Minimalism

Our theme for December is minimalism. It seems counter-intuitive, in this season of excess, but that’s exactly why we chose it.

The trend towards minimalism has been fueled by blogs like Joshua Fields Millburn’s and Ryan Nicodemus’s The Minimalists and the book that came out if it, Everything that Remains, and David Bruno’s blog that led to his memoir The 100 Thing Challenge: How I Got Rid of Almost Everything, Remade My Life, and Regained My Soul. His Ted Talk is a great summary of the arguments he makes and his reasons for undertaking the project. “Simplicity is action.” Simplicity is both a spiritual movement and a anti-consumer culture movement.

This article describes how a Canadian family took up Bruno’s challenge to reduce their belongings to 100 things each, if you want to see the plan in action. And if you’d like to try it yourself on a more manageable scale, another version is not to reduce your belongings to 100, but to get rid of 100 things.

And, of course, there’s the movement towards minimalism with social media: tweets and instagrams are short and sweet. If you’d like to see more of 4mothers (writing less!), follow us on Twitter and on Instagram @4mothers1blog. We are doing more and more on those platforms, and we’d love you to join us.

This month, minimalism will be our subject and our method. We will have two-word letters to our younger selves. We will have posts about our choices for our one word for the year 2015. We will be writing about reducing, refining, simplifying.

We will also have a week of gift guides, which will appear to be anything but minimalist and certainly not anti-consumerist, but our goal is to help you shorten your list of things to do by giving you some great ideas and to point you to some great causes and creators.

So bring on the December excess and join us for some minimalist fun!