After decluttering your home, how do you prevent possessions from piling up again? The key is establishing habits that stop unnecessary items from entering your space in the first place, rather than constantly battling accumulation.
Here are two practical strategies for how to maintain a minimalist lifestyle, including tips to stop buying new things and what to do when you do inevitabely do aquire new things.
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Keep Yourself From Acquiring New Things
Even after you discard most of your possessions, maintaining a minimalist lifestyle requires that you stop buying new, unnecessary things. In Goodbye, Things, Fumio Sasaki offers two tips to avoid accumulating new possessions in the future:
1) Eliminate Something Old Whenever You Acquire Something New
First, Sasaki recommends adopting a personal rule: every time you acquire a new item, you must also discard something that you already have. This may be challenging to keep up, but it will force you to think carefully about what you need and prevent you from stockpiling possessions again.
(Shortform note: Other minimalists build on Sasaki’s advice with tips to make the most use out of the “one-in, one-out” rule. They explain that this rule is most effective when making swaps of equivalent value and worth: for instance, trade one old pair of jeans for a new one instead of swapping a cracked plastic container for a set of wine glasses. They also recommend that you use this rule to swap disposable items for more durable items. For example, you can trade that cracked plastic container for a high-quality glass container that will last much longer.)
Declutter Routinely
According to Greg McKeown in Essentialism, for your closet to stay organized, you need a maintenance system that’s automatic, so it stays consistently organized without requiring a Herculean effort every so often. In your life, once you’ve decided what things to pursue, you need a system to make doing the important things simple.
2) Don’t Obtain Something Simply Because It’s a Good Deal
Finally, Sasaki advises you to resist the temptation of bargains and freebies. You might be tempted to make a purchase because it seems like you’re getting a good deal. This is especially true of free items such as promotions, prizes, or items that others are trying to get rid of. Sasaki cautions that free items are never actually free; their true cost is the space they take up in your home.
| How Marketers Use “Bargains” to Manipulate You In trying to resist bargains, it may help to understand the ways that marketers use the allure of bargains to manipulate customers into believing they’re getting more value than they really are. These strategies typically rely on a customer’s tendency to make “relative comparisons” (such as how one price stacks up to another). Here, we’ll explore three common strategies that marketers use to make customers feel like they’re getting a bargain: Anchoring: The marketer presents an “original price” that’s higher than the actual price. The customer believes the price has dropped and thinks they’re getting a good deal, even though the “discount price” is what the marketer planned on selling the product for in the first place. That’s not all: Common in informercials, a marketer will tack on an additional product or benefit before the customer has a chance to make a decision. This makes the customer feel like they are getting more value because they’re comparing the current offer to the initial offer. Decoy pricing: When comparing two offers, a marketer will introduce a third offer at a higher price so that the middle price option looks like a better value. For example, a seafood restaurant that adds a really expensive menu item might see an increase in sales of its second-most expensive item, which now looks affordable in comparison. |
Learn More About Maintaining Minimalism
If you’re a minimalist and you want to stop buying new things, check out the full guides to the books mentioned above here:
