I was just thinking how the opposite of minimalism isn’t necessarily only one thing. Also, how most of those things seem to easily converge into extremes and become as dysfunctional.

Those opposites, to name a few, are fancification, hoarding, and chasing performance.

Chasing performance is easy to explain – it’s belief that you need top performance gear in order to get good results at something. It’s sometimes true, and mostly it’s not. For instance, you might need a Macbook Air, but you might not need the model with the most storage space and most RAM if you’re using it in order to write text. You need it for the small size, great performance, great screen, keyboard and touchpad, but you don’t need the extra performance one would need to run Lightroom and process 61MP files. If you’re into landscape photography, you need a camera and lens with great resolution, contrast and resistance to flare. However, you don’t need a lens with great maximum aperture since you’ll mostly be at f/8-f/16. You also don’t need a camera with the greatest frame rate and autofocus in the world. You just need it to be good enough to catch the occasional specimen of wildlife that happens to wander into the frame. Everything past “good enough” is in essence a waste of resources. You might need 5 FPS, but not 25. What you need is excellent weather sealing. Chasing performance after a certain point is useless and wasteful, and yet people do it because they think more is better. Sure, you want your car to be fast and to accelerate well. It’s important for safe overtaking and safe acceleration to highway speeds. However, after a certain point it becomes excessive, and if you push it far enough it becomes so wasteful and unnecessary it borders on insanity. Also, the more you don’t need it, the more money it tends to cost, and yet people develop some kind of tunnel vision where they rationalise it with spiritual projections of all sorts – oh, a fast car makes me remember the feeling of the astral plane, of freedom and power. Excellent. Work on being on the astral plane then because that’s the actual thing you want. Fuck cars, they are just an illusion that makes you think you can get that in the physical world which you can’t, and it’s fatal to try.

Hoarding is also very easy to understand – you accumulate stuff with little to no consideration to what happens next, chasing that dopamine kick of getting a new thing. Soon you have so many things your place looks like a Chinese $1 store. You also can’t make yourself get rid of things, despite the fact they have zero utility, negative decorative value, and they make it difficult for you to clean and maintain the place. Hoarding is the obvious reason why people thought of minimalism as a solution, often going so far as to make the cure as bad as the disease.

Fancification, on the other hand, is more difficult to explain. Let’s define it as attempt to make each object you own the most exclusive, fancy and expensive you possibly can, often at the expense of functionality and performance. The fixtures in your bathroom don’t just need to be functional, they need to be the fanciest fixtures you can find. You don’t really watch TV, but your TV needs to be the most expensive, biggest, fanciest model. Your fridge needs to be the fancy model that connects to the Internet and shows the interior of the fridge on the screen outside so that you don’t have to open it. Your carpet needs to be Persian, hand made. Your coffee set needs to be handmade vintage porcelain. Where a hoarder will just fill their place with all kinds of trash, you will get very specific, extremely expensive and fancy decorative pieces strategically positioned to start conversations. Nothing you own can be “just anything”, and mere function is something you scoff at. You want it to “reflect your personality”, and you want to show that your personality is fancy and unique, that you’re not satisfied with the mundane.

In my experience, I came to associate those things with certain personality profiles and states. Minimalism, for instance, usually means self-hatred and profound unhappiness. Hoarding indicates mental illness, of a very serious, personality breakdown kind. Fancification, on the other hand, indicates projection; trying to force this reality into conformity with your desires and ideas. It can indicate narcissism, or it can indicate refusal to accept that this world cannot be forced into compliance with your ideas about perfection.

So, where in all of this do I see myself? That’s always an interesting question. I don’t hoard stuff; if trash accumulates, I periodically clean it all up, but I don’t clean everything constantly, because I have better things to do. Rather, I tend to leave everything in good condition so that I don’t have the mess accumulate. I will try to get things that are functional first, and everything else second. I prefer clean, elegant design without extraneous fluff. I prefer steel to gold; gold is for fancy people, steel is for people who get shit done, and I see myself as the latter rather than the former. Minimalism takes too much effort for me to entertain it, but I would subscribe to the Bauhaus ideal of form following function. Also, I prefer not to increase dependency, so I like things that are easy to maintain.

I don’t project higher realities or my true, past self, into either things of this world, or my physical body, because, frankly, I don’t think I deserve it. Vedanta would put identity in terms of realization of the True Self, by which they mean Atman/Brahman, while everything else is either false identification or outright delusion.

I disagree. I see identity as a combination of self, memories, power and circumstances. Self without memories is what exactly? A pathetic, damaged state of being. In case you do remember yourself as being a king in a past life, what is it to you now, if you’re currently an ordinary person without any power? Of what use is a memory of a past self as an important, wealthy, powerful person if you’re a wage slave now? Can you truly claim your former identity? I don’t think so, unless you’re after misery and humiliation. And circumstances, they are perhaps the most important of all. If a huge part of your identity is being surrounded by your family and friends in the higher plane of existence, can you really claim your true self if you’ve been forcefully separated from them, can’t even remember most of it properly, and even the memory you have depends on your spiritual state? Shankaracharya would say that merely saying the words “I am a king” doesn’t make one so, if it goes without commanding an army and ruling a country. To claim identity without appropriate circumstances makes you delusional and an object of ridicule.

So, what does it matter if I remember some of my past circumstances and power, if I have no access to those things now? If I am in a humble state, I would rather act humbly, than make a fool out of myself by claiming something that is out of my reach at the moment. Also, the nature of my memories, those that I managed to reclaim, puts a damper on any attempt to project into my physical circumstances and try to fancify them, because it feels so ridiculous. You can’t substitute spiritual jewels with physical ones, nor can you emulate the Throne of God with physical gold, despite the similarity in colour. It would feel so incredibly ridiculous and pathetic. Things are just things. They can’t reflect my higher reality because if you saw my higher reality, you’d know how ridiculous that even sounds. Am I to try to reproduce Shivaratri here with some pathetic attempt to adorn myself with black jewellery? I am in a pathetic state, being reduced to human existence, but I have some dignity left, so the answer is a definite “no”. A fast car could never reproduce the feeling of true power. No status symbol here can reflect my status “up there”. So, I adhere to simplicity, functionality and dignity of just sucking it up instead of acting childishly in some foolish rebellion.

No fancy things for me here. Just getting shit done. When I reclaim power, memories and circumstances, we’ll talk about true names and identities.