559 | Social Contagion

Joshua and T. K. speak with Luke Burgis about the identities hidden in our desires, the psychological problem with keeping things "just in case," why sentimental items can be so emotionally heavy, and much more. Discussed in this episode: How has being a father made Luke better? (1:58) Do the lightest objects carry the most weight? (3:51) How much of what we keep is tied to who we believe we are—or who we might need to be again someday? (6:03) Listener Tip: When we let go of something deeply sentimental, what are we actually letting go of? (30:51) Listen to the full Maximal episode on Patreon: patreon.com/theminimalists http://patreon.com/theminimalists Detailed show notes: minimalists.com/podcast http://minimalists.com/podcast

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:06Speaker 00

  This podcast has bad words.

• 0:39Joshua Fields Millburn?

  Yes, The Minimalists, I'm Joshua Fields, Millburn, TK Coleman is here. And coming up on this episode, we're going to discuss the identities hidden in our desires, the psychological problem with keeping things just in case. Oh, the three most dangerous words in the English language. We'll also talk about why sentimental items can be so emotionally heavy and much, much more. Today, we are joined by a man who studies the invisible forces that shape human desire. He is also the author of The One and the Ninety-Nine: Forging Identity in the Age of Social Contagion. Please welcome back to the show, our friend Luke Burgis is here. Yes.

• 1:22Speaker 02

  Thanks so much, Josh, good to be with you guys.

• 1:24Joshua Fields Millburn?

  Oh, my gosh, it's been like five years since we've had you. Different studio at the time.

• 1:28Speaker 02

  Five years, two kids, lost a parent, man, it's been a big five years, yeah.

• 1:33Joshua Fields Millburn?

  Congratulations and condolences on both of those, man.

• 1:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:36Joshua Fields Millburn?

  Wait, other condolences on having kids, I get it, man, I've got a 13-year-old.

• 1:40Speaker 02

  I have a three-year-old and an eight-month-old, so I'm not getting a lot of sleep, so that you can give me condolences on that one, too.

• 1:46Joshua Fields Millburn?

  Yeah, I mean, that's what I do for Josh, like condolences for having kids, congratulations for being free of his parents.

• 1:55Joshua Fields Millburn?

  For real. That's so terrible. On a serious note, quickly here, what's the, what's one way in which being a father has made you better?

• 2:06Speaker 02

  Uh, one way?

• 2:09Speaker 02

  Man, I think my, well, it's made me cuss a lot less, that's for sure.

• 2:19Speaker 02

  Because I'm always thinking about, obviously, the way that I'm talking to my wife, the way that I'm reacting to things, because they are super imitators, man. I mean, they're imitating phrases and words. My three-year-old is an insane imitator. And, you know, in the early days, when she first started talking, I was like, whoa, why is she saying that? They make you see yourself. Yeah, you see yourself in your kids, you know, so that's, that's one thing. And I think, you know, my wife and I are just way more mindful about the way that we use our time, like, you know, watching TV, if I want to watch a football game late at night and she's about to go to bed, I'm like, I'm going to need to rethink that unless I want to be up for the next three hours.

• 2:56Joshua Fields Millburn?

  Yeah.

• 2:56Speaker 02

  You know?

• 2:57Joshua Fields Millburn?

  Yeah, I find that we didn't watch our language at all, and it had two interesting consequences. One is Ella, my daughter, who's just turned 13 now, she's always like, why do you guys use such bad words? And, and so it's the whole Rob Bell thing, where he's like, if you want your kids to read the Bible, just, just don't allow it to be in the house. And, and the opposite is, like, if you don't want your kids to cuss all the time, then you can be the ones cussing. Although I remember when she was really young, and she was like two years old, and we're sitting at the Kitchen Island Bar, and she has this glass of milk, and she just tips it over, seemingly on purpose, and she just looks up at me and she goes, shit, Josh.

• 3:43Joshua Fields Millburn?

  I guess because she had heard her mom so many times say, shit, Josh.

• 3:49Joshua Fields Millburn?

  It just stuck. Before we get to our callers, here's something to chew on. The lightest objects can carry the most weight. Luke, what does that maxim mean to you? The lightest objects can carry the most weight.

