Minimalism As Trial and Error

I did everything right. Well, at least I thought so. I didn’t half-read it on my phone while watching TV and then vaguely apply two ideas I half-remembered. I actually sat down with this book. I took notes. I followed the sequence in the order it was presented, because I’m the kind of person who reads the instructions and follows them when trying something new. For better or worse.

I held each object. I asked the question. I made the piles. I genuinely felt like I was finally doing this correctly. Like something was shifting. Like I was becoming the kind of person who had her life together in the specific way that minimalism-adjacent people on the internet appear to have their lives together.

I was going to have clean surfaces. I was going to know where everything was. I was going to open my wardrobe in the morning and feel calm, instead of that specific low-grade panic of being late, nothing fits right, why do I own this, when did I buy this, what was I thinking?

I quietly stopped after one week. Just sort of drifted away from it. The book went on a shelf. My house continued to look like my house. I told myself I’d return to it when things calmed down. I don’t know why I keep thinking things are going to calm down.

It took me an embarrassingly long time to understand what had actually happened, because my first explanation was that I had failed. Again. Obviously, I had failed. The method was clearly sound, millions of people had managed it, and the problem was me and my inability to commit to things, my chaotic brain, and probably seventeen other personal inadequacies I could list if you gave me a minute.

I sat with that story for a while. It fit neatly into other stories I already had about myself.

Then one day, I was flipping back through my notes, and I stopped at a passage about sitting quietly with your belongings and really feeling into whether each one brought you joy. And I started laughing.

Sitting quietly. With my belongings. Feeling into things.

I have three children of the same age. The last time I sat quietly with anything, that was basically a historical period.

The book didn’t know about my life that “hold each object and feel something about it” falls apart completely when half the objects in your house are small plastic things that arrived at the bottom of a party bag, and you have no feelings about them except mild existential dread. It didn’t know that any system requiring one person to make decisions that stick, in a house with a partner and three kids, is a beautiful theory that will be destroyed by Thursday.

And underneath all the practical stuff, the book had an aesthetic. A very specific visual language of neutral tones, space, and everything in its place. It’s a lovely aesthetic. I understand why people want it. But it has never been mine. My home has color, and noise, and things on the walls, and a corner dedicated to art supplies that lives in what I can only describe as organized chaos. And I love it. It’s mine.

I was trying to pour my life into a mold cut for someone else and then blaming myself when the shape came out wrong.

This is the part where I want to be a little defiant, because I think the minimalism world has a lot to answer for here.

It sells itself as universal. Neutral. Just principles, applicable to any life. But every method carries the fingerprints of whoever built it. The specific constraints they had, the specific life they lived, the specific things they valued. And those things are not your things, necessarily. They’re just presented as if they are, because that’s how you sell a book to as many people as possible.

When it doesn’t work for you, the message is often the same: you didn’t commit enough, you’re not disciplined enough, you don’t want it badly enough. The framework itself won’t be questioned, because the framework is the product.

I believed that story for longer than I want to admit. I thought something was wrong with me. But what was actually wrong was that I was a parent of triplets trying to apply a method designed for someone with none of my constraints, toward an aesthetic I didn’t even want. It wasn’t my fault. It also wasn’t the author’s fault. The method just wasn’t for me. And nobody said that clearly enough.

So here’s what trial and error actually looked like, once I stopped trying to follow a map that wasn’t drawn for my territory.

It looked like clearing something and then needing it back two weeks later. Like a storage solution that made perfect sense in theory and lasted five days before real life touched it. Like getting rid of toys and watching my kids ask for the exact ones I’d donated with a specificity that felt almost personal.

It looked like accepting that my number is not the book’s number. The amount of stuff that makes my home feel functional rather than suffocating is something only I can figure out, by actually living in my actual home with my actual family, not by hitting a count someone decided was correct from a distance.

It looked like slowly accepting that my home is going to look lived-in. Because five people live in it. Three of them are kids. This is not a problem to fix. It’s just what’s true.

If you tried a method and quietly abandoned it, can I just say: same. And also, you probably didn’t fail it. It probably failed you.

There’s a version of less that is yours, but it’s not in a book. It’s in the slow, slightly tedious, occasionally frustrating process of paying attention to what actually works in the specific home you actually live in.

Your version might have more stuff than the photos suggest is acceptable. More color, more noise, more evidence that real humans are present. It might not photograph well. It might never look like the before-and-after that made you want to try this in the first place.

And it only means it’s real.

I don’t follow any "famous" system now. I have a practice, and a practice is different because it’s allowed to have bad weeks. A practice gets disrupted by illness and holidays, and the phase my kids went through where they were inexplicably obsessed with collecting rocks, and suddenly, rocks were everywhere. So many rocks. Rocks in every room, rocks in my coat pocket, rocks on the bathroom shelf.

A practice just means you keep returning to the question: what’s actually working here, and what isn’t?

Trial and error. That’s it.