Enough

Lately I have been thinking a lot about minimalism and what it means to be minimal. This seems to be a trendy topic on the web as of late, with several great websites and podcasts dedicated to the subject. I guess one could say that I am on the minimalist bandwagon, so to speak, but what exactly does it mean to be minimal? Many people have written about this, all with varying interpretations. That being said, I present my definition of being a minimalist, bolstered by a recent experience I had at the Apple store.

My definition of minimalism boils down to one word - enough.

Exactly how much is enough? This is certainly subjective, since what may be “enough” to one person may not be “enough” to another. That’s as it should be. In order to determine if one has “enough”, one should ask the simple question, “Does the tool I’m using get the job done?” Everything one has can be considered a tool to be used for some purpose, and “tool” can be applicable here to almost anything. It could be a gadget, a notebook, a pen, a dresser, a car, or even a house. If the answer to the aforementioned question is no, get a new tool. If the answer is yes, one should ask, “Does the tool I currently have get the job done in the most efficient and/or enjoyable manner possible”? If the answer is no, get a new tool. If the answer is yes, stick with the tool you have, learn its ins and outs, customize it for you, and use the heck out of it until it no longer works for you.

This simple philosophy hit home during a recent trip to the Apple Store of all places. Before I get into this, I feel it best to share a little background on my addiction to gadgets. My name is Steve, and I was a gadget-holic. No worse, I was a gadget junkie. If it was new and cool, I wanted it. Now, for economic reasons, I obviously did not always get said new gadget that I coveted at the time, but nonetheless, I still felt deep down inside somewhere that I simply had to have the latest and greatest. I have also been sort of an Apple fan-boy (even since the days before the switch to Intel, when there was only one model of iPod), and why I like Apple products so much, especially the iMac, is certainly the topic of other articles.

That having been said, my wife and I were recently at the mall, and as is usual when I am at this particular mall, I stopped in to the Apple store to drool over the latest and greatest offerings from Apple. We made our way to the middle of the store, past the iPod Touches, the new Verizon iPhone 4, and the Macbooks and iPads, to the iMacs. The 27-inch iMac is certainly a beautiful machine. We played with the Magic Trackpad that was synced to one and then with the Magic Mouse that was synced to another 27-inch machine. As my wife was using the Magic Mouse on this particular iMac, she clicked the iPhoto icon in the doc. To my surprise, the icon bounced and bounced and finally, iPhoto sprang to life. Now, it could have been some anomaly going on with this machine that everyone and their brother messes with on a daily basis, but there were no other programs running, and Activity Monitor showed that everything appeared to be normal. It could have been my expectation for this rather subjective action of how fast a program should open on a relatively new machine. However, it made me pause to think about my current iMac and whether I really needed a new one.

My iMac, which I must embarrassingly confess still runs Leopard (simply because I have been too lazy to upgrade to Snow Leopard), is roughly three years old now, having been purchased in September 2008 from that very Apple store. As I stood there in front of the shiny, new 27-inch iMac, I thought about the fact that my iMac still performs like the day my wife and I brought it home. Even with its gigs upon gigs of Photos stored within its database, my copy of iPhoto seems to open just as fast as on the new iMac at the Apple store. Which begs the question, do I really need a new iMac? The answer is no. Mine still superbly purrs along, and in answer to the two aforementioned questions, it does what I need it to in the most efficient and enjoyable manner possible.

As we walked through the rest of the store, I kept asking myself those two questions about everything we looked at. Do I really need a new Apple TV with which to stream Netflix? Not really, as my Wii works just fine, and it also can play You Tube videos, surf the web and play video games. (I am not an HD buff.) While I cannot rent new movies and stream them to the living room through iTunes, I can get new releases from Redbox, DirecTV, or via iTunes on my iMac. Do I really need the new 11” Macbook Air that as I walked through the store was beckoning me to buy it? Not really, as my CR-48 does everything I need it to and then some. (This will be the topic of a future article.) Do I really need a new iPod Touch? The answer is a decisive no, since my wife’s Touch works just fine, and she lets me “borrow” it whenever I feel like borrowing it. Do I need to replace my current 5th generation Nano with one of the new ones? Absolutely not. I already have a few wrist watches, and I actually watch videos and regularly use the video camera on my Nano. An “upgrade” for me would actually be a step down in functionality.

What are your thoughts? How much is enough?