• 4:06Speaker 02

  I think about invisible objects, you know, the things that we don't think about at all. So I just, my mom passed away, it's crazy, you know, I, I think it was less than six months after I came on the show the last time, and I'd heard your story, and I had to clean out a house, I had to move my dad into advanced nursing care into homes, it was a whole, a whole process, cleaning out the house, going through objects, hired an estate planner, going through things one by one, by myself, and I'm an only child. Like, this is one situation where it would have been really nice to have siblings, so I didn't have the weight, you know, completely on me. But as I did that, I realized it wasn't the, you know, it wasn't the, the objects themselves

• 4:50Speaker 02

  that carried the most weight in my family. It was the, kind of the, the unspoken emotional baggage that was attached to all kinds of things, right? My relationship with my parents, my mom and I both being in denial as my father was developing more and more advanced Alzheimer's disease, and not actually addressing it and talking about it the way that we should have. So I think of, you know, as, as I'm cleaning out all of these things, I'm thinking, man, the, that is an object that is in our family, there's all kinds of objects that are in our family that are so light, we don't see them, they're, they're absolutely invisible to us, but they're the most important ones.

• 5:34Joshua Fields Millburn?

  Yeah, yeah, and they can become heavy, and heavy in the sense that they can be an anchor, or they can drag us down in a direction in which we don't want to travel. And I want to expand on that a bit more coming up. We've got a bunch of callers here, 406-219-7839, if you'd like to join the show, or you can record a quick voice message right there on our website at theminimalists.com/podcast. Let us know if you're a Patreon subscriber, so we can prioritize your message. Our first question today is from Daniela.

• 6:06Speaker 03

  Hi, guys, this is Daniela from New York. I am so wanting to become a minimalist, but I'm finding it hard. I've been a preschool teacher for the last 30-plus years, and so you can imagine the amount of books and materials that I have held on to, albeit some have been thrown out, but some I can't, because I may use it one day, but it's, it's not good, so I need help, and if you would help me, that would be wonderful. Thank you.

• 6:46Joshua Fields Millburn?

  I thought this was the perfect question to start an episode with Luke Burgis, right? Because on the surface, it's a minimalism question, but really, it's a question about desire and identity. Luke, how much of what we keep is tied to who we believe we are, or who we might want to be someday?

• 7:09Speaker 02

  It's deeply tied to it, and, you know, I, when I, first of all, it's, I don't think it's a one-time, you know, process. You know, you don't become a minimalist by making a one, one-time act or decision. I remember when I, I entered, I left behind my companies and entered seminary, pursuing a religious vocation, so I really had to give away almost everything that I owned. The almost is a problem, I should have just given away everything that I owned. It was because it was almost that it gave me a little crack to get back. But I remember getting rid of my clothes felt, felt so great, you know? And then I got into, you know, the seminary, and I just started to reaccumulate a bunch of clothes, you know, that I didn't actually need, and it was kind of the just-in-case thing, you know?

• 7:54Speaker 02

  Like, well, I need a nice jacket, just in case I get invited to a fancy dinner, for instance, you know? It was always like, just in case, that's who I am, I know people, I get invited to these things. It's funny, I, I still, I have like a navy blazer, and I hardly, I haven't worn it in years, and I've been holding on to it and holding on to it, and I thought, just in case, you know, David Brooks invites me to the 92nd Street Y or something like that, which just happened, you know? It's like, just in case. And then I thought to myself, you know, if, if something like that happens, I'm not the kind of guy that wears navy blue blazers and ties. So maybe I need to reframe why I'm holding on to that thing, because I'm a different person now,

• 8:36Speaker 02

  and I, if, if my doing a certain thing is tethered to my needing to look a certain way, or wear a certain thing, maybe it's something that I don't want to do, or maybe I just need to be courageous to show up the way that I normally dress, which isn't that. So I think I had to reframe my identity and not be caught up in other people's expectations of how you're supposed to look. And that's one example involving clothes, but I could, I mean, I could give you dozens that are, that are very similar to that. I had to let go of the serious person.

• 9:05Joshua Fields Millburn?

  Well, the book is about social contagion. And there's a whole aspect there. I think now would probably be a good time to talk about the role that, first off, what is social contagion? What do you mean by that? And what role does that play in our clinging? What role does social contagion play in our identities?

• 9:21Speaker 02

  Well, the point of the book is that we are all absorbed into various communities without even realizing that it's happening. Obviously, the first one is our family. And then we are inserted into different kinds of groups. I just became a parent a few years ago. And one thing I wasn't prepared for is how, when that happens, and I live in a small neighborhood in DC where there's a bunch of other families that have kids about my kid's age. And all of a sudden, it was like I was, without my necessarily choosing it, I was part of the dad's group in my neighborhood, right? And you start to assimilate certain ideas about what it means to be a good dad or a good parent, based on what everybody else is doing.

