Consider This from NPR - Reframing The Minimalist Lifestyle

Episode Date: January 29, 2022

Minimalist lifestyles are in vogue. From books to blogs, to Instagram to YouTube, Marie Kondo and other influencers have popularized living with less. But many of the dominant voices ignore the ways history and culture influence how and why we consume. Enter Christine Platt, The Afrominimalist. Platt is a lifestyle strategist and author of The Afrominimalist's Guide To Living With Less. She examines how a history of oppression shapes a community's views on ownership and consumption.In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment to help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Have you ever asked yourself, do my possessions spark joy? If so, you know who to thank. Hello, I'm Marie Kondo. That's Marie Kondo, queen of decluttering. When you touch the item, it sparks joy for you. Okay. And you feel... Best-selling author with two shows on Netflix, she is a master organizer,

creator of the KonMari method with devoted disciples. Even if you had no translator, I would follow you to a cult compound and never leave. For many, following the KonMari method has been a transformative experience. Marie, she changed my life. Confronting this tendency to overconsume has had a huge impact on people and on donation centers across the country. In January 2019, right after tidying up with Marie Kondo dropped on Netflix, thrift stores were swamped with new donations, like this Goodwill in Florida. Thousands and hundreds of thousands of donations is huge. We can hardly keep up with it. Beyond the KonMari method, there is no shortage of minimalist lifestyle trends, from Swedish death cleaning to capsule wardrobes. There are books, blogs, TV shows, and social media accounts devoted to the environmental,

financial, and mental health benefits of saying goodbye to excess and learning to live with less. And sometimes it can feel like you're out of step if you're not paring down. Consider this. Minimalism is having a moment, but sometimes it seems as if many of the most famous voices behind tidying up and scaling back are unfamiliar with some of the history behind why we consume what we consume. And that can leave many people, especially people from the African diaspora and other historically marginalized groups, wondering where they fit in or feeling judged. One author and influencer is trying to change this. That's coming up.

From NPR, I'm Michelle Martin. It's Saturday, January 29th. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today or visit WISE.com. T's and C's apply. It's Consider This from NPR. Like many people, Christine Platt's devotion to minimalism started from a place of abundance. I remember just having so many things, so many things, and just realizing

like, I can't go on this way. She started letting go of her possessions. And then when I started reflecting on my own journey, I realized minimalism is so much more than decluttering and having a tidy house. You know, it can really be this essential tool for self-discovery and even self-mastery. So Christine Platt decided to write a book, but one that would be more than an instruction manual. Keep this, get rid of that. Instead, she decided to explore why we seem to want what we want and how much we want. I wanted to write a book that really centered on understanding our attachments. Why is it so hard to let go of things we no longer need, use, or love? There's no one reason why we consume. For those who grew up with less, it's easy to want more. And for some people of color,

wanting more can be a reaction to a legacy of deprivation. And so I was very intentional about highlighting specific areas of consideration for Black people and other marginalized communities. Christine Platt calls herself the Afro-minimalist. Afro-minimalism is simply how I define my minimalist practice, which is influenced by the history and beauty of the African diaspora. Her book, The Afro-Minimalist Guide to Living with Less, focuses on how race and racism shape ideas about ownership, wealth, and what items are worth holding on to.

Coming up, I speak with Christine Platt about her ideas about life and stuff. It goes without saying, people of all cultures love stuff. But among African Americans, the over-the-top luxury goods flaunted by artists and entertainers, athletes and other celebrities are often meant to signify success achieved in spite of racism, and that can have a powerful effect on Black culture more broadly. Displaying wealth or perceived wealth is very much a part of our culture, and we tend to feel a sense of belonging and self-worth when we have the same things as people we admire. And, you know, we may even feel cultural expectations from our families or peers, this sort of weighted pressure to acquire certain things that reflect our status,

our social currency, right? Which is how and why so many people find themselves caught up in what I like to call this dangerous web of conspicuous consumption, which is, you know, this act of purchasing luxury items and wearing or displaying them in an attempt to enhance or give the appearance of prestige. I asked Christine Platt how she acknowledges this tendency without making her readers feel judged. You know, we have to own that. And, you know, for black folks and for other marginalized groups, it's often the missing link for how and why we consume the way we do. And, you know, it's empowering once we own it. And it's why I dedicated the book to our ancestors, right? I say living with less is now our choice because

ownership is just a complicated matter for people of the African diaspora, right? I mean, as a black woman, when I think of ownership, I have to consider the historical and generational inequities of slavery, of Jim Crow, of redlining, you know, and other state-sanctioned limitations on ownership and their lasting implications. Our familial and collective histories are just a big part of and continue to influence how and why we consume. I mean, I'm thinking about the pressure to be perfectly turned out all the time, right? Even down to like the edges of your hair, right?

