Minimalism is a bulwark against financial fragility.
The global economy has a little secret. There is a contingent workforce which is built into the current global economy. This workforce is what formerly was known as the middle class; but, that was when these workers commanded a remuneration that could support a family with only one breadwinner.
The current global economy has built-in financial fragility for most individuals who work for a daily, weekly, fortnightly, or monthly wage. This fragility comes because individuals are treated as a collective not as individuals when they are remunerated. These people are classified as teachers, doctors, lawyers, clerks, technicians, etc. They are paid in accordance with their classifications not their productivity.
But. The tragedy is that the collective wants of these people are no longer affordable.
Thus the worker is caught in a "head fake" as they are forced to choose between all the collective wants they were expecting to be able to afford. But these collective wants often can not be satiated. Indeed... Sometimes even the basics of life must go because the cost of the collective wants consumed, during the last pay period, has overwhelmed the household budget.
In these periods the wage earners use credit facilities to bridge the gap in cashflow and spending. In other words they punt their financial fragility down the road. Eventually that place down the road is upon the punter and the issue of his or her financial fragility is greater than it was ever before.
Minimalism is a state of mind that reduces the impact of all those collective wants to a bare minimum. This shift is achieved when the individual's focus is clearly on personal needs and not on collective wants.
Richard.
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