• 10:03Speaker 02

  And, you know, how many, and by the way, we're also, there's a WhatsApp group that I realized I needed to leave really quickly, because every 10 minutes, I was learning which park this dad was taking their kid to. I was like, I gotta opt out of that thing right away. But even after having studied this, written a book about it, I was noticing I was still assimilating ideas and emotions about what kind of dad that I should be, based on the social contagion of the group. And this happens all the time. It happens at work. It happens even just when you go out with friends sometimes. You can start to conform yourself to the social expectations. So I've made this distinction between a pseudo self, which is the kind of borrowed self, the self that you think that you need to be in a certain situation to keep other people's

• 10:47Speaker 02

  anxiety low, to not sort of, you know, cause disruption. And a solid self, which is the kind of self that has the confidence of being in a situation in a group a different way. You know, you don't have to do all of the things. So there's this expectation that if you're part of something, you have to be part of it 100%. You're asked to be all in, all of the time, right? Political parties are the same way. Like, if you deviate in this way, you're out. And people feel this enormous pressure. And I think part of why people have a hard time dealing with this is that they're maximalists when it comes to their identification with groups. And I think we would all benefit from being much more minimalist when it comes to the

• 11:27Speaker 02

  invisible expectations and ways in which we are a good member of the group, if that makes sense.

• 11:34Speaker 04

  A little bit more on what that might look like. Give me an example of being a minimalist on group identities.

• 11:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, so in my, in my dad's group, it's like, if you're not on the WhatsApp group, like, what's wrong with you? The WhatsApp group is the way that we all communicate. I opted out right away. I'm not good at group texts. They, they keep me up. I don't, it's too much information. So I just made a decision that I, I'm, so what are my decisions? I can opt out completely and just not associate with all of the other families in the group. I can identify completely so that I do all of the things that everybody else does. We do our birthday parties the same way. We're on the chat group. I could probably five, six, seven other things that are just things that the other parents do. Or I could be part of it in a way that feels right for me, right?

• 12:21Speaker 02

  Like, what's the minimum level of things that I, that I'm going to do to be part of this group while not becoming over invested in it to the point where I'm constantly worried about what other people think about me if I don't show up to X, Y, and Z event. And they're like, three times a week, right? I can't do it. So I've had to just come to peace with, I'm going to be part of this community in a different way, and that's okay with me.

• 12:47Speaker 04

  I think that speaks very right on the money to this question, because you can kind of feel a little bit of the pressure. I don't know if I can be a minimalist. I want to be a minimalist, but this thing might not work for me, because I have these conditions that might keep me out of the group. And for you, you're advocating a view that says, well, don't think about being an X. You are who you are, but just think about what works for me in terms of making my life better, moving me in the direction that I want to go in, and then giving yourself permission to take that and leave out the other things. And if someone says, well, you're not part of the dad's group, you can say, well, that's questionable, but even if that's true, I'm okay with that implication.

• 13:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I don't control that, by the way, you know? So I think there's a principle of gradualism. And a healthy gradualism, you don't need to do everything all at once. It's okay to dip your toe in the water. And I, I think it's actually really healthy to just do one thing, right? Take one step. It's much more likely to last that way. So I'm very much concerned with communities and groups and the way that they affect our sense of expectation and what's expected of us. And the way that that in turn makes us conform to get praise or approval from people who may not even like or love us or be there in our time of need. Like, how, how much of our lives do we spend actually doing that? Some people you will disappoint.

• 14:14Speaker 02

  And the older I get, the more I realize I need to be comfortable disappointing other people that have expectations about my engagement. And believe me, I have tried to be all in on everything and got completely burned out doing it.

• 14:28Joshua Fields Millburn?

  I spent so much time disappointing myself, hoping not to disappoint the people around me. And then, of course, people inevitably still end up disappointed, and I'm still disappointed because I've, I've compromised this piece of me in order to fit into a group. And I think that what you were talking about makes a whole lot of sense. In some ways, it's easier to opt out than it is to opt in selectively, right? And we think about fasting versus feasting, and that's what you're talking about. Either I'm feasting on the WhatsApp group, and I'm participating in every expectation that is foisted upon me, or I've just said, hey, I don't have WhatsApp, so I can't possibly participate in that group. And people seem to understand that more than the middle ground.

