4 ms·

I've found a lot of freedom in similar decisions. Not sure I could take it to the same level, but even just having a small set of meals to eat every week makes

by nessex 5y ago

I've found a lot of freedom in similar decisions. Not sure I could take it to the same level, but even just having a small set of meals to eat every week makes shopping, cooking and planning around expiry dates so much easier. Clothes can be similarly hacked such that everything goes together and every combination is something you are comfortable wearing, leaving you never needing to consider what to wear. I've optimised these to the point that they take up nearly zero mental space and generate no stress. In my case, I use pre-prepared frozen meal delivery service, but I know some meal preppers who find similar freedom that way. Don't cook or order anything you won't eat at any arbitrary time, and you'll never be stuck with wasted food or indecision. And for clothes I found a small set that works for me and can be worn in any given situation (except formal, though that doesn't impact me in any way). I see a lot of comments that seem to see all the things you miss out on in this situation. But in my mind, it frees up a lot of mental effort, time and stress. If I ever get bored I can go to a restaurant and eat something wild and it will be all the more exciting given I don't optimize for excitement or luxury in my everyday steady-state. When Soylent came out I was super excited about this idea. Don't think about three meals a day that you normally fuss over, and instead have two predictable, quick meals and optimize to make the third one amazing. Soylent was OK, and DIY soylent offered some hope too. The third meal WAS always amazing, in a relative sense, and tasted better somehow than when I had the same thing before this diet. Unfortunately liquid diets are just not satisfying to me and so frozen meals won out. I'd love to find other areas of my life that can be similarly optimized. I have hope for bill management services to take the annoyance out of juggling payments etc., and roboinvestors or similar automated financial services. Doing these things manually offers no excitement and no added value beyond the transitively provided service so I don't think they should take up my life. The amount of time wasted across the whole human population on things like preparing meals, choosing outfits and managing everyday responsibilities must be huge and that is all time that could be spent doing other exciting or valuable things.

theonething 5y ago
May I ask which frozen meal delivery service you use?
- nessex 5y ago
  I'm in Japan so I use nosh.jp. It's decent and surprisingly cheap, not much more than food from the supermarket here which is expensive regardless.
alisonatwork 5y ago
I completely agree. I recommend decreasing your gadgets to just a phone (for when you go out) and a tablet or laptop for home. That is, no TV, no stereo, no games console. Assuming you live on your own, you can do all the same things you did before, just move your laptop screen to a comfortable distance. I suppose you could buy headphones if you also want loud audio, but personally I prefer to go out to a bar or nightclub or movie theater to get that experience. You can also optimize most of the furniture away. The last few places I lived I just had a mattress in the main/living room and cooking supplies in the kitchen. Not only is the up-front cost less, but you can live in a much smaller apartment, cleaning the whole place is much faster, moving house is easy. Personally I like to work lying on my stomach, so I don't need a desk, but I suppose you could get a small table and chair if your body isn't comfortable lying down or sitting on the floor for a lot of the day. More available floor space means it's easier to pace or work out too. Other recommendations... Best to live somewhere without carpet, so you can clean it with a broom - saves buying a vacuum cleaner. You can use toilet paper for the bathroom and also in the kitchen and also to blow your nose. You can use shampoo for everything in the bathroom, including washing your hair, hands, body and clothes (if your house doesn't have a washing machine). You can use dishwashing liquid to clean most surfaces in the house, as well as your dishes. You can avoid using lights for most of the day/night by keeping windows uncovered and using the ambient light from outside. The upsides are exactly as you say - since you're not spending as much time and money maintaining your house, you have more time to go out and visit interesting places, and you can spend more money at nice restaurants or splurge for a comfortable hotel if you want to enjoy some luxury every now and then. But I find I don't really want to. Life is a lot more enjoyable, in my opinion. Way less stress than cleaning and maintaining a bunch of stuff.
- snoshy 5y ago
  That's certainly one kind of minimalism, but I think it goes well beyond what GP intended. While your comment and lifestyle seems earnest, it's a bit too far for most given the GP context, in the sense that rather than minimizing the time taken to do routine things, it optimizes many of them out entirely to the point that it does not appear practicable for most (ex. mattress being the only furniture). Such things can certainly be taken to even further extremes: why buy a mattress? A sleeping bag might do fine and might well be good for your back. Everybody draws a line, and for even relatively extreme folks, that line is certainly shaped by social norms. I'd wager there's a rather large number of folks like GP intending to minimize the effort required to do drone-ish tasks rather than eliminate them. I don't deny that it's only a logical next step to eliminate them entirely, but that seems a step too far for social conventions. After all, culture defies logic rather often.
auslegung 5y ago
> I'd love to find other areas of my life that can be similarly optimized. I have hope for bill management services to take the annoyance out of juggling payments etc., and roboinvestors or similar automated financial services. You’re probably familiar with auto bill pay (I think most services have it, and many banks offer it as well), and index fund investing with automatic transfers, so I’m guessing those don’t solve the problems you’re talking about. I’m interested what you mean then.
- nessex 5y ago
  Yeah absolutely, that's kind of what I'm talking about. Though even then, managing different contract durations across many different companies for many different bills each month is annoying, and there are companies that can do that part for you as well. Haven't ever tried it, nor checked the cost, but it sounds like something that might be beneficial to not worry about. They can send me a summary each month to make sure I'm not spending too much. The index fund investing with scheduled transfers is exactly what I meant by automated financial services. I probably micro-manage it a little too much right now for no real benefit.
  - auslegung 5y ago
    > I probably micro-manage it a little too much right now for no real benefit. I do my best not to even log in to my account. One could go so far as to change one’s password to something impossible to remember, then delete it, so that signing in becomes a huge hassle of password recovery and identification verification at a banking institute (one of Dante’s levels of hell iirc)
chubbyish 5y ago
Cooking is enjoyable and you can get the same flow state cooking that you can coding. And it’s where you can let your mind wander and come up with sparks of new ideas/approaches. Soylent is terrible for your insides.
- alisonatwork 5y ago
  I also find cooking enjoyable, but I would hate it if it just became an extension of work! One of the reasons why I continue to cook dinner every night despite having a fairly minimal life in other aspects is because it's a set of physical actions that helps to get my brain out of work mode. This is especially important during pandemic/work-from-home era because there is no commute (I used to cycle). But this experience of finding value in cooking is not really universal. I have some friends who legitimately, actively dislike the process. It's not that they're bad at it, they just consider it a waste of time. For them Soylent, or a food delivery service might be just fine. I think the key is to aggressively optimize out the things in your life that aren't working for you. We shouldn't feel like we "need" to do things just to have a "normal" life, I think that's one of the causes of stress and unhappiness for a lot of people.

