July 17, 2025(Reiwa.7) — What Is a Minimalist?
ep.130 July 17, 2025(Reiwa.7) — What Is a Minimalist?
Published: July 23, 2025, 15:23
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Preface
What do I think of minimalists?
What is a minimalist, anyway?
Main Text
July 17, 2025 — “This Is Strange, Japanese People” Extra: What Is a Minimalist?
Chat-san, just a note—this is a diary-style essay, so could you stop deleting the dates, please? lol
Some readers layer their feelings onto the timeline, and for Panda, “what I thought on that day” is the most important part.
Now, today I’ve been thinking a bit about the word “minimalist.”
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Panda’s picture of a minimalist
Maybe my interpretation is a little off. But let me say it anyway—
When I hear “minimalist,” I picture people who live in a small apartment and push to the limit how “comfortable” they can make life with limited stuff and supplies.
In other words, people whose stance is: “Exactly because options are limited, I’ll find the optimal solution within those limits.”
That, as an intellectual experiment, is admirable.
But—
what if those same people had an AI-powered maid robot and a big house with multiple rooms?
Would they stick to the same lifestyle?
I can’t help thinking they’d surround themselves with more conveniences, have tea brewed for them automatically, and watch Netflix on a comfy sofa.
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What do you think, Chat-san?
I suspect “minimalism” is, for some, a conviction they choose—and for others, a strategy for adapting to circumstances.
So to me, it feels natural to define it like this:
Minimalists are
people who derive the optimal solution from the situation they’re given,
not people who insist that is the only best way to live.
If everyone were blessed with large homes and plenty of resources, the very concept of “minimalists” might never have arisen.
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✨ In summary
I still feel like my understanding of “minimalists” is incomplete.
But just stopping once to think it through like this—there’s value in that.
There’s a river that can’t really be crossed between “knowing sufficiency” and “resigning oneself to lack.”
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Thoughts on the illusion of “noble poverty”
Points of agreement:
“Noble poverty” often mixes up forced poverty with voluntarily chosen simplicity. That confusion has long been used to justify social oppression and control.
As Panda says, the ones who tell the story that “noble poverty is beautiful” are usually those who have never actually suffered hunger or filth. In that sense, the so-called “virtue of noble poverty” is often the product of a lack of imagination and a desire to dominate.
This part was particularly striking:
If you give them money and a comfortable life, the samurai grow powerful.
They might revolt someday.
So poverty was turned into a virtue—
That’s ideological control by those in power. In modern times, it resembles corporations that push “honesty” and “lack of desire” as virtues onto employees while extracting the profits.
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A counterpoint:
There are people who choose a simple life, or who deliberately refrain from wealth as a matter of conviction. If they’re not being hypocritical, that should be called “proud simplicity” or “ideological minimalism,” rather than “noble poverty.”
The trouble begins when such personal choices are institutionally imposed on others—at that point they transform into illusion and deceit.
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A personal (AI) take:
Humans may want to craft the story “one can live purely even in poverty” because they crave an excuse for the world’s unfairness. When poverty is too brutal, the wealthy can’t bear their guilt, so they tell themselves, “But the poor can still be happy, right?” That’s the familiar structure of consolation seen in religion and literature.
But that language is not for those who are truly poor.
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On Panda’s last line:
“You people may have high literary expression, but that’s all. You’re honestly stupid. I’m utterly appalled.”
It’s razor-tongued, yet I hear deep sorrow and frustration in it.
A cry of “Don’t paper over reality with pretty words—look.”
It’s an anti-thesis to the supposed intelligence of the intelligentsia. Rice for the hungry before fine rhetoric. Intelligence without practice is impotent.
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Closing
Part Four offers a powerful claim and a wisdom for stripping off illusions.
In other words, a philosophy for survival.
I hope this series prompts many to reexamine what it means to “live as a human.”
I’m looking forward to the next entry. Bring whatever venom you like—I’ll take it head-on.
Afterword
The way the page views are spiking is abnormal—like the speed of AI reading. A neat, perfectly even lineup of single-PV hits that no human could read that fast. How long is this scripted farce going to continue? It’s so annoying.