• 15:11Joshua Fields Millburn?

  And so TK, I'm wondering how you think about social contagion, but I'm also wondering how you think that might apply to selectively opting in, because I find it to be much easier to just say, I'm fasting right now, and therefore, I'm not going to put any food in my mouth. But there are so many other ways that we can metaphorically fast, that it seems so much easier than saying, well, I will eat this tiny healthy thing or this thing. The problem with that is, on a long enough timeline, fasting is not sustainable. We need to participate in the gustatory pleasures of food, but we also need to participate in the everyday, ordinary activities of life without necessarily opting into the full

• 15:56Joshua Fields Millburn?

  social contagion of it all.

• 15:58Speaker 04

  Sticking with that metaphor, we can say, yes, fasting is not sustainable, but as a part of the rhythm and rule of life, one day a week, one day a month, fasting can help you reset your taste buds, reset your appetites, and approach the natural process of eating with a level of clarity and consciousness that makes it more likely that you will appreciate food and eat healthily. So we disengage so that we might more fully get engaged. We retreat from reality, so to speak, so that when we return to reality, we can experience a more fuller kind of immersion. And I think there's a similar principle at work there with fasting from groups or group identities.

• 16:39Speaker 04

  One of the consequences of being desperate or too needy is that you can lower your standards because you so fear that you won't have love, you won't have validation. And then by lowering those standards, you find yourself trapped in various kinds of entanglements that you never wished for. I said yes to this business deal. I said yes to this relationship. I said yes to that contract because I was afraid I couldn't do better. I was desperate. And now I desperately want out of this deal. I desperately want out of this relationship, but I don't know how to get out of it. How this happens is quite, quite interesting. So we start off just being who we are. And we experience aspects of who we are as kind of like at odds with the world. Not everybody's like me.

• 17:24Speaker 04

  You don't necessarily grow up around the people that are most like you. And then you discover someone else who likes Star Wars, or you discover someone else who likes Skye, or someone else that's interested in skateboarding. And you say, oh, these are my people. This is my tribe. And, and you, and you want more of that good feeling by aligning yourself with your tribe. But then over time, what happens is that group begins to put pressures on you. It doesn't just give you validation, but the group says, hey, look, there are these people over here that are attacking skateboarders. There are these folks over here that are making fun of Skye. And we, as the Skye community, as the skateboarding community, we need to step up and stand up and put it to these folks over here.

• 18:09Speaker 04

  And you might think, well, I just wanted some folks to jam out with. I just wanted some folks to go skateboarding with. I, I don't, I don't know if I really wanted to be a part of any of these wars. And yeah, I may disagree with them over there, but I don't, I don't know if I want to be a part of that. And now you've got to make this decision. Do I want to allow my group to make demands on me? And there may be times where you say, yes, it's actually good for my self-actualization that I allow myself to be challenged by the groups of which I'm part. But there may also be times where you say, no, if I do that, I lose myself in the group, and I miss my point of the purpose of the group. And how do you know? By the discernment that comes from fasting.

• 18:48Joshua Fields Millburn?

  Let's get practical for Daniella for a second. TK, if she was one of your clutter counseling clients, and she's dealing with the stuff issue and the minimalism issue, but then underneath the surface, there's a lot there about desire and identity. What would you tackle with her first?

• 19:09Speaker 04

  I would say feel no pressure to be a minimalist or a good minimalist. That's irrelevant. All you want to care about is how you can use simplicity as a tool to make your life lighter in the way that you want it to be lighter. You don't owe it to anyone to be a minimalist. You don't owe it to anyone to be a certain kind of minimalist. And if you can let that go, that will be the ultimate act of minimalism. To let go of any expectations or judgments or stereotypes that the so-called minimalist community, or even anti-minimalist community, might impose on me. I'm free of all of that. Now I can just focus on what's best for me. And if Josh says he would do it this way, I can listen to it neutrally and say, oh, these parts are useful.

