Physical Goods as a Ceiling for Digital Media

Minimalism is hard. The modern (since 50s others tell me, I can only vouch for after 2000s) marketing shows possessions as a proxy for prosperity. There is some truth to it as social beings in the past “some” valuable possessions gave you a clout among your peers as someone who is trustworthy, reliable and can get stuff done. However with modern money and mass production economy that “some” seems to have a very high ceiling.

Doing minimalism with physical good is still easier than doing minimalism with digital goods. You see the things, can touch them, stack them up and give them away.

With digital good usually being a file or just a database entry the ceiling almost becomes infinite. I remember from early 2000s when phone photography was starting to pick up. My father was losing his love for his hobby of photography. When I asked him why, he answered (paraphrased) “in the world of SLR cameras, every shot had a cost of being filmed on a physical photo roll and that made each picture more valuable and precious”.

With the prevalence of free photos, we end up taking many more pictures than before but fewer ever make it to a family photo album (if the concept lives on at all).

But anyways, personally, I have always been good at physical minimalism (Maybe even too good, once a friend visited me and force ordered some stuff on my amazon that he deemed as life necessities. I am grateful to having such friends). A “trick” that I have been using to manage minimalism in the digital realm has been to try and have a physical copy of a digital item that should be on my mind.

Example, all books, movies I have have a physical “mirror” (sounds unintuitive in minimalism land but provides a ceiling where none exists). I don’t delete older books but just put them in a cold storage that aren’t accessible. That means the stuff on “top of my mind” in digital world gets capped. This doesn’t apply to all the books, I might read a book in digital if I have decided to read something but keep a physical copy if I plan to re-read the book.

I do something similar with movies (I self host all the movies since last month, no more streaming services as the fragmentation in the industry meant loss of value, unlike spotify which seems to have won the music wars) and PS5 games.

Overall, minimalism brings clarity to me and some logistics are justified.