Minimalism: A Documentary About the Important Things

Minimalism can be an eye-opening message for anyone who hasn't been exposed to it, but for most, it's too little too late. Documentaries like Food Inc and An Inconvenient Truth were ahead of their time, coming out before the zenith of the information age. But minimalism has pervaded through blogs, books, Youtube, college lectures and TED already, and making this documentary at this time was a very safe choice.

It has a little bit of everything, some dialogue from semi-famous bloggers (and Sam Harris), a few anecdotes, pictures, data, some shots of Americans being iphone-addicted slobs. It has a lot of good one liners but doesn't particularly go into any one thing in depth. I don't think I walked away from it knowing anything I didn't already know.

Every now and then, I do need a little reminder to cut back on my excess and focus on quality rather than quantity, and this movie does that. It's useful for that.But this joins a long line of works with the cliché message of "avoid consumerism, find fulfilment in your life and live in the woods maybe".

If you have not heard about the minimalism movement and feel curious about it I totally recommend this movie (available on Netflix), it could be eye-opening and inspiring for you.

However as a person who has read a few articles and watched a few videos on minimalism and consumerism issues, I found this documentary lacking in deep, new and engaging ideas. It felt more like a long promotional video for the book with interesting stories of people thrown in between.

The excerpt from president Carter's speech was the most interesting part to me, the message might not be new but it was delivered with clarity and strength.

I liked the message of the documentary. It argues that we don't need all the extra stuff that we are constantly collecting. This is obstructing us from things that really matter. You don't make space for that since consuming seems more fulfilling myopically and seems more urgent. There were examples of multititude of people speaking about apparels, home space, career related things which we just get hooked on to without rethinking if that is for us. The documentary didn't get very deep in the challenges of implementing it, or even the nuances and how several people have adopted it in their daily lives. There were traces of meditation helping, connecting with people, implementing this within a family or just your spouse. But it felt a little superficial. But overall I recommend it. The next time you are purchasing something, if this movie triggers a deliberation, then it has left a mark. It seems to have done for me.

A succession of wall street types clear a fair deal of stuff out of their big, fancy, rich bro condos. It hard to empathise with people like this, especially the "homeless" guy who has access to enough money to constantly move around the world staying in hotels.

They may be able to cut 6 shirts down to 2, but they clearly can't escape the stranglehold of capitalism. Buy their new book.

I think most reviews here don't get the point. It's not supposed to give you a plan for how to live like a minimalist. This is a documentary made for people who don't already live minimalist and haven't done any reading on the subject. This could serve as a great wake up call for many and all Western materialists should watch it. It's like an easy introduction to the topic.

It doesn't do much for someone who already lives like that but so what? "I rather read blogs on the subject and bla bla bla", yeah okay sorry guess what? You are the egotistic hipster you so much like to mock. You don't need guidelines or blogs to live a minimalist life. To be able to choose minimalism is always a huge privilege as you can see in this documentary and I think this fact makes it easier for Western people to relate and absorb something from Minimalism.