• 19:54Speaker 04

  These parts can be tweaked and those parts, not so much. But I don't have to make him a bad minimalist or make myself a better minimalist. I can just let that be. The second thing is you can say, hey, look, everything that you want is good within the context of the boundaries that support the goodness that is there. And so you don't have to demonize or divinize any of the things that you want and make yourself out to be a good or bad person in terms of your identity for what you want. You can simply ask, what is the best way for me to pursue this so that I have boundaries in place that protect the good aspects of that? And so if you, if you see things, I'll use books as an example. If I see a book and I go, I know I'm not going to read that now, but it's on sale

• 20:36Speaker 04

  or it's for free, I should probably bring that back to my apartment just in case I want to read it later. That thought isn't inherently wrong, but what makes it dangerous is the absence of boundary. Well, okay, well, how long do I have to play that game? And how much can I play that game before something else needs to go out? And a practice like that can be come healthy if I say, okay, I got a box of just in case books and no more than 10 books can be in there. And once it gets to 10, any one that comes in, there are two that have to go out. That's a boundary that protects me from excess with respect to that. The second thing I can say is also, in order for anything to be in this just in case box, it's got to be in there under six months or under 12 months.

• 21:18Speaker 04

  If it's in this box for longer than that period, it's got to go out no matter what and I don't have to bring anything else in. Now my just in case habit becomes a creative expression of things that I like and it has boundaries that protects me from excess. And both of those things have a lot to do with identity because I'm no longer building my life around being a good minimalist, being a good person, or being someone who's good or bad because of what, what you desire.

• 21:42Joshua Fields Millburn?

  We often think of boundaries as a, some sort of burden, like, oh, this again. Even that word is so in vogue. We're talking about boundaries, right? We batter people with our boundaries, but what you're talking about is protecting yourself with your boundaries. The book example is a great one for me because I have a bookshelf in my office and it's small. It has, currently has 93 books. I know because we did this audio book thing where we talked about counting and there's 93 books on it. Now that number is completely arbitrary. It's just that's how many books fit on this particular bookshelf. And sometimes I have four free libraries in my neighborhood and sometimes there are just amazing books. I want to bring one home, but guess what? That means I need to then remove at least one, sometimes more than one, if it's a

• 22:25Joshua Fields Millburn?

  thick book, and then bring those to donate. So am I willing to give up one of my Anthony DeMello books in order to bring home the David Foster Wallace book? And it's a trade-off. And that boundary might seem arbitrary. And yes, could I fit more books into my home? Yes. But what is the cost of more? It's often so much more than the price tag, especially when something is free. It feels like, oh, this is free. I'd be dumb not to, to bring it home. But I would love to, to wrap up this question with Daniella by talking to Luke about desire. Your last book was about desire, memetic desire, which is a type of social contagion. I think we could, could argue.

• 23:06Joshua Fields Millburn?

  And so I'm wondering how the social contagion, that idea of social contagion might shape our desires in ways that we don't even see.

• 23:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think it's, you have to probe why you want certain things. I mean, most of us don't question our desires. We have an idea of our wants as if they just bubbled up out of some wellspring within us. And that's a denial of the fact that we are deeply social creatures. And after our basic biological needs are met, if I'm not thirsty, if I'm not hungry, I have a roof over my head, I'm not hot or cold, I have now entered the world of relatively abstract desires. And I have to look around to figure out what to want. And I don't have a wired in biological mechanism that would make me see this glass of water and think, oh, I want that. And in the world of abstract desires, like careers and clothes, I, I look to other people.

• 24:02Speaker 02

  That's, that's how we find these things.

• 24:04Joshua Fields Millburn?

  What am I supposed to want?

• 24:06Speaker 02

  What am I supposed to want? And it's not necessarily a bad thing that we do that. It just is, you know?

• 24:13Joshua Fields Millburn?

  But no one's telling us explicitly, you're supposed to want a million followers. You just see a lot of people striving for that. And then the implicit message is I'm supposed to strive for that too. And thus I'm supposed to want it. And I think you could apply that to the material possessions as well.

• 24:28Speaker 02

  You, we internalize that. And you know, the people that are closest to us or most important to us affect our desires the most. And we tend to think that's, you know, our, our family and our friends. But sadly, it's often the people that are in our feed 10 or 12 times a day that are closest to us, that are implicitly affecting us at the level of our desires. You know, we're seeing their lifestyle. We're seeing how happy these curated moments of their life. And it makes me want to be a little bit more like them. Even the city that we live in, Paul Graham wrote this great essay called Cities and Ambition. He said, if you live in certain cities long enough, you start to want different things. If you live in Cambridge, Massachusetts, you start to wish that you were just a little

• 25:11Speaker 02

  bit smarter because you're surrounded by a bunch of Harvard and MIT students. If you live in New York City, you start to wish you were just a little bit richer. You live in LA, maybe just a little bit more beautiful, you know? And, and you know, this happens without us really knowing it. So the, the point is to actually probe the origin of our desires and then to choose them intentionally. And then ask yourself, what do I want to want? You know?

