Image: a tiny house designed by Jay Shafer
As a person who has grown up my entire life in cities I think I am particularly vulnerable to the myth of ‘the peaceful life in the country side’. I always notice that whenever I go (admittedly always on vacation) out of the city I feel much more relaxed, and it feels good on some deep level to be around plants and away from concrete and the constant roar of the city. So I have a persistent fantasy of leaving it all behind and going to live in the countryside. I’m sure this would be a rude awakening for me if it actually happened, but the fantasy persists.
Periodically I indulge the fantasy and spend time watching YouTube videos about related topics. One of my favorite topics is tiny houses and the people who live in them. In western culture Henry Thoreau and Walden are a central touch point for the allure of voluntary simple living. Thoreau and his ideas seem to pop up cyclically in the culture, taking on various manifestations, including some of the recent trends around minimalism. The contemporary tiny house movement is a fairly recent development in this continuum, over the past 20 or 30 years, with one recent source of origination credited to artist and house designer Jay Shafer. He was a poor artist and decided to build a tiny living structure on the bed of a trailer that could be towed by a car or truck. Of course poor people around the world have been living in prefabricated mobile homes for generations. We even have a pejorative slur for them in the US: “trailer trash”. Shafer’s and the tiny house movement’s innovation is to position tiny house living as an ethical and aesthetic statement about minimalism and freedom, as opposed to framing it around poverty or lack. As such it appeals strongly to urban dwellers who are feeling overwhelmed by the rat race of contemporary life. It’s worth noting that in fact Shafer went through periods of homelessness and that the tiny house movement has now gotten involved with addressing the homelessness epidemic on the west cost of the USA, so there are points of interconnection.
Over the past five years I’ve gone through a number of significant life transitions and upheavals and have come to realize that I really don’t need very much at all to live, in terms of possessions, and actually living with less is generally a lighter and more pleasant feeling. Moving to Berlin was again a kind of squeezing through the eye of the needle in which I moved with only 6 large (and heavy) cardboard boxes on the airplane. I got a lot of second hand furniture and appliances on arrival here and a year later am living comfortably with a minimalist but not particularly austere setup. So I find the concept of getting rid of stuff and keeping things simple appealing.
Being a family man there is a limit to how minimalist I can become, and in fact a huge amount of what I brought with me from the US was kids toys and stuffed animals. For me minimalism is an adult choice and not one I want to excessively impose on my kids, though I do try to limit the random buying of stuff that modern kids seem to thrive on and feel entitled to. Given my current family situation I think it will be some time before I can make any kind of significant shift in my lifestyle, towards this kind of more nomadic and simple existence, but long term I think that’s the way I’m trending. I really have no desire to accumulate a mountain of stuff or a big house as I find it’s usually just a burden to move around, store, organize and manage. The benefit of frequent uprootings is that you realize that anything you bring into your life you’ll end up being forced to carry with you.
