will have to give up many of the secrets that we are not actually going to achieve. To miss it, it's been over four years in which I've technically been homeless, although I go to new countries and rent flats, so maybe I'm between houses or maybe a full house. Only I have many houses, but not in one place. for a long time it's always interesting to go on a date or something and have to explain well yeah, I'm homeless, maybe I shouldn't go through with it when I started reducing the amount of stuff in my life and started getting rid of essentially everything.

That didn't fit in these bags, so I went through and took photos of everything I had in the world and counted it and as a result I discovered that I had 51 things in the whole world. I started living this way about four years ago. I was running a branding studio. I always wanted to travel the world and I had never left the country and that was kind of a sign of my failure in many ways, so I started a Blog and left my career behind in Los Angeles. and I started looking for something new, something a little different and something a little more in line with what I wanted out of life and now I carry everything on my back, like a hermit crab or a turtle that I could get my hands on. getting rid of everything I had that didn't fit in my carry-on, which was a huge decision and not something I expected from the beginning.

Very quickly I realized that I wouldn't need that much and came to the conclusion that Everything I Left Behind would probably be left behind forever. Which he did at the end of the day knowing that this road had been well traveled, the direction it was going and these very successful men and women with all this money and all this prestige. and all this professional experience behind them they were not happy, they are very successful, but not in an absolute sense, they are successful with dollars and cents, it seemed much more likely that I could find something, find a definition of success that In fact, it took me to a place where I was successful and incredibly happy.

It seems that money can buy happiness in a sense. So Global Research below US$70,000 a year, adding greater material well-being, is related to greater psychological well-being. but when you start to exceed that threshold, money does not buy happiness, you can have more money, but you are not happier. Jim Carrey has a quote where he says: I wish everyone could become rich and famous so they could realize that's not the answer. The first answer is always that good, it's easy for Jim Carrey to say he's rich and famous, right, and I'm like, wait a minute, who else could say that it would take someone rich and famous to be able to say he's not worth the money? grief?

We need to satisfy our basic needs. Have a house with food on the table. Know. Be sure. That's very important to recognize because not everyone has those things that money is going to say. They give you security. The problem is that you don't necessarily have control over them. do more of something you do have control overIt is spending less, what you do have control over is having less and that by automatically stretching what you have it is not so much about financial gains for me but about financial freedom, which is the ability to get up in the morning and spend the day as best you can.

You may think, part of why we consume things is that we work for so long and many people don't find satisfaction in their jobs and need some way to tell themselves that's the case. It's worth it but it's more than just a few numbers in a bank account. There's more. There's more to life than bills and money and work. How do you earn? It is earned with traditional nicknames of success. You earn how many zeros are on the end of your paycheck. I remember sitting, you know, in Barnes and Nobles and I was deciding what career I was going to pursue and all I was doing was flipping through this book, it was a book that showed the title versus earning potential over time and that is When I focused on Finance and Accounting, my

entire

life was about winning with a capital W.

My whole life was focused on being the guy who would be respected. I had a series of vertical jumps since my 20s that led me to this place in 2008. Earning a ridiculous six figure salary, I have a corner office and on December 31, 2007 my boss calls me into his office and tells me that I'm going to get a promotion and this is it, this is the turning point, this is me being a junior partner at this firm and everything I had worked for was going to be handed to me at that very moment, you know, in terms banking, I was coined and I remember hearing this man say that and it was really strange. kind of um ethereal moment where I felt like I was watching this happen, you know, it was almost and I walked out of his office and I went back to mine and I just closed the door behind me and I started crying because I realized that I was completely and completely trapped and that I could never walk away from that amount of money in my life and any dream that I had of living a life of purpose and meaning and being an adventurer and someone who would really take risks and and live a life that is deliberate and intentional.

Those disappeared when you see your life written down and recognize that this is not this, it is nothing. I will, why am I doing this? This guy who is giving me this I don't want to be thing. he don't envy his life you know maybe this was never for me to begin with and maybe if I don't leave now I'll be that guy for the rest of my life and I just took the elevator down 28 stories and that was it and from then on I decided that this life was going to be mine and it was going to be wildly extravagant my life, you know, ready here, yeah, that was good, all those people are waiting and I'm not.

I'm thinking, do you want to go take a look? I'm sure we can do it or fit into good seats for about 30 people. This is the most disorganized night of the tour so far. in Las Vegas, imagine, and the space we rent here for whatever reason is not ready for us even though we paid to rent the space, luckily there are amazing people here who are actually helping us in some way. this job, yeah, you know what's funny. I used to think Rich made fifty thousand dollars a year, then when I started climbing the corporate ladder in my early 20s, I quickly started making fifty thousand dollars, but I didn't feel rich.