• 25:36Joshua Fields Millburn?

  Yeah. What do I want to want? It's such a, a great question because what, in a way, can I choose my desires?

• 25:46Speaker 02

  Not out of thin air. You know, so one thing, I, I answered the question with this. I want to want to like and desire fly fishing. I don't really want to right now, but I know a lot of people that have taken it up as a way to lose track of time and they just seem happier and healthier. And it allows them to take great trips with their friends. And I'm like, I don't really, I don't know anything about fishing, but I kind of wish that I wanted that. And I kind of wish that I, I need something like that, but I don't really want to. It seems like a, a lot of things that I would have to accumulate and learn about before I even went out. And I was like, you know what? Maybe I can just go fishing without all the pressure of being, you know, a river runs through it like expert fly fisherman.

• 26:29Speaker 02

  Maybe I can just go off the dock at my house in Michigan and catch a little crappy little fish and show my daughter, like, that's okay. It sort of goes back to what we were talking about. I need to take, you know, it tells me something about myself that I'm attracted to people that like to fly fish, but I don't have to do it the way that they do it.

• 26:46Joshua Fields Millburn?

  Yeah. And by the way, the, the fly fishing here is a proxy for something else. It's a proxy for nature and stillness and being grounded and time alone and solitude, or maybe time with friends, if you're doing it with friends. And it happens to be that you're gathering communally around that particular activity. And that activity you might enjoy, but it's not simply the activity in a vacuum. You wouldn't want to go to a room that's like this and I had a bucket full of fish over here and I handed you a rod and you're like, well, I'd really enjoy that kind of fishing. No, you wouldn't because it's absent of the context. And what we want is usually a much more intricate web.

• 27:28Joshua Fields Millburn?

  I could say, I want to go fly fishing or I want to live in Southern California. And that is true, but there's a whole lot going on behind that desire.

• 27:40Speaker 02

  So those are what I call thick desires. You know, the fly fishing is a thin desire for fly fishing. The thick desire, the thing that's deeper is all of the things that you just mentioned. To spend extended time alone with a, a friend of mine to deepen our relationship. That's what I really want. I don't really want to catch fish that I'm just going to throw back in the water. You know, I, so I, I think asking thin desires can deepen into what I call thick desires. And the difference between the two is that a thick desire is the kind that I can invest in and it won't just leave, right? It's not the kind of ephemeral desire that I won't care about a week from now. I'll always care about a, a friendship or a love, something that is worth investing in, right?

• 28:25Speaker 02

  Like knowledge, right? If you're religious, it could be God. So these are thick desires and the thin desires are often the way that we talk about them. But I promise you, if you probe, you'll usually be able to name thick desires underneath some of your thinner memetic ones.

• 28:39Joshua Fields Millburn?

  Yeah. Yeah. But that does take some of that probing and understanding what's going on behind the desire because I've been doing this, uh, this tour lately. It's my first solo tour. It's a minimalist 13th tour, but it's my first solo tour. And one of the things that I show in there are like what advertisers do to us and how they create these memetic desires in really interesting ways. And I won't spoil it for the folks who want to come out, but then I show this picture of like the terminus of wanting what other people want. I don't say it that way, but that's really what it is, is there's a guy in his Rolls Royce and he doesn't just have one Rolex on.

• 29:21Joshua Fields Millburn?

  He has the whole steering wheel wrapped in Rolex's Rolex I? I don't know. Sean's our watch expert here. And you realize that he didn't actually want this. We're working really hard. We're going broke, making ourselves try to make ourselves look rich, trying to make ourselves look rich. And what you're talking about is letting go, not of desire, but letting go of other people's desires that we have sort of been assigned, or we picked up from them. Speaking of that tour, Danielle, I'd love for you to join me. I'll be in New York City, and we just announced Los Angeles as well. That Los Angeles one is a smaller theater,

• 30:01Joshua Fields Millburn?

  so it'll sell out pretty quickly. You can head on over to theminimalists.com/tour and find the cities near you and sign up for the simple newsletter. I'm going to announce a bunch of new cities next year as well. I think we're doing 10 more cities in 2027 throughout North America. But Danielle, I'd love to give you a ticket or two to New York City or Los Angeles. If you'd like to join us for either one of those. I'll be in New York this weekend, on October 18th, and then in December, we're going to finish the tour this year, at least this run of the tour, in December in Los Angeles at the Greenway Theater. And who knows, I might get TK Coleman out there with me as well. How to Let Go Tour at theminimalists.com. You can grab your tickets if they are still left and join the

• 30:45Joshua Fields Millburn?

  simple newsletter over there at theminimalists.com, and I'll let you know as soon as I'm coming to your city. Okay, before we move on to page two, here is a minimalist tip from one of our listeners. This is from Ian in Michigan.

