Who Decides the Self-Image Called “Minimalist”? The Structure of a Label Applied From Outside

Introduction: Reducing Became Your Proof

You reduce your possessions and pare your life down. That way of living is genuinely light. But from some point a strange sensation mixes in: the sense that reducing itself has become your proof.

Add a possession and you feel you cease to be yourself. Called so you’re a minimalist, you feel the pressure to preserve that image. What began in order to get light has become, before you know it, the work of maintaining a single mould.

Material on the merits of ways of living is plentiful. What this article treats is the ground beneath it: why a life of disciplining yourself binds so strongly to the sense of who am I — its mechanism.

Let me give the conclusion first. Because it supplies a startlingly plain answer to a hard-to-answer question. And in exchange for that plainness, the material of the self-image comes to be procured from outside.

Freedom Is Also Rootlessness

First, what lies at the foundation of this bond. The psychologist Erich Fromm saw the two faces of the freedom the modern age brought [Fromm, 1941].

One is freedom from something. Once, people were firmly bound by status, community, tradition. The modern age shatters this bondage one after another. People are released from birth and rank and become able to choose their own lives.

But Fromm points out an easily overlooked shadow here. To become free from bondage is, at the same time, to lose your anchor. Once, community bound people and, at the same time, supported them — because it gave, in advance, the answer to what to do and what to want.

When that bondage is removed, people become free and, at the same time, are thrown into rootlessness. The state you may want anything is, turned over, the state no one guarantees what you ought to want.

People cannot always bear this suspension. If someone, or something, would decide want this for you, how much easier it would be. Fromm called this movement, by which people try to escape the weight of freedom, the escape from freedom.

“The Disciplined Self” Draws Your Outline Sharply

A life of disciplining yourself is one of the most refined forms of this flight.

Everyone wishes to know who they are. But answering this question is not easy. What you truly want, what you hold dear, where you want to head — putting this into your own words is laborious, endless work. For many, the outline of the self is hazy.

There, a vivid answer is held out: I am a person who can pare things away. This self-image is startlingly plain. What you do not hold, how far you have reduced, what rules you keep — these are concrete, visible, and can be shown to others. To a self that had no grip, it gives a clear form.

Moreover, this story is reinforced ceaselessly by outward achievement. Each time you keep a rule to the end, the self-image I am this kind of person gains fresh evidence. Identity keeps being resupplied with the fuel of achievement.

Another strength is that it is easy to see from outside. Inner inquiry is invisible to others. However deeply you ask what you want, that undertaking is quiet and can be shown to no one. But a pared-down life takes a visible form. In the work of establishing a self, this is a peculiarly exhibitable kind. So people flow toward visible achievement rather than invisible inquiry.

Here a certain exchange holds. You let go of the vague, heavy work of asking yourself what you want. In its place you receive a plain, easy-to-tell story. Instead of enduring the vagueness of the question, you buy the plainness of the answer.

Let me note, to be safe: I am not denying holding a clear goal or throwing yourself into it. The problem lies in whether that achievement is the expression of your own wish or the filling-in of a self-image. If the former, achievement is the footprint of your desire. If the latter, it is a temporary signboard to cover the anxiety of not knowing who you are.

The One Applying That Label Is the Outside

Here, touch a decisive fact. The one adjudicating this kind of self-image is not the person themselves.

One experience tells it well. Absorbed in creation on minimal food and sleep, you are admired — so stoic, such concentration. But be just as absorbed, taking no meals and forgetting time over a video game, and the appraisal flips at once. Now you are seen as undisciplined.

The content of the behaviour barely differs. The same absorption, the same paring of life. And yet, on the mere difference of whether the object is creation or a game, the appraisal splits in two, from praise to contempt.

What this fact teaches is this. The appraisal whether you are stoic does not come from the nature of the behaviour itself. If it did, the same absorption would receive the same appraisal whatever its object. What decides is an external ruler — whether the object is deemed worth valuing. It is nothing but a label the outside applies to a particular behaviour.

From here an unavoidable consequence follows. When a person tries to conform to that label, they are choosing an object the outside approves of and fitting themselves to a label the outside applies. That is, the very act by which they believe they are disciplining themselves has become the act of obeying the external standard most faithfully.

Precisely for this reason, this kind of praise is a word not to be careless with. Wearing the face of praise, it binds the person ever more deeply onto the outside’s ruler. The more praised, the more they try to answer that appraisal and draw their desire toward the direction the outside approves.

▸ The whole picture of this structure — praise becoming currency — is treated in why trying to be stoic drives you further from freedom.

Conclusion: Rebuild the Self-Image From the Inside

A pared-down life binds strongly to the self-image because it supplies a plain answer to a hard-to-answer question. And since the material of that plainness is procured from outside, the right to adjudicate the self-image, too, is left outside.

Let me make it clear here. I am not denying a life of reducing possessions itself. If you reduce after consulting your own life, it is the exercise of sovereignty. The problem is that the moment reducing becomes the proof of who I am, the party who receives the proof moves outside.

One question suffices to tell it apart. Would you choose that life even if no one saw and you told no one? If you would, it is the expression of your own desire. If you would not, what was supporting you was not the life but the label applied to it. The point where you notice becomes the starting point for rebuilding the self-image from the inside.

References

Academic papers and theory

• Fromm, E. Escape from Freedom (1941)
• Nietzsche, F. On the Genealogy of Morals (1887)