the.com/minimalist
Owns less so every object has to justify its existence.
means A person who deliberately keeps only what they use or love, treating empty space as a feature, not a lack.
from Built from 'minimal,' tracing back to Latin 'minimus' meaning 'smallest' — the superlative of 'parvus,' small. The '-ist' suffix (person who does/believes in a thing) got bolted on in the 20th century when art critics needed a word for painters and sculptors stripping work down to bare shapes and colors — think single canvases of one flat hue. The lifestyle sense, applied to people who pare down their closets and apartments, followed decades later, borrowing the art world's prestige to make owning less sound like a philosophy rather than just tidying up.
- origin
- 1960s art movement rejecting excess decoration
- secret cost
- often spends more on fewer, better things
- myth
- not the same as just having no stuff
- tell
- describes their shelf as curated, not empty