Minimalist Blogs


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Mind you, there’s a lot of people in the world that need to see and read and hear about the wonder that is getting rid of things you don’t need and aren’t passionate about in your life and making room for the things that matter most to you. I get that and it’s important.

But with some of the headlines in blogs I’ve been reading, I’ve had thoughts more along the lines of something I read by Chase Night a time ago. I found myself astonished into laughter when I saw a blog post about the negatives of being online as often as we are and that we should be online less. As I rode the bus that morning, a smile crept across my face as this came up in my RSS feed. How would this have even been read if someone hadn’t been online to write it. How would someone have posted this without being online to do such a thing?

I’m flabbergasted. I’ve come across the same chuckles about books — read this carefully: books — on minimalism. As I consider the irony of getting online to read a blog that has a subscribe button and then tells me that being online less is a good thing for me,  I admit that maybe Chase and a few other bloggers I’ve read have a point.

That said, the amount of time I spend online is most because I’m a web designer/developer and I have to be online for that. I also connect to people via the same means as we are geographically separated one from another. That said I continue to consider this conundrum of simply being online and minimalist. It’s such a bad idea, but there are so many of us getting online to tell people that being online is a generally bad idea or that the time should be better managed only to write a regular stream of posts that require us to check for updates. Wouldn’t it make more sense to say the six or seven really important things and stop so people can have them for reference and live their lives in the freedom we think they should have for themselves? What if we did? Then again defining that freedom for others is a bit of a task; I think that if we aren’t careful, our opinions about minimalism can be just as destructive as society’s current push for us to have more and that more often.

That last sentence sparks off a whole different point of discourse, but that’s for another time.


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