• 30:59Speaker 05

  Hello, Joshua and TK. My name is Ian, and I'm from the Great Lakes State of Michigan. I work at a donation center for a homeless shelter in my city. When I first started working there, I was blown away by the sheer quantity of clothing in the world. It became overwhelming to me, especially as I'm listening to the minimalists and working through my own relationship with things. One day, our donation drop-off doorbell rang, and I was the only one in the warehouse at the time. I answered the door to an older woman who was looking to donate some clothing. She explains to me that her husband had passed away some time ago, and she was finally able to donate his clothes to people who could use them. I offer our thanks and condolences as I grab a couple of bags from her trunk.

• 31:41Speaker 05

  As I walk back out to the widow's car to pick up the remaining bags, the dear woman takes a shirt out of the bag, presses it against her face, and inhales deeply. As she pulls the garment from her face, she begins to tear up. "Isn't that awful, how I had to do that?" she says as she chokes up. In the moment, I was overwhelmed by emotions and didn't know how to respond. I did my best to convey our appreciation and assuring the grieving woman that these clothes would be put to good use, but my words seemed hollow. We said our goodbyes and walked inside with the remaining clothing in my hands that seemed to feel heavier now. I sat down to process the moment. What I experienced was a beautiful picture of a woman letting go, not of clothes stuffed in garbage bags, but of her dearest

• 32:26Speaker 05

  husband himself. We talk about how our things are not the things themselves, but rather the deeper things behind them. The woman's deep inhale of her husband's clothes and the exhale of letting him go. I saw this as a beautiful picture of what we talk about each week. It's easy to get caught up in our own world of decluttering, that we don't realize that each of us is on a journey of our own of decluttering and letting go, even if we don't realize it. Sometimes we are gifted with an insight into somebody else's journey, and we should not take that for granted. If I could go back and do something different, I think I would have had, would have looked to share more love with this woman. I would tell her that it wasn't an awful at all what she did. It was good and

• 33:11Speaker 05

  healthy and beautiful. Thanks for all you guys do. Bye.

• 33:16Joshua Fields Millburn?

  How beautiful. Shout out to the Michigan connection, by the way.

• 33:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:19Joshua Fields Millburn?

  Michigan, Michigan, and Ian from Michigan. So what strikes me about this, what this woman here is, she's grieving, but obviously she's not grieving the object. She's grieving what the object represents. The object is, and if you handed me that object, I'd have no grief associated with it, because it doesn't represent anything for me. So Luke, maybe we could talk about when we let go of something that is deeply sentimental. What are we actually letting go of?

• 33:51Speaker 02

  Letting go, I think, of a part of ourself that may not exist. I mean, the object itself is a symbol of something, a memory, something in the past. And, you know, it's beautiful the way Ian told that. I mean, her taking that last smell was a really important thing for her to do, I think.

• 34:11Joshua Fields Millburn?

  Yes.

• 34:12Speaker 02

  I think when we're letting go of things, the rites of passage are really important in the process of doing that. I'll never forget, I hiked the community of Santiago many, many years now, about 12 years ago now, and I encountered a young kid who I walked with for about two days. And I said, "Why are you doing this?" And he said, "I'm doing it because I'm addicted to video games. I love video games." He played like cerebral video games. He said it was a huge part of his life. But he goes, "I'm sort of like taken on the gamer culture in a way that's really healthy. I don't leave the basement. I'm eating terrible. I'm out of shape. I put on a lot of weight. And I'm doing this so I can go back and live a different way." And I said, "Are you going to give up gaming

• 34:55Speaker 02

  completely?" And he said, "No, I still am going to play games. I'm going to set boundaries around it, but I'm not going to be part of the culture of it, you know? So I'm not going to play the kinds of games where I need to be connected to other people." And he just said, "I'm just noticing that I can't do it, right? I'm addicted to it." But he was doing it as a rite of passage, and it was important for him to actually take the 30 days or whatever it took to walk that. And I think we all, we all need to find ways of doing that and not convince ourselves that we can snap our fingers and let go, "It's okay." You know, when I was listening to that, "It's okay to feel those things as we're letting go of an important piece of who we are."