Something went wrong. I had to do it. I went back to the drawing board and discovered that I hadn't adjusted for inflation, okay so we can pontificate just for a while, we really are here for you, as Ryan mentioned, and that's why we like to ask what we call questions and attempts to answers. dedicated you are creative you are innovative you have a sincere desire for humanity the same people fear the rules of Wall Street and to me you are moving away from war if you really talk about mineralism the supreme mentalist is a recluse hermit or monk and to me that doesn't work to change the world you know what I'm saying you're the only threat to that system you're right there are two sides of the spectrum I think you know ideally we're somewhere in the middle of that right because I don't think there's anything wrong with consumption, the problem It was compulsory consumption, buying things because that's what you're supposed to do, that's what advertising tells you to do or that's what this magical model for happiness is and then when you receive it you realize that it doesn't make you as happy as you thought yes, it was a great comment thank you very much we are trying to destroy those you know amen let me hug you yes, thank you very much I will tell you about your personality and your simplicity and answering all the questions that charisma about me was connecting with People, how can you see yourself well, it's like 4:30 in the morning, yes, and we're going to be on TV, good morning, 5:20.

I always hope to buy the latest gadget or smartphone, but this morning I'm joined by two men who have taken what they say is the simpler path and are living a minimalist life. Hello, we are here for five o'clock. and Josh and Ryan at six o'clock with the minimalists. I was living the American dream and I realized it wasn't my dream. I looked around at all the things in my life when my mother died and my marriage ended, both in the same month and I started to ask myself what was really important, what things really added value to my life and I realized that many of the things that I bought to make me happy weren't actually doing their job, well good luck, take it easy, don't do it. do too much don't buy anything today okay amen good luck with that we'll be back a little later at 5:30 the latest on the search for the missing Malaysia flight, missing five days ago, plus how you can show your Minimalism in the bedroom is not a radical lifestyle, yes, I absolutely believe in quality over quantity, so I would rather have a nice sweatshirt than a closet full of ugly sweatshirts that I don't like to wear.

I don't have many clothes. now, but all the clothes I have are my favorite clothes, so let's take a look at what I have packed for 10 months of traveling. I'm wearing my only pair of jeans, I have a couple of denim shirts. I have a short-sleeved button-down Oxford. a few t-shirts a hair dryer every good minimalist has a hair dryer and a lot of underwear now here is the secret of underwear you have to have a color that is in the middle this is how you separate your dirty underwear from the clean clothes interior with the pair of red underwear toiletry bag everyone needs a toiletry bag obviously I also have a laptop with me but that's it for 10 months we didn't really have a plan, which is pretty much our story in 2010 when I was really looking into tidying up and simplify, I thought about the only place in my house that was the most messy and that was my closet, so I decided to create a minimalist fashion challenge to wear less than what I had, so in project 333, the challenge for me was to wear 33 items for three months and the 33 items included clothing, jewelry, accessories and shoes, that's where I usually lose people.

It was a great way for me to really see what I needed, what I was using, and if it would make a difference, and it did. Working in advertising I had a lot of clients that I had to see every day, I went to sales meetings and for the first three months no one realized that the story was picked up by the Associated Press because so many people were writing about it and doing it. and trying it out in this video I'm going to talk more about how I plan my project 333 project 333 project 333 and I thought oh boy this is it and they didn't realize so I was probably that whole year until I quit my job.

Without anyone really knowing that I was dressing in only 33 items, I made this thing called project 333 and it just helps me keep my wardrobe really simple. I went from this giant closet where I had I don't know 100 sweaters to now. Having this super small wardrobe and being able to share it with Logan and that made a huge difference, I just don't worry about what I'm going to wear in the morning because all the things in my closet are amazing, at least I think so. So there's something about not being prepared for every moment that really helps you engage with your community - being pregnant, for example, in such a limited amount of time I had a costume event to attend and I said to David, let me go see If I can find a dress and I was thinking God, this is so dated.

I have two months left. The event is next week. What I am going to do? So I called a couple of my friends. Hey, do you have any dresses? May I know, check but in the past, you know, I definitely would have bought what I needed when I needed it because that's what you do, you prepare, you know for your situation, the beauty of it is that it's become very communal, our friends ask us for things that we know, you know we've gotten closer to people because of that. Mark and I got married in 2005 and a year later I started to feel very unwell, I had a lot of vertigo, tingling and fatigue which the following year got very bad and in July I was diagnosed with MS and at first We were both terrified, it was difficult, it was a difficult moment, I mean, immediately my response was not: "I have to simplify things." I'm a slow learner, so I decided I had to work hard to prove that I was good, and that's why I worked harder.

