Woke up to some ticking noise in the morning. 6ish AM. Tick, tick, tick. Ignored it. I was so cozy in bed. Yet again I passed out last night. The past few weeks has been losing momentum, going as hard as I can, and then losing it again. I need to be better with this. Tick, tick, tick. Alright, I’m awake. Thought it might be a rat but didn’t see anything. I went and unplugged my timer that turns on the light at sundown, but has since gone out of sync. Time is disappearing before I know it. The morning tasks start to fill my head. I have a writing piece I need to submit today. I have a run to hit. I have an animation to draw. And at the end of the run, I should pick up flowers for Valentine’s day too (8am at Trader Joes).

Things have gotten a little out of control. Before I do any of those things, I look up “ways to simplify my life”. I’ve been here before. I got the same old: delete social media, stop reading the news, hit the gym, put everything in VOO. Still, I feel a neurotic desire to scrub the edges clean. This has become its own sort of excess.

As a society, we’ve oriented into minimalism: the clean, bleach white philosophy. It makes sense: we emerged out of the 2008 financial crisis into a sharing, attention economy. The fruits of culture are online, not physical. Materials and labor got expensive. Rent instead of own: apartment complexes, Uber, streaming services. If you can’t accumulate anything, you respond by making absence a virtue. Even luxury has become aspirationally quiet and empty. Every new building is starting to resemble airports and doctors offices. Bland scandi D2C furniture, one-swatch clothing without any history. Marie Kondo away your friends every time they do something that upsets you!

I’m starting to revolt against this. The tragedy isn’t just template buildings, the tragedy is we own nothing and know no one. I think to my grandparents. When I used to believe they had hoarding tendencies. Things that had “no purpose”: fake flowers, stuffed animals, origami. But, today, each of those items I realize were intimate reminders of all the joys they’ve had in life. The stacks of books they have are a symbol of surplus. To them, a sign that they’ve made it past immigrant scarcity.

We as a generation still don’t really have surplus, but I think the anti-minimalist comeback is here, just probably not in the form we really want. Today, modern dominating brands eschew minimalism. You can see Trader Joe’s design their CPG labels with age and cultural narrative as much as they can. Thrifting is in, but I’ll come across brands from 2021 who aim to resemble old money clothing (knock off Ralph Lauren). Same with furniture: knock off mid century modern furniture designs that mimic an appearance of history. Ultimately, it’s a little fake, but I am hopeful our collective tastes are swinging in the right direction.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized life’s joys are mostly about those turning the edges into ornaments, not scrubbing them away. I still use my beat-up 14 year old LL Bean backpack. I’ve started to see the scars as wear and tear. Every time it’s shed some lining, I’ve tried to look up “best backpack” and usually some backpack guy will tell me about a $299 backpack with like 20 compartments. We yearn for objects and places with stories, sometimes not even our own. Scraps of unfinished letters to people. Post it notes and postcards and posters all over my walls. I’m collecting evidence of life instead of hiding it and I’m keeping it messy.