I appreciate the aesthetic of minimalism, and if it's pragmatic for a particular person, more power to them.

There is, however, an underlying (but not specifically articulated) article of faith in the Silicon Valley / news.yc / startup / digital nomad culture that a minimalist life is somehow more moral or sophisticated or something.

This meme goes at least as far 2400 years ago when Diogenes the Cynic lived in a barrel.

Much of this pride in minimalism is coupled w a only thinly veiled disgust with how "bloated" and "gross" other people are. I've seen blog posts, coffee table books, etc. that intentionally juxtapose pictures of a virtuous, thin, happy minimalist with a unhappy, overweight person and their tons of possessions.

e.g. the front cover of this

https://www.amazon.com/Material-World-Global-Family-Portrait...

seems almost designed to make us recoil from the "wasteful" American family.

The problem I have with this stance is two-fold:

(1) there is no inherent reason why it's wasteful or gross to own a lot of things. Sure, some people purchase junk too fill a void inside them. But other people drink to excess, sleep around, or travel to the ends of the earth for the same reason. Just because some people in category X are motivated this way doesn't mean that everyone in category X is.

(2) much of the self-congratulation on minimalism is really just disguised self-congratulation for being upper-middle class and having the "right" preferences. A lot of people would tell you that there is no reason that rock-and-roll is inherently better than Indian pop music or African whatever - it's just different cultures with different norms. And yet many of these same people would tell you that their upper-middle-class Silicon Valley lifestyle _IS_ better than, say, that of some family living in the suburbs of Texas. The fact that the minimalist Silicon Valley is both enabled by and required by very high incomes is ignored. (What I mean by this: living in SF / Silicon Valley means that you CAN'T have a huge kitchen or garage full of stuff, and it also means that you have the means to substitute other people's capital and labor for your own.)

The family living in suburbs in Oklahoma might have a two car garage, but they might also have two rolling tool chests in those garages, so that they can do all the auto maintenance that they need. The minimalist living in SF instead might take Ubers.

How is the "gross" profusion of junk in the former case less virtuous than the minimalism of second case?

This leads me to my third point: there is no possibility of true minimalism: there is only the ability to outsource the ownership of things to someone else. The SF loft minimalist who only owns two plates and two forks actually owns a fractional share in dozens of industrial kitchens and hundreds of food delivery trucks; they're just kept "off the books". Out of sight, out of mind.

A lot of people like to own things, for their own reasons. Some good, some bad.

Be aware that when you read "ooh, minimalism good!" articles, you're reading self-flattery. And that's fine - people are allowed to be fans of their own economic class and lifestyle aesthetic.

...but such propaganda should not be consumed uncritically, or without awareness of who and what is implicitly being denegrated by it.

I'm strongly reminded of Peter Menzel's 1994 book "Material World: A Global Family Portrait".

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0871564378