It was never about the stuff

You’d think a podcast about getting rid of things would run out of things to say after a year. The Minimalists have made 561 numbered episodes and I’m still listening. The guests are psychologists and therapists and the writers who read them: Susan David, Lori Gottlieb, Nedra Tawwab, Ramani Durvasula, Jamil Zaki, Arthur Brooks, Johann Hari, Cal Newport. The episode titles tell you what it’s actually about. Toxic People. Decluttering Friendships. Psychological Clutter. Disrespectful Family. Overthinking. It’s one of the best psychology podcasts there is, and the two hosts are unusually good at putting into words things I’d felt and never managed to say.

What I take from it is that minimalism is only a very small part about owning less. Most of it is about minimising everything else.

What people think it means

Say minimalism and people picture an empty white room. One chair, one plant, nothing on the walls. They assume it means getting rid of everything in your house, or at least everything in your bedroom.

I’m not that. I’ve actually got a lot of stuff. I collect Transformers, which I wrote about in Heroes in plastic, and when the cupboards filled, the overflow went up into the loft, beside LEGO I’d never unpacked. I wrote a whole book about decluttering, Turn Down the Tap, and it starts in that loft, with the thought that the thing flooding my home was never really stuff. By the popular definition I’m the opposite of a minimalist. I’m a collector who likes kit.

So it’s odd that the podcast is the one I keep coming back to. The reason is that the people who made the word famous don’t define it the way the white room does.

Seven relationships, and stuff is one

The Minimalists’ own definition page opens with a mock list of rules. Own fewer than a hundred things. No car. No television. No children. Then they say they’re joking, that minimalism is none of those things, and that there’s nothing wrong in itself with owning possessions. The problem is the meaning we give them. Their one-sentence definition calls it a tool for getting rid of life’s excess so you can focus on what matters. It never mentions an object.

Their 2021 book, Love People, Use Things, is built on seven relationships: with stuff, truth, self, values, money, creativity and people. Stuff is one of the seven. The publisher’s reading guide asks you to count how many of the relationships you have today you would choose again. That’s a question about people, not shelves.

Fig. 1 · One in seven

The people you keep

Start with the biggest one. A meta-analysis of 148 studies covering more than 300,000 people found that those with stronger social ties had about 50 per cent better odds of survival over the studies’ follow-up, comparable to giving up smoking. So minimising people sounds like the wrong move. But the same authors point out that most of those studies never looked at the quality of the relationships, only whether people had them.

Quality is where it gets interesting. In a study at Brigham Young University, 102 adults wore blood pressure monitors for three days and took a reading a few minutes into each conversation. Blood pressure was highest when they were with people they had mixed feelings about, both good and bad. Higher than with the people they plainly disliked. The researchers’ reading was that a reliably difficult person can be avoided or discounted, while a mixed one keeps holding out the hope of support and then letting you down. One later paper from the same group puts mixed ties at close to half of the people who matter to us.

That’s the friendship that no longer serves you. Not the enemy, who is easy to file. The friend who is lovely half the time.

The Minimalists don’t flinch from this. Joshua Fields Millburn’s essay on letting go of relationships says to try to fix it first, because a marriage, a friendship or a family relationship can change without ending. If it can’t be changed, end it. He says that applies to family as much as to friends and partners.

We also do some of this without deciding to. As people get older their social networks shrink, and a long-running study found the loss is almost all peripheral contacts, while the close ties stay put. Older adults also report less negative emotion from the people around them. Some of that is retirement and bereavement, which nobody chooses. Some of it is pruning.

Family, carefully

The hardest version is family who cause you stress. The ones you think you can’t get away from, and have to. It’s more common than it looks. In a US survey of more than 1,300 adults, 27 per cent had cut off contact with a relative. In a British poll for the charity Stand Alone, 8 per cent said they had cut contact with a family member themselves.

I want to be careful here, because the evidence cuts both ways and I’d rather say so. Most of the people in that US survey were upset by the rift, and most who reconciled felt better for it. In national data following Americans from 1994 to 2018, 81 per cent of estrangements from mothers and 69 per cent from fathers had ended by a later survey. Stepping away is rarely painless and often not permanent.

But a 2025 study of 5,590 adult children found that the mental health of those who had stepped away from their mothers was not statistically different from those with good relationships. The ones who did worse were those still in close contact with a relationship that wasn’t good. On that evidence, distance from harm is not the unhealthy choice. Staying close to it is.

The yes you’ll regret

Then there are the commitments to things you no longer do. The club you joined in a different decade. The standing thing you keep saying yes to because you always have.

There’s a tidy explanation for why we take them on. In seven experiments, Gal Zauberman and John Lynch found that people expect to have more spare time in the future than they have now, and more so for time than for money. So we agree to things months away that we’d turn down for next week. The authors called it the Yes… Damn! effect, which is as good a name for a diary as I’ve heard.

The Minimalists have an episode called Outgrowing Things that covers possessions, careers, cities, routines, habits, traditions and relationships in one go. That’s close to the whole argument. Things we do only because we used to do them are clutter with a calendar entry.

Habits that have stopped serving you

Habits are a bigger share of the day than it feels. In two diary studies where people recorded what they were doing every hour, between a third and a half of all behaviour was habit: done almost daily, in the same place, with the mind elsewhere. A habit that no longer serves you is running on that autopilot, which is why deciding to stop doesn’t stop it.

I wrote in Stop waiting for willpower that the answer is to change the setting rather than fight. That’s still mostly true. But the honest version has a second half. For strong bad habits, one set of studies found that the only thing that worked was watching for the slip: thinking don’t in the moment, and noticing when you did. Changing the setting helped with temptations, not with the deep grooves. So change the room where you can, and watch for the slip where you can’t.