I exercised more, I really pushed myself probably during that first month and I felt terrible about any illness or disease, one of the biggest factors, one of the things that contributes to these things in a negative way, is the stress in your life by getting rid of of these things in our lives these material elements and all this excess that we used to live in good things happen since then I have not had what I would consider a relapse I am in better health than before I was diagnosed people always tell you or at least I do they did with me in the early stages of Ms you have to listen to your body like listen to my body I can't even listen to my family I don't know how I'm going to listen to my body so that I started to get those things out.

I was finally able to realize what I had sacrificed by being busy working constantly. We have this ability to concentrate, but we live in a context in which we continually go from one stimulus to another. looking for the dopamine experience where we are rewarded with the next email or the next retweet or the next thing that hits your phone quite often I think there is a price that we pay and that has really become a problem, there's a Nokia study that says the average person checks their phone about 150 times a day you walk down the street in any major city locked in their devices we're totally in The Matrix and it's easier to be stupid than just reading the newspaper update your social media feed and consume because you can potentially do everything you want, but to do everything you want you have to sacrifice the things that are really important when it comes to overwhelm, the easiest way to solve it is to turn it off, really just turn it off.

It was really powerful to realize that most of my life had been a dream for Garner's sympathy. I came to ABC News when I was 28 years old and I was a very ambitious young man in my way to compensate for my insecurity about being such a rookie I had to throw myself into work and really become a workaholic and after 9/11 I raised my hand to go to the abroad and cover subsequent conflicts. We were lucky this week to have our reporter Dan Harris on a trip organized by the Taliban. at night, a harrowing journey down a single broken road towards a besieged city.

I spent a lot of time in Iraq and Afghanistan without thinking much about the psychological consequences, and when I returned home from a particularly long tour in Iraq I became depressed and then did something really stupid: I started self-medicating with recreational drugs. According to my doctor, it was enough to cause a panic attack on live television. Let's go now. Dan Harris is on the editorial staff. DaveNews. Now one of the most frequently prescribed drugs in the world may be providing a big advantage, researchers report that people who take low-cholesterol drugs called statins for at least five years may also reduce their risk of cancer, but it's too early to prescribe statins slowly for cancer production.

He does it for the news, let's go back to Robin and Charlie now. He raised the level of adrenaline in my brain, which my doctor said prepared me to lose control on Good Morning America in front of five million people. 5.019 million people according to the Nielsen ratings at the time set me on a strange, winding path that eventually led me to the last thing I thought would be useful to anyone: meditation, ruminating on the past and the future in a way that It prevents us from truly connecting with the present moment in a way that values ​​it as good enough.

Meditation is a technique for finding well-being in the present moment before something happens. You can be happy and satisfied simply by being aware of the sensation of breathing very rarely. We are completely dedicated. On the one hand, we are interrupting ourselves or allowing ourselves to be interrupted by these data streams and what in any other context would be considered distractions, but now we consider them as akind of necessary parts of our bandwidth if I leave my phone in my pocket and it's on vibrate mode unconsciously. I shudder when it vibrates. I even cringe when it doesn't vibrate thinking it vibrates and that kills that little argument like those nanoseconds of distraction.

I think it has a hugely detrimental effect. everywhere you look it's like constant high frequency shudders this anticipation of newness has the quality of turning us into the lab rat that just presses the bar meditation is a great antidote to that people here at ABC News would ask me about What are you meditating in parentheses? What's wrong with you? What happened? Eventually I started to respond oh, you know, because it makes me 10 happier and I could see the looks transform from disdain and skepticism to interest like, oh, that sounds reasonable, I'd like that one. Some of the best advice I have ever received in my entire life was from a meditation teacher named Joseph Goldstein.

He was asking them about the usefulness of worry in the specific context he was talking about, whether it makes sense to worry about missing a flight. and I was arguing to him that look, you Buddhists are always talking about thoughts being just thoughts that don't necessarily have any connection to reality, but the fact is that if I miss my flight I'm screwed and he said you're definitely right. , but there is a certain amount of worry that makes sense and a certain amount of worry that doesn't, the seventeenth time you worry about missing your flight and all the horrible ramifications, you might ask yourself a simple question: is this Boom useful to a guy who had spent his entire life worrying and thinking that my worry was the advantage I had over everyone else because I knew I was going to be more anxious and more compulsive than any of my competitors.