by nessex 5y ago

theonething 5y ago

May I ask which frozen meal delivery service you use?

nessex 5y ago
I'm in Japan so I use nosh.jp. It's decent and surprisingly cheap, not much more than food from the supermarket here which is expensive regardless.

alisonatwork 5y ago

I completely agree. I recommend decreasing your gadgets to just a phone (for when you go out) and a tablet or laptop for home. That is, no TV, no stereo, no games console. Assuming you live on your own, you can do all the same things you did before, just move your laptop screen to a comfortable distance. I suppose you could buy headphones if you also want loud audio, but personally I prefer to go out to a bar or nightclub or movie theater to get that experience. You can also optimize most of the furniture away. The last few places I lived I just had a mattress in the main/living room and cooking supplies in the kitchen. Not only is the up-front cost less, but you can live in a much smaller apartment, cleaning the whole place is much faster, moving house is easy. Personally I like to work lying on my stomach, so I don't need a desk, but I suppose you could get a small table and chair if your body isn't comfortable lying down or sitting on the floor for a lot of the day. More available floor space means it's easier to pace or work out too. Other recommendations... Best to live somewhere without carpet, so you can clean it with a broom - saves buying a vacuum cleaner. You can use toilet paper for the bathroom and also in the kitchen and also to blow your nose. You can use shampoo for everything in the bathroom, including washing your hair, hands, body and clothes (if your house doesn't have a washing machine). You can use dishwashing liquid to clean most surfaces in the house, as well as your dishes. You can avoid using lights for most of the day/night by keeping windows uncovered and using the ambient light from outside. The upsides are exactly as you say - since you're not spending as much time and money maintaining your house, you have more time to go out and visit interesting places, and you can spend more money at nice restaurants or splurge for a comfortable hotel if you want to enjoy some luxury every now and then. But I find I don't really want to. Life is a lot more enjoyable, in my opinion. Way less stress than cleaning and maintaining a bunch of stuff.

snoshy 5y ago
That's certainly one kind of minimalism, but I think it goes well beyond what GP intended. While your comment and lifestyle seems earnest, it's a bit too far for most given the GP context, in the sense that rather than minimizing the time taken to do routine things, it optimizes many of them out entirely to the point that it does not appear practicable for most (ex. mattress being the only furniture). Such things can certainly be taken to even further extremes: why buy a mattress? A sleeping bag might do fine and might well be good for your back. Everybody draws a line, and for even relatively extreme folks, that line is certainly shaped by social norms. I'd wager there's a rather large number of folks like GP intending to minimize the effort required to do drone-ish tasks rather than eliminate them. I don't deny that it's only a logical next step to eliminate them entirely, but that seems a step too far for social conventions. After all, culture defies logic rather often.

auslegung 5y ago

> I'd love to find other areas of my life that can be similarly optimized. I have hope for bill management services to take the annoyance out of juggling payments etc., and roboinvestors or similar automated financial services. You’re probably familiar with auto bill pay (I think most services have it, and many banks offer it as well), and index fund investing with automatic transfers, so I’m guessing those don’t solve the problems you’re talking about. I’m interested what you mean then.

nessex 5y ago
Yeah absolutely, that's kind of what I'm talking about. Though even then, managing different contract durations across many different companies for many different bills each month is annoying, and there are companies that can do that part for you as well. Haven't ever tried it, nor checked the cost, but it sounds like something that might be beneficial to not worry about. They can send me a summary each month to make sure I'm not spending too much. The index fund investing with scheduled transfers is exactly what I meant by automated financial services. I probably micro-manage it a little too much right now for no real benefit.
- auslegung 5y ago
  > I probably micro-manage it a little too much right now for no real benefit. I do my best not to even log in to my account. One could go so far as to change one’s password to something impossible to remember, then delete it, so that signing in becomes a huge hassle of password recovery and identification verification at a banking institute (one of Dante’s levels of hell iirc)

chubbyish 5y ago

Cooking is enjoyable and you can get the same flow state cooking that you can coding. And it’s where you can let your mind wander and come up with sparks of new ideas/approaches. Soylent is terrible for your insides.

alisonatwork 5y ago
I also find cooking enjoyable, but I would hate it if it just became an extension of work! One of the reasons why I continue to cook dinner every night despite having a fairly minimal life in other aspects is because it's a set of physical actions that helps to get my brain out of work mode. This is especially important during pandemic/work-from-home era because there is no commute (I used to cycle). But this experience of finding value in cooking is not really universal. I have some friends who legitimately, actively dislike the process. It's not that they're bad at it, they just consider it a waste of time. For them Soylent, or a food delivery service might be just fine. I think the key is to aggressively optimize out the things in your life that aren't working for you. We shouldn't feel like we "need" to do things just to have a "normal" life, I think that's one of the causes of stress and unhappiness for a lot of people.