Minimalism As Permission

Before the triplets, I was moderately organized about self-improvement. I had a morning routine I followed. I regularly read productivity books (or at times their summaries). I thought about my habits with the mild, background anxiety of someone who’s absorbed enough of the culture to feel perpetually slightly behind, but not so deep in it that I’d built a spreadsheet for my personal values.

I was keeping up. Imperfectly, but keeping up.

Then three babies arrived and the keeping up stopped completely, practically overnight, because there was simply no keeping up to be done. Three newborns don’t care about your morning routine. They don’t care about your system. They exist in a state of pure, relentless, beautiful chaos that defeats every framework you’ve ever read about.

My systems didn’t fail gradually. They just became immediately irrelevant. And I collapsed into survival mode so fast I didn’t even have time to mourn the routines I was leaving behind. That came later.

The mourning for the person I’d quietly hoped I was still becoming. The more organized, more intentional, more put-together version of myself that all the systems were supposedly building toward. She’d had a plan. She’d had a morning practice and a clear sense of her priorities and a home that reflected her values.

She did not have three babies of the same age.

I grieved her in the odd quiet moments that first year. Just an occasional, tired recognition that the trajectory I’d imagined for myself had been permanently rerouted, and I was going to have to figure out who I was in this version of my life instead.

That grief was real. I don’t want to skip past it because I think a lot of people in the middle of a life that has exploded their plans are carrying something similar and don’t quite have a name for it.

What replaced the systems was just triage.

I had a limited amount of energy on any given day, and three children who used most (if not all) of it. So I started, out of pure necessity, asking a different question. Not: how do I optimize this? But: does this even need to happen?

A lot of things, it turned out, did not actually need to happen.

The elaborate skincare routine. The journaling practice I’d maintained out of habit rather than genuine need. The background guilt about not reading enough, not exercising enough, not being further along in whatever direction I’d previously decided further along meant.

I didn’t clear these things out thoughtfully or intentionally. I just ran out of energy for them and they fell away. And the expected feelings—the guilt and the sense of falling behind—mostly didn’t come. What came instead was more interesting.

One day I did the bare minimum and it felt fine. A weird feeling that it could be truly just fine. The kids were okay, the house was functional (enough), dinner happened, everyone slept (I mean the kids). Nothing optimized. Nothing improved. Just an ordinary day that was, on reflection, a perfectly good day.

What if that was always enough and I just couldn’t see it before?

That’s when minimalism entered my life, though I wouldn’t have called it that yet. It started with physical stuff simply because physical stuff was the most obvious problem. Three babies generate an astonishing volume of objects. Things multiply. Surfaces disappear. And I didn’t have the energy to manage it all, so I started removing things instead. Because owning less meant managing less, and managing less meant I had slightly more of myself left over at the end of the very long day.

Somewhere in that process, I cleared a shelf in a cabinet. Stood in front of it for a moment. Just a shelf with some space on it. It was the first moment in a long time I hadn’t been trying to turn something into something better than it currently was.

What if that’s actually what minimalism is, underneath all the aesthetics and the methods and the before-and-after photos? Not a system for owning less but a quiet permission to stop engineering everything. To let a Tuesday evening just be a Tuesday evening. To let your home be a place people live in, rather than a project in permanent progress. To let yourself be a person who’s doing reasonably well, rather than a draft of someone more optimized coming soon.

I think about people I know who seem genuinely calm. Just actually settled in their lives. I used to assume they had cracked a code I hadn’t found yet, that they were more disciplined or better organized or further along in some way I needed to catch up to.

But now I think most of them just put something down at some point. The quiet weight of treating every part of their lives as something to be improved. And either they chose to put it down, or life forced them to, the way three babies arriving simultaneously forced me.

Either way, something got lighter.

I’m not saying we should abandon all our routines or stop caring about growth. Some structure is genuinely useful, and there’s no virtue in chaos, as anyone who has lived in genuine chaos will tell you.

But I do think it’s worth asking, honestly, just once: is the life you’re building actually the life you want? Or have you been optimizing for so long that you’ve lost track of what you were originally optimizing toward?

Because what if the best version of yourself isn’t somewhere ahead of you, waiting to be constructed through better habits and smarter systems?

What if she’s just the version that stopped treating every ordinary day as raw material for something better, and started actually living in it instead?

That version doesn’t require a system. She just requires you to put some things down.

I know it’s hard. I know there’s grief in it. I know it feels like giving something up. But on the other side of it is a bare minimum day that turns out, quietly, to be enough.

P.S. Have you ever felt that your life had become a project? And did you choose to put it down, or did something put it down for you?