I realized that there was a certain amount of worry that's what I call constructive angst and then there's useless rumination that just makes you miserable it's not like I'm 100% conscious all the time you know I still do an enormous amount of stupid shit and simi wife was here, I'd give you a 90, it's still a rant and there's no doubt I'm still an idiot in many ways, but I'm less of an idiot and less of an idiot and more reflective, more focused and calmer. We've been on tour all year and just when I start to think if we're doing it, if we're making a difference, The Today Show calls us and asks us to be on now, we have the opportunity to share this with millions of people, which is huge, dude, we're actually late, so we gotta go, the entrance is the address, it's 35.

Yeah, but you'll see like the Today Show stuff set up, oh, right there, there, you sure about this. Is it yes, go down the stairs? Oh, compare it from NBC News. This is today with Black Friday Cyber ​​​​Monday with holly bows and stuffed stockings. It may start to feel like the holidays are more and less about what's really important. Joshua Fields Milburn and Ryan Nicodemus have come to see things differently. They are what you call minimalists in the hypothetical world. What if one of you falls madly in love with a max list? Yes, who likes his stuff.

What are you going to do? That's a great question. My girlfriend. Actually, me. lives with I don't think she calls herself a minimalist, she has about 20 pairs of shoes, but what I will say is that she and I have very similar values ​​and beliefs, yes, we respect each other, we love each other, we appreciate each other, it's a great lifestyle great topic for today last book everything that's left is in stores right now what concept okay so last night's event was crazy. We arrived, the store owner had about 30 chairs. I asked him to put out more chairs and he was there.

Are you sure you're going to need more chairs? Ken Burns was here and maxed out all my seats. I have 60 chairs total and I said yeah, I think we'll have about 50 or 60 people show up, go ahead and let's take out the rest of the chairs and we end up with about 150,200 people showing up. I mean, people were standing on wall-to-wall shelves. Hey, thanks for everything you do. I think your story came at the right time. Serendipity, guys. you are my amazing inspiration, thank you so much for that, I'm glad we couldn't help, thanks for coming bro, we're seeing more and more people showing up so it's great to see the messages spreading so we're on our way. to Los Angeles will be our biggest venue yet, expecting one of our biggest crowds and I really think LA is a city that could really use this message.

Forget about doing too much. I'm moving to campus. Black things are small, but we love things, cars, houses. and six-figure salaries may sound like a dream life Joshua Milburn and Ryan Nicodemus on a world book tour and here to explain why someone would just give up all of these things, letting go was really hard. I wish I could say it was as easy as running a dumpster and throwing my stuff out properly, but it really was a strange process. I love watching it spread like wildfire and in a good way, it's like a good plague. A surprising new study shows a large number of children under the age of 10.

Four have access to a mobile device and some of those children began using them before they were one year old. We are building more competitive environments, more interesting for the consumer. This means ingesting signals that tell us about their interests and making sure we can control what message they see next. A Toronto-based advertising executive wrote an op-ed in the Globe and Mail saying it's time we stopped advertising to children. Advertising aimed at children has been around for so long. However, what has changed is the amount of this advertising and the media. Through which this advertising arrives, historically companies that had products aimed at children targeted mothers and made mothers want to buy things for children.

What happens is that companies decide to ignore the mothers and go directly to the children. I don't know what the three most common words are in American homes. I don't know if it's I love you or if it's I want. Those 5,000 ads that we see every day from the moment we are born and everyone tells us so. Hey, this is what your life should be about, should it be about accumulating more stuff or should it be about focusing on yourself, if you have something you've ever dreamed of, advertisers have been thought of, they just realized that there is a huge market.

Their parents want to give the best to their children and are really working hard to reach that angle. There is a problem of both process and content and the problem of content is enormous. Products advertised to children are garbage. Welcome to mute mini. wrestling 120 new characters you can collect the secret is that they are flexible spawns it is a junk culture it is the food that is bad for them they are shitty toys that are gendered and violent I don't see the argument for subjecting children to this as if There would be no social positive to benefit from it, we only know that there is something negative and it is only the political power of advertising and the companies that make the advertising that prevents us from doing something about it.

Yes, I heard someone say that there is another word for minimalism: it's called being single. to help people think, oh, that's so easy if you're not married and you don't have kids, how can I set the example of being married and having six kids? Which is not minimalist at all and very ironic, how do I live a minimalist lifestyle with those? Types of Limitations Jack and I haven't been too prescriptive like, you know, you have five toys, you know, no, buddy, you can only have one truck, you can't have three trucks, you know, it's like no, when I was a little kid, no I don't have a GI Joe.

