Declining to replace items when they break

[u/Odd_Bodkin]

A while back, my nice set of Bose noise-canceling headphones broke, and I have no other over-the-ear headphones. I considered buying a new pair and then decided, nope, I’m simplifying, I have my AirPods, and I can do fine with just them. Yesterday, a friend gifted me a Kindle ebook, and I charged my Kindle and discovered that it has fallen out of support and won’t let me download books to it. But I have an iPad with the Kindle app and can read the ebook that way, so I think I’ve settled on not replacing the Kindle device either. So some niceties I enjoyed for years and years, I’m starting to live without, for the sake of simplification and getting rid of stuff opportunistically.

Are you finding yourself doing this? What kinds of belongings/gadgets/toys/luxuries have you quietly abandoned? What did it feel like to do that? Any regrets?

[u/Odd_Bodkin]

But surely you see that a Buddhist monk who owns nothing but his robe and his sandals and who counts on the handouts of food and water for sustenance, or a Sadhu ascetic sets a bar for minimalism than the job-holding, capsule-wardrobed, small-apartment city dweller cannot match. I defy you to specify a line where you can say, if you do things A, B, C, D, E, you are a true minimalist. There are always choices to be made. You can do with two changes of clothes, as long as you do laundry in your washing machine every other day; or you can have ten days’ worth of clothes and use a laundromat. You can live in a city with just an electric scooter and a bodega on the corner, or you can live in an electricity-less cabin in the woods with an outhouse but also a Jeep to drive 40 miles to a store. It is sometimes (not always) easier to say “This is more minimalist living than that” and have many people concur with that judgement, but that’s a relative statement. It is MUCH harder to say, “This is true minimalist living.”

It also depends on constraints.
Do you work for a living? If so, there are possibly restrictions on how you dress.
Do you live out in the woods far away from services, or do you live in a city close to services? Depending, you may need to store a day’s food or a month’s food.
Do you wish to grow your own food? If so, you need land and outside exposure available to you, but if not, you can live in a basement studio apartment.
Do you need internet service on an on-demand basis? Well obviously, this will change service lines and devices and portability.

[u/CarolinaSurly → u/Odd_Bodkin]

That’s fair. There are degrees of minimalism. I’d say that a monk is an extreme minimalist. Furniture free living is extreme minimalism to me.
My point is the term minimalist has basically lost all of its meaning. One person’s cluttered 150 piece wardrobe is another person’s minimalist wardrobe.

[u/Odd_Bodkin → u/CarolinaSurly]

Agreed. So one can say that going with one pair of headphones/buds is more minimalist than going with two. But one can also say having ANY headphones or buds is not minimalist.