Pure Writerly Moments 2 (Short Stories, Essays, Book Reviews, and More)

Book Review - Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown

I was already a buddying essentialist before I ever picked up this book -- actually, the term I prefer is minimalist, though I suppose essentialist has a more positive meaning. The book did not need to convince me to be an essentialist, nor to instruct me to clean out my closet. What the book did need to do was justify its 220 odd page count. What it needed to do was tell me how an essentialist should deal with non-essentialists. The book does do quite a bit of that. If you are a minimalist like me, then you may want to read this book for the simple reason that it reaffirms your principles and gives you a few more tools in your minimalist toolbox.

Other books have taken on the idea of minimalism in their own way. It's very similar to the "Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck". That book asked a very important question: How can we efficiently distribute our fucks? "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", also posed a similar question: What is the most quality action we can take? (As opposed to mindless quantity). Seneca's "On the Shortness of Life" was another book (a long essay really) that dealt with limited nature of time and the absolute necessity of mastering how to make the most of it. Perhaps that is the book's greatest pitfall -- its inability to pay tribute to the books before it that have grappled philosophically, literarily, and poetically with maximizing the quality of our time. (I was happy, however, to find many quotes by Lao Tzu).

One thing I'm glad the book touched on is the compatibility of essentialism with flaneurship. What is flaneurship? Flaneurship is a term coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. It means essentially, a person who tries many different things. There is no contradiction between being an essentialist (or minimalist) and being a flaneur because while an essentialist dabbles in many things, he or she only commits to a few in the end. Being a minimalist, then, actually helps to free up more time for creative exploration -- what the author calls "play". And "play" is definitely an important aspect of life.

There are a few criticisms I have of "Essentialism". They come from my own attempts to apply minimalism in my own life.

1 - Your environment will hate it and it might ruin your relationships. Japan corporate culture will reject it. Your family might reject it. Your (materialistic) girlfriend might reject it. This is not a critique of the philosophy as it stands, just a critique of how much work there still is to do to master the techniques of applying minimalism in a non-minimalist world.
2 - People might think you are an asshole. And often, you will have to be an asshole to make minimalism work...until, of course, you have mastered the techniques of making minimalism work in a non-minimalist culture.
3- The hard part is waiting for that perfect zone of contribution. It comes up so infrequently that you will hate yourself for your own lethargy.
4 - You have to be ready to trade being liked for being efficient and honest...and that's really tough.

If the word count of this book review is already too high for you and you already think that reading 220 odd pages violates your minimalist creed, then let me put the book into a nice little nutshell for you.

"Less is better: captured in just three German words: Weniger aber besser. The English translation is: Less but better. A more fitting definition of Essentialism would be hard to come by."