Chapmanesque—Mastered by our Own Monsters
You may have heard of a group called The Minimalists. This duo of Joshua Fields Milburn and Ryan Nicodemus have been best selling authors as well as podcasters.
They have a wonderful documentary on Netflix that should cause you to pause and examine how your physical surroundings communicate with the world what is truly important to you (among many other gut-hitting truths).
I saw this documentary years ago. I’d love to live according to their suggestions, but it takes dedication and discipline. In fact, living exactly like them requires you to act as if you’re exactly them.
With each life being uniquely its own, we can’t (and probably shouldn’t) create a facsimile of another unique life.
To put it simpler, I can’t live their lives. I can only live mine.
However, when we brush up beside others in our day-to-day lives, encountering a character trait or virtue that is appealing, it’s never a bad idea for some introspection and a little application.
One of the statements they’ve made is that the world appears to be too materialistic—that’s why we feel the need to get more stuff.
In reality, they say, the world is actually not materialistic enough, in the truest sense of the idea.
If we had more appreciation for the materials that we are blessed to have, revisiting the joy, the usefulness, the productivity we get from what we do have, we shouldn’t feel the need to consume more, thus leaving us in a state of deep and prolonged appreciation.
To Have and Have Not
With over a quarter of the 21st Century already in the record books, it’s very clear that Minimalism is a chosen lifestyle much in the same way a person chooses to be Vegan. It’s not something that seems to be found in human nature. Instead, it’s a luxury.
To choose to have a minimal amount of possessions, you’re shunning the natural desires to gather as much as possible. We want to have plenty for tomorrow in order to feel secure today.
My grandmother, Nell, was born in 1921 and was a teenage girl in Smith County, Mississippi during the Great Depression. She knew what it was like to have nothing.
A little bit about her: She went to school during the day, came to help around the family farm picking cotton, snap peas and corn among other farm chores.
During her formative teen years, she would sometimes go back to her schoolhouse and practice with the basketball team.
There’s no doubt I see her through the lens of awe and wonder, but if you look at her life and remove the horrendous economic decline the world saw in the 1930s, her days could resemble the average person’s life—school, family, chores, extracurriculars, social commitments.
But you can’t overlook the horrendous economic decline the world saw in the 1930s, much in the same way you can’t look at a twentysomething-year-old man in the mid 1940s and say his world was ho-hum.
Our place on the timeline of history helps shape our we’re viewed by those further down the timeline.
She knew exactly what it was like to have nothing. After she died, my mother and her sisters found boxes of unopened shoes and clothes that still had the price tags on them. She was the only one living in her house, yet every closet was filled with clothes, shoes, hats, you name it.
One time, we took her to Cock of the Walk, a fried catfish restaurant that serves food in theme, as if you’re traveling along the Mississippi River. Part of the fun is that they serve you on tin plates.
Nell wasn’t amused. She told us she’s never going back to that place. She grew up eating off tin plates. Why on earth would she pay good money to do that again?
Again, she intimately knew what it was like to not have. She, along with an entire generation, entered adulthood knowing what hunger felt like, what having little felt like.
In our world today, we live like kings. We have plenty.
We have so much we donate our extras to those who don’t have as much.
We have so much we have the option to choose to focus on having minimal.
Tyler Durden’s Brilliance
I’m extremely guilty of craving that high when you buy or get something new and awesome. The shelf life of that joy is far too often far too short. I enjoyed the chase, the thrill of the hunt, the satisfaction of the discovery, and the excitement of the purchase.
Sometimes, I’m willing to bet, we revel in the pursuit more than we do the procurement.
One of the best quotes in all of ‘90s movie canon comes from one of the most ‘90s movies ever—Fight Club.
In the scene, Tyler Durden, played by Brad Pitt, is talking to the narrator, played by Edward Norton, about how mankind has traded productive struggle for lazy comfort.
We buy furniture that complements certain patterns and colors, buy entertainment systems that feed us endless loops of cheap, empty dopamine, losing our sense of control. Tyler looks at the narrator, pauses, then delivers that iconic line:
“The things you own end up owning you.”
The Monster Within
I’d like to give Brad Pitt’s rendition as Tyler Durden in David Fincher’s adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s novella credit for this, but the idea in this maxim traces its way back to Henry David Thoreau when he wrote in Walden that, “We don’t own things; things own us.”
Well before Tyler Durden made his way into literature, Mary Shelley gave us the story about the modern prometheus, better known as Frankenstein.
In an assumption that you know what the book is about (you know with Dr. Victor Frankenstein building a creation out of dead body parts, thus giving birth to Frankenstein monster), one of the best lines from this book could allow the Frankenstein monster to walk arm-in-arm with Thoreau on one side and Tyler Durden on the other (allegedly).
The monster looks at Dr. Frankenstein and proclaims a loud truth him:
“You are my creator, but I am your master—obey!”
The choices made by Dr. Victor Frankenstein allowed his self-control to be traded and the seeds of mastery by someone or something else to take root in his life.
Though the Minimalists may have the luxury of choosing to have not, they’re evidence of the fact that we should (and can) learn from the mistakes found in the past.
Nell had nothing, but she persisted, not letting things (or the lack thereof) define her.
We’re not defined by how much we have or even by how little we have. It’s far too easy to fit inside a box and even to collect as many boxes as we can in order to change setting and scene much like we change clothes.
There are roads paved with the best of intentions, but, as we too often discover, the destinations aren’t always something to write home about.
We don’t aim at being mastered by our own monsters, but that’s just how those monsters get so powerful.
Subscribe to Community Studio on Apple Podcasts or Community Studio on Spotify or wherever else you get your podcasts or catch the Community Studio Podcast in video form on YouTube.
You can also Subscribe at Substack.
