Minimalism and Flow

I carry a lot of labels. I'm a writer, atheist, libertarian, blue collar guy, and a minimalist. I acquire and discard these labels as I go along. At some point, these labels come into conflict, and they need resolution. No bigger conflict exists in my living than the one between the life of minimalism and the life of flow. I am always keeping those two things in tension. I will now elaborate.

When you are living a life deep in the Flow, your projects become expansive. This is the nature of flourishing. It makes you want to do more. You want to see more, taste more, experience more, work more, and create more. Flow is all about more.

Minimalism is about less. Less distractions. Less material things. Less wasted time. Less commitments.

If I give in completely to the Flow, I produce more but also neglect more in the process. Things go well in one area and disastrously in another. Overcommitment occurs. As passionate and as robust as you can be, we are limited by the same things--time, money, and energy.

On the flip side, if I ruthlessly minimize the things in my life, I can eliminate a lot of frustrations in my life. But this also presents boredom. This seems to be a common refrain among the minimalist bloggers that I read, and I witness them go into the death spiral as they exhaust their self-limited creative options.

Minimalism is great for helping you get your shit together. If you are having trouble with finances, bad habits, and stress, the minimalist lifestyle will fix all of that for you. But we forget one important thing in this regard. The endpoint of life is not getting your shit together. The end and purpose of your life is happiness which only comes from flow. You can have all your shit together, and your life will still be empty.

People like to go to extremes because extremism is easy. So, on one side, you have the perfect but empty life of minimalism. On the other side, you have the messy but full life of flow. The answer lies in the mean. Aristotle's dictum concerning virtue being the midpoint between deficiency and excess applies here. You can have both. You can use both minimalism and flow to make your life both better and less messy. The two can work hand in hand as a writer and an editor would or a musician and a record producer. Flow is art while minimalism is management. Or as I use a favorite analogy, it is the picture and the frame.

I don't want a boring life, but I don't want a messy life either. I use minimalism to help produce a life with more flow. This means eliminating stuff I don't need, paring down unessential tasks, streamlining my chores, and focusing more on doing things as opposed to acquiring things. The result is that shit works.

The hardest part of living in this balance is coming up for air. It is stopping a high flow task to do one with less flow. But as a sweet friend points out to me repeatedly, you need times of boredom. You need white space. For me, this usually comes over the sink as I wash my dishes. It isn't actually boredom as most of my best thinking and ideas happens during this time. My brain is always on fire. But I find you need a break from doing simply to think about what you're going to do next.

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