I had like 100 GI Joes. We have welcomed things into our lives, but definitely with the intention of thinking about what we are doing rather than just consuming when you live with other people and are a family. You can't just make unilateral decisions. Well, now we're going to get rid of everything and throw the TV out the door. There will be a revolt which will be a little frustrating because you can't just get away with it, but it's also a really interesting experiment. on how you can move together as a group and learn about this together as a group from the beginning, when we decided to live with less, we knew from the beginning that the miniloves would look how we wanted them to look.

I remember going. getting rid of things and finally saying, "Okay, Salem, let's go through your toys and get rid of some of the things you no longer need." He didn't have any problems. My daughter is seven years old and she is very different. She loves all the dolls. she can go so far as to collect rocks and twigs and anything else she can find, she collects and clings to you, you know, as parents, we can set some limits for her, but ultimately, we let her choose what she wants, all the time. minimalism. I wanted to get rid of more than I wanted to get rid of and then there comes the compromise that her side of the closet seems a lot smaller than mine and that's okay with us, you know, I think one of the lessons that we learned to The thing about this whole journey is that our kids are really watching us and we might tell them we want them to be certain people, but they are learning so much more about how we live our lives.

This is the undercurrent of consumerism, removing some of those things provides them with a safe environment where they can become what they most want to be instead of what the world will try to convince them to be. Good evening, it is clear that our nation's real problems run much deeper than gas lines or energy shortages, deeper even than inflation or recession in a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, many of us. We now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does but by what one possesses, but we have discovered that owning things and consuming them does not satisfy our longing for meaning.

We have learned that accumulating material goods cannot feel the emptiness of lives that have no confidence or purpose. It is not a message of happiness or peace of mind, but it is the truth and it is a warning that we believe we need those things because we have been told we need those things. Our society has told us that we need those things. It has been like that. It's kind of a slow little thing that percolates and suddenly becomes something that you do, thank you, that really comes down to a values-based ideal: you want to do the most good and get the most value out of exactly what that you need to have too little will not give you that and having too much will not give you that right having that balance having enough that is what you are looking for thank you if I were to review the American dream it would be more about coming together in community it would be more about a society that It would have much less inequality and more justice in which everyone has an opportunity, which for me is responsible with the planet and our ecosystem, that would be an American dream when talking about not consuming.

People think you're trying to take something away from them, but the truth of the matter is that I think what this movement is really about is seeking a life that is good for us and for the people around us, so we are in the Angeles right now we are here for our biggest event, what we are trying to do is show people that there is a different way to live than the people you bring into your life. You should always be with people who have the same values ​​and that's what minimalism is really about, it's about living deliberately, so every choice I make, every relationship, every item, every dollar I spend, obviously I'm not perfect, but I constantly I ask the question, is it just adding value, am I being deliberate with this? decision that you will see tonight at The Last Bookstore in Los Angeles at seven o'clock thank you Joshua and Ryan for coming.

I didn't realize it at the time, but I was so focused on what my idea of ​​success was. of success was making more money and similar relationships were a priority, well I didn't pay any attention to the people closest to me including my mother, the point of this message, the point of us sharing this story is to help people to control that appetite. for more things because it is a very destructive path. I have literally used people to sell cell phones. I've used people to get bigger and better clients. What I love about my life now is that I can be genuine and that there is nothing. manipulation, it is my great pleasure to introduce you to Joshua Fields Milburn and Ryan Nicodemus.

Minimalists imagine a life with less passion, free from the trappings of the chaotic world around me. Well, what you are imagining is an intentional life, it is not a perfect life and it is not even an easy life, but a simple one. What I found with minimalism is a way of saying, let's stop the madness. This looks like it's not going to work. It's not the answer. There is a movement in growth. Don't know. I think there is a limit. I am now surrounded by people who are inspired to create massive social change and impact. TheThe depth of my relationships is beyond anything I had ever imagined.

Recognize that this life is yours and that it is yours. one and only and one that stops being esoteric when that is no longer hippie poetry when the pragmatism of that statement sits directly in your bones and you recognize that this is all it changes I don't know where you are on your journey where you are in life or wherever may you go on that journey, but we are so grateful that you are here with us tonight, so if I could give you one thing to take away from all of this, it would be to love people and use things. because the opposite never works thank you very much for coming but we love foreign things