And also thinking about, like I'm thinking about a young woman I know who was planning her wedding with her longtime love. And she and her fiance owned a house together and were good savers and had been really kind of intentional about their lifestyle. But when it came to the wedding, big pressure on both sides to have the big thing with the custom dresses and the horse-drawn chariot or like the Bentley. And I said to her, why do you, why? And she said, well, because neither of their families had ever been able to have that. And so you can see the strong emotional push to live that way, right? Yeah. And it's why I think it's so important to have a more holistic approach to this practice, right? For everyone, but I think in particular for black folks in marginalized communities, right? For example, I believe forgiveness is such an essential step

at acknowledging and understanding our overconsumption. Because for many marginalized people, that forgiveness often has to include and extend to our caregivers and communities, right? We have to give grace to the people who helped raise us, right? And understand that so many of them were doing the best that they could under the circumstances, whether it was due to lack of education, resources, lack of guidance, right? There's a quote that I love by the indigenous writer Tommy Orange, in which he reminds us, what we are is what our ancestors did, how they survived, right? So many of our choices and behaviors are reflections and remnants of what our ancestors

had to do to survive. And today, many of those learned behaviors of our ancestors and their advice, such as live for the moment, right? And because tomorrow isn't promised and all of these things, right? They continue to influence our relationship with money and impact our opportunities to build generational wealth, which is why I feel we have to continuously work to dismantle a lot of cultural beliefs that are just no longer applicable and beneficial to us individually and collectively. Okay, but now I'm going to flip it around and talk about the value of items. And here I'm thinking about the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

The museum's founding director, Lonnie Bunch, spent years gathering items for the permanent collection, and it has to be said, many of the artifacts are things that families held onto, not museums or archives. I mean, the truth of it is that so much of Black history is held in the home, in personal artifacts. And you could say that that's just stuff, but how do you think about that? Well, I mean, I think there's a difference between the things that are, you know, part of our cultural histories and legacies and things that we buy for our desire to just simply have something. Oftentimes that's, you know, rooted in this false sense of security because, you know, when we live in a society where we constantly feel unsafe or at risk, our desires to seek things for comfort, it's heightened, right? And that's very different from familial legacy generational items, right?

And so definitely, I mean, holding on to things that are cherished, that are part of your family's culture, legacy that ground you, that sustain you, that's very different than using our resources to purchase things for temporary comfort, right? Things that have momentary value, right? When we do that, we really do run the risk of not only remaining victims of systemic oppression, but even worse, contributing to it, in my opinion. So this leads logically into help for people who are listening to our conversation to say, okay, okay, I'm inspired now. I want to get organized like right now, but where do we start? Well, of course, I'm going to say start with the Afro-Minimalist Guide

to Living with Less, right? I really offer a four-step holistic approach, which you can get for free off my social media, which is step one is acknowledging that you have too much, right? And step two is, again, that important aspect of forgiveness. And step three is letting go. And step four is paying it forward, being very intentional with those things that no longer serve us so that they don't end up just in landfills and that they do end up with people or organizations that can truly benefit from their use, right? Of course, in the book, I go deeper into understanding the psychology of ownership, right? Again, going back to understanding our motivations and

attachments, you know, looking into our childhoods, our cultural expectations, right? I mean, all of these things just play a role in who we are as consumers, which is why I like to say this is such a journey of self-discovery and it should be approached with enthusiasm. I know a lot of people approach it very much with fear, right? And you have to confront that fear and understand that on the other side is this opportunity to really, really discover who you are and make the changes that not only benefit you individually, but benefit your family and your community collectively, and in essence, you know, our world, our culture, and our society. And you've kind of answered this, but just in case that for people who got started at the

beginning of the year and then lost hope, you know, a couple of weeks into the new year, it just seemed like too much. Is there something that they can do to kind of recommit to the cause? You know, I think that's a big part of it too, right? We put so much pressure on ourselves to finish in one month or to finish in a weekend, right? I mean, I have a challenge that I host on Instagram, which is really to just let go of one thing a day. I mean, you don't have to make it this weekend warrior mission, right? But I also feel like if you've lost some steam, even pausing and starting to do some of that self-discovery work, starting to do some of that inner work and understanding, why am I this way as a consumer? Why do I have so much more than I need? Why is it so hard for me to let go?

Right? The answers to those questions are what really makes the journey not only manageable and tolerable, but possible. That was Christine Platt. She is the author of The Afro-Minimalist's Guide to Living with Less. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Michelle Martin.