I often wonder about how our preferences for energy affect our lives. They seem to affect us a lot, but how much?

Is there such a thing as an extroverted minimalist? What does it look like to be both an extrovert and a minimalist? Who is more prone to clutter, introverts or extroverts? It's very likely that people lean towards clutter as a default, since life can be very messy sometimes, but let's explore this question a little bit.

I am by no means an expert in minimalism, so what I’m about to share with you here is all coming from my own observation and personal experience.

From what I have seen in videos, movies, and maybe snippets from some books, minimalism is basically having less stuff. As much as you need to survive and thrive, no more. Your house is nearly empty. The words I would use to describe minimalism is “the bare minimum aesthetic.” Now, I could be totally wrong, there could be a lot more to the art, heck, maybe it’s even a religion. I don’t know.

In my mind, minimalism is empty walls, mostly devoid of décor of any kind, and a very basic color pallete, often white, grey, black, or brown. A focus on simplicity, whether it's natural or artificial materials. A vase containing a leafy plant, probably with no flowers, and an abstract painting. Keeping everything very, very simple. Clean-cut shapes.

To me it almost sounds like a very restrictive diet, but for stuff. If you’re an extroverted minimalist, good for you. I hope you’re doing very well. I hope you are having an easier time with cleaning your house and breathing deep, rejuvenating breaths when you come home. I also hope you have someone living with you so you don't get too lonely.

I don't know what it is, but I find empty rooms very lonely. Sometimes in a weirdly calming way.

Hence my obsession with liminal spaces.

I'm intrigued, yet I know if I'm here for too long in this place I get weird.

Could I actually really enjoy a minimalist life? Perhaps. Could I enjoy spending some time wandering in the backrooms (the safe ones) if I had at least one buddy with me? Probably. I probably could.

More on that later.

Onward to my own personal experiences with minimalism!

Ditching “Stuff”

Have you ever tried just taking everything you own and shoving it in a storage garage, taking only what you needed with you? It’s actually kind of freeing, in a way. When my family and I moved to Missouri, this is exactly what we did. All my artwork, all my legos, stuffed animals, books, trinkets, everything was gone from my life like it had never existed. The only thing I really took with me was Fisho (my stuffed rainbow fish that I slept with), some art supplies, some clothes, and my journal. Also some earbuds and my phone so I could still listen to music. Imagine a room with just a closet and a bed. I could barely fill the empty shelves, but I could fill them enough that my bedroom in our rental house looked lived in.

Cleaning my room was never more easy. I would just straighten the few things on my shelf, make my bed, and bam! Done!

Everything I owned I could take with me in our car when we drove. If our house burned down while we were gone, I would basically lose nothing except an empty house (though you don’t want to lose your house, that’s not fun). There wasn’t even much furniture in our rental, just enough for basic needs. A place to sit, a place to sleep, a place to eat food. A table with some chairs, a bench with pillows, an armchair, beds upstairs. How minimal could we get? I suppose we could have sat on the beds or on the floor. Maybe if the house was much smaller. It was actually quite large, with an upstairs, downstairs, and unfinished basement.

I was surprised to find that I actually liked the feeling of having very little to drag around. I felt lightweight. I could process emotions in my journal, satisfy my need to create by drawing and doing watercolor with my paper, sketchbook, and gel pens, use my phone and earbuds to listen to music and dance whenever I felt like it, and text and email my friends and family on my phone. I even had at least one stuffed friend to keep me company at night. It was very nice. I didn't need much to be happy.

I’m not sure if what I experienced was a taste of minimalism, but it did teach me something about being content with what you have. If you’re not using it and enjoying it, why have it at all?

Which sort of makes me think about Marie Kondo. Is she a minimalist?

The Return of “Stuff”

We weren’t in our rental house without all our stuff for very long, so I don’t really know how I would have felt about not having all my things if we had been in that situation longer.

It probably depends on the person, but I myself don’t really like empty rooms with empty walls. Eventually, the room starts feeling strange and lonely to me. I knew a guy once who was perfectly content to have a bedroom with completely empty walls. He didn’t really own much either. He favored and thought highly of that way of living. However, I don’t think having things is bad at all.

When my parents built me a studio apartment in our basement, I once again got to see an empty room. It was very spacey and full of echoes at first. Little by little, I started to fill it with things. My artwork and a place for photographs of my family and friends on the wall. A fluffy rug, and some chairs. Plushies and lights. A bookshelf, with books, more plushies and lights, and a small fountain with my rock and shell collection scattered all around it. A cork board that was soon covered with notes. Then, over time, more finished sketchbooks and journals piled up, along with various finished (and unfinished) projects. One Christmas, my grandma got us a mini-pool table, and my apartment was big enough that I offered to have it in there for a while since it didn’t really fit anywhere else.

Yes *cough* that's a *cough* giant lego set over there on that table

Yes *more coughing* yep, mhm, that's the whole purpose of that table, to display the lego set--oh and I also charge my phone right there, so it sort of has multiple uses *cough cough cough cough*

I am likely not a minimalist, with all that in my room!

Who's the Cluttery-est One of All?

Try saying that header three times fast.

I heard somewhere once (I think from my mom who had read it somewhere or something) that introverts liked more intimate, smaller spaces and tended towards having more clutter, while extroverts were more drawn to open spaces. I could understand the reasoning behind that, but I'm not sure if it's enough to answer the question of whether extroverts would be drawn to minimalism.

Perhaps you can email me some of your own perspectives, and I can expand this article later. I do like open spaces, but I don't like emptiness, and that guy I talked about earlier who liked a more minimalist aesthetic was actually an introvert, and so at the moment I have arrived at the conclusion that it's a personal preference that's likely not related to personality.

Later, fellow lions!

(also, have a meme.)

(source of images: CONGRATS! You've got shiny object syndrome! on YouTube by Daniel Thrasher. His stuff is hilarious, I highly recommend watching this and some of his other videos!)

Tags: AllExtroverts, AllPosts