“The hardest thing in the world is to simplify your life.
It’s so easy to make it complex.”

~ Yvon Chouinard, Founder of Patagonia

Minimalism and a Meaningful Retirement

I recently sat down for a conversation with Joshua Becker of Becoming Minimalist to discuss how we can simplify our lives in order to better focus on what’s important. What prompted the conversation?

I have often joked that my life resembles a Rube Goldberg machine. It gets results—food on the table, work done, semi-regular exercise, etc.—but often only after a complex and convoluted series of steps.

As you can imagine, this sometimes creates no small amount of cognitive dissonance as I try to hold the contradictory ideas of living an intentional, meaningful life while constantly struggling with busyness and complication.

I’m guessing some of you are dealing with the same problem. I don’t want retirement (or life in general) to look like the equivalent of a cluttered junk drawer, so I reached out to Joshua to get his thoughts on how minimalism can help deal with the problem. He defines minimalism like this:

“Minimalism is the promotion of things I most value and the removal of everything that distracts me from it.”

So it’s not necessarily about how many shirts you have or how big your house is. It’s about defining what’s important to you and what isn’t. Then you ruthlessly cut the latter in order to create space, time and money for the former. It’s about becoming a minimalist in the things that don’t matter so you can become a maximalist in the things that do.

What are some practical ways to do that? What are the benefits? How can we simplify life, minimize stress, and focus on what we really want out of life? Answers to those questions and more are in my interview with Joshua. You can either listen to it using the player below or, if you’d prefer, I’ve attached a PDF transcript as well. [Note: If you’re reading this in an email, you may need to view the post online in order to use the media player.]

PDF Transcript: How-to-Simplify-Life-In-Retirement

 More Helpful Resources

After listening, spend a few minutes thinking about ways to clear the clutter from key areas of your own life. Your possessions are an obvious place to start, but don’t forget things like your work, relationships, obligations, finances and goals.

I’ll write more about how to simplify life in retirement  in future posts, but until then, you may want to check out these articles on Joshua’s blog…

•  The 10 Most Important Things to Simplify in Your Life
• 10 Creative Ways to Declutter Your Home
• A Helpful Guide to Becoming Unbusy
• 7 Common Problems Solved by Owning Less
• Owning Less, Intentionality, and Living Your Best Life Possible

…And these articles at Intentional Retirement

• How to Cure The Busy Virus
• Curate Your Life
• 15 Practical Ways to Live a Purposeful Life
• A Brief Guide to Retirement Bliss
• The Dual Processes of An Ideal Retirement

One last note.  We were updating our web hosting last week and a glitch caused an email titled “Hello World” to be sent unintentionally.  I apologize for the annoyance.

Touch base if I can ever help.

~ Joe