The thoughts you can’t push away

The intrusive ones, the negative ones, the self-deprecating ones. The first thing worth knowing is that everybody has them. A study across 13 countries found that 93.6 per cent of 777 students had at least one unwanted intrusive thought in the previous three months. The researcher’s own line was that what matters is what you make of them.

Pushing them away tends to bring them back. That’s the white bear experiment, and a review of 31 studies found the rebound holds up. Though not always: a 2023 Cambridge study trained 120 people to suppress specific fears for three days and found no rebound and less anxiety afterwards. One study, and its authors say more work is needed, so I wouldn’t say suppression always backfires. The better evidenced move is to change how you talk to the thought rather than whether you have it.

One small, slightly daft idea has good evidence behind it. In seven experiments, Ethan Kross and colleagues found that people who talked themselves through a stressful task using their own name, or you, rather than I, were less distressed, did better, and ruminated less afterwards. It works better than it sounds.

The words you didn’t mean

And the bad language. Saying horrible things to people you didn’t mean, which is clutter you leave in someone else’s house. I don’t have a study for that one and I don’t think I need one.

There is a study for the swearing, though, and it’s a good one. At Keele, 67 students held a hand in iced water while repeating either a swear word or a neutral one. Swearing let them keep it there longer and hurt less. A follow-up from the same lab is reported to have found that the more people swore in everyday life, the less it helped. Even swearing works better when you minimise it.

The look you can buy

Here’s where I think it has gone a bit wrong, and this part is my opinion. Minimalism has become a look. The coolest minimalist furniture, bought to replace furniture that worked. Perfectly good things got rid of so the room photographs well. And just out of shot, the junk. People trying to out-minimalise each other on a platform that rewards the picture.

I’m not the first to say it. Kyle Chayka, who wrote a whole book on it, argues that minimalism has become a commandment to consume fewer, better things, which is still consuming, and that its sales pitch is the one perfect multipurpose item you can buy. Reviewing Marie Kondo’s Netflix series, he wrote that our homes became a competition once we started rating them.

Two facts, and you can decide what they mean. In 2019 Kondo opened an online shop that sold, among other things, a $75 tuning fork with a quartz crystal. And the Minimalists’ episode 550 includes the hosts’ favourite minimalist furniture brands. Others have made the sharper point that choosing to have less is only a choice for people who have enough.

The research on stuff and happiness is real but modest. A meta-analysis of 259 samples found materialism reliably linked to lower wellbeing, with an effect that’s small rather than dramatic, and three longitudinal studies found that wellbeing rose as people put less weight on material goals. Less stuff helps, a bit. A room bought to look like it has less stuff in it is not what they measured.

Where I find it hardest

None of this means I’ve cracked the stuff side. The podcast does inspire me to avoid clutter, and I still sometimes buy things I don’t need, because the marketing works on me and I’m always looking for the perfect setup. Hobbies with a lot of kit are the worst for it. Camping, for example.

The pattern goes like this. I upgrade something to a smaller, lighter version, which genuinely reduces what I pack. Then I keep the old one. I can still use that one day. If I go car camping I can take the bigger thing. Both of those are true, and both of them are the voice I wrote a chapter about. Once I own something it’s really hard to let go, and the endowment effect, which I went into in the book, is the biggest mental block I have with any of this. Letting go of things is the hardest part.

Marie Kondo has a line on this that I remembered as two kinds of people. It turns out to be three. In The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up she describes the people who can’t throw things away, the people who can’t put things back, and the people who can do neither, and she reckons the last group is about 90 per cent of us. Tidying, in her telling, comes down to those same two actions: deciding what goes, and deciding where everything else lives. The Minimalists’ 20/20 rule and Kondo’s tidy-by-category method are in the book, so I won’t retell them here.

Fig. 2 · Kondo's three kinds of untidy

It helps a little that in 2023, after her third child, Kondo said through an interpreter that she had kind of given up on keeping her own home tidy, and that time with her children mattered more. The person who wrote the method moved towards the 90 per cent. If stuff were what it was all about, that would be a confession. I don’t think it is one.

It was never about the stuff

I think it’s brilliant that the idea is bigger than possessions, because the possessions are only the visible part, and they’re not what’s making anyone miserable. The friend you dread and keep seeing. The weekly thing you stopped enjoying years ago. The habit that runs itself. The thought that says you’re not good enough, in your own voice. The thing you said and can’t take back. Those are the clutter.

A collector with a loft can see that as clearly as anyone with a white room, maybe more clearly, because I know exactly how much the stuff isn’t the point. It’s a mindset, and a mindset doesn’t go in a charity bag.

It was never really about the stuff.

Book links go to Bookshop.org, which pays me a small commission and gives the same again to independent bookshops.

Further reading

• Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus, Love People, Use Things: Because the Opposite Never Works (2021). The seven relationships.
• The Minimalists Podcast. Start with 349, Outgrowing Things, or 393, Psychological Clutter.
• Marie Kondo, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying (Vermilion, 2014), called The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up in the US. The three types are near the start.
• Kyle Chayka, The Longing for Less: Living with Minimalism (Bloomsbury, 2020). The case against the look.
• Holt-Lunstad, Smith and Layton, Social relationships and mortality risk: a meta-analytic review, PLoS Medicine (2010).
• Reczek and colleagues, the 2025 study of estrangement and health, Journal of Marriage and Family.
• Ally Burns, Turn Down the Tap. The stuff side, for brains like mine.