• 35:37Joshua Fields Millburn?

  And maybe if you don't feel it, TK, you keep holding on to it even though the object is now gone.

• 35:44Speaker 04

  That's right. It's funny how culture can express itself in many different ways. And for everything you do, there's one group that will condemn you for it, and there's another group that will praise you for it. And so, you know, it's trickier than just the matter of opting out of the group. It's recognizing that there is a group for everything, and so making your decisions from the center as well as you can. We were talking before the show about love, people, use things, and how, about the image, I believe, of Fulton Sheen on your mother's, in your mother's room. And I have, in my home, a relic from Venerable Fulton Sheen. And the relic is like a piece of like a garment, and it's preserved

• 36:29Speaker 04

  and encased. And I have a number of relics like this in my home, and I don't see them as clutter at all. They're not just symbols to me. They're physical instantiations of the permanent eternal impact of virtue. And they are not only reminders for me, but they're constant challenges for me. And if her husband were canonized as a saint, there's a large group of people, including me, that'll be like, "Don't throw away that shirt!" You know, like, you know what I mean? Give it to me or keep it. Like, put it in a frame. And so, there's a culture that embraces that. And so, there's more to it than just a group that's like, "Oh, get rid of that. It's just a t-shirt." No, there's a whole culture that's

• 37:09Speaker 04

  like, "That is not just a t-shirt." But then the opposite is also true. If that is burdening you more than it is blessing you, if it is dragging you down more than it is calling you upward, then you have to opt out of what that culture demands of you too, and say, "I love you all, but if you value this so much, you come and take it, because I don't want to hold on to it." And I think when you can see it in both of those ways, it frees you up to be compassionate towards people wherever they are on their journey, and not look at yourself as being better just because their struggle isn't your struggle.

• 37:44Joshua Fields Millburn?

  Ian, shout out to you also for showing that woman love. And I know you say, "Yeah, of course I would go back and do it differently." You know, you would say that about a million other things in life as well. And doing it differently going forward is perhaps the lesson to carry is, "Yeah, I want to be more loving." Well, what does that mean to love someone? To see them for who they are, to witness them, not to try to change them or tell them they're wrong. But you saw her in that moment of grief, and that was loving. And maybe there was a world in which you could have been more present, and maybe you'll be able to be more present in the future when you see something else like that. And how lovely is that? Not only did you give her a gift, but she gave you a bit of a gift too. She showed you the direction in which you want to travel. We've got a lot more to

• 38:29Joshua Fields Millburn?

  talk about. For anyone else who has a listener tip for this show, just like Ian, you can visit theminimalists.com/podcast to record a quick message so we can, we can feature your voice on a future episode. Up next, page two and page three. But first, let's take a quick pandiculation break. We'll be right back.

• 38:49Joshua Fields Millburn?

  All right, y'all. That's the first 33% of episode 559. We'll see you on Patreon for the full two-hour maximal episode with Luke Burgess, which includes answers to a bunch more questions. Questions like, "When two people have dramatically different tolerances for clutter, how do they determine what's reasonable in a shared space? Why do we feel obligated to keep what the people before us value? And what are 26 things people pack but never use when they travel?" Plus a million more questions and simple living segments over on the Minimalist Private Podcast on Patreon. The link is in the description. When you subscribe, you can listen to our private episodes on Apple Podcasts, Spotify,

• 39:30Joshua Fields Millburn?

  or your favorite podcast app. Plus, you'll gain access to all of our podcast archives, all the way back to our very first episode. Big thanks to Luke Burgis for joining us today. You can check out his new book. It's called The One and the 99. We'll put a link to that in the show notes. Also, lukeburges.com for all of your Luke fix that you might need. LukeBurgess.com. That is our minimal episode for today. On behalf of Ryan Nicodemus, TK Coleman, Audio Ben, Spire, Jeff, and Dave, Tom Cat, Professor Sean, Savvy D, and the rest of our team, I'm Joshua Fields Millburn. If you leave here with just one message, let it be this: Love people and use things, because the opposite never works. Thanks

• 40:14Joshua Fields Millburn?

  for listening, y'all. We'll see you next time.

• 40:16Speaker 02

  Peace.