Never underestimate the importance of abandoning crap you don’t need.
Encouragement is important in all areas of life, but especially when trying to live a life different than those around us.
Encouragement provides us with motivation to persevere. It invites us to dream dreams of significance for our lives. And it begs us to work diligently with optimism and promise.
Overcoming the pull of consumerism is a difficult challenge regardless of our stage in life. Simplicity requires encouragement. To that end, I hope you will find motivation in these articles below.
Each post was intentionality chosen to inspire simplicity in your life. For maximum effect, find a quiet moment this weekend and enjoy them with a fresh cup of coffee or tea.
Lessons From One Family’s Quest to Buy Nothing New for a Year | Chicago Tribune by Heidi Stevens. When you’re not buying things that are new, you have a different way of looking at things.
The Secret to a Simplified Schedule | No Sidebar by Melissa Camara Wilkins. Saying yes to the best stuff means saying no to everything else, even some really good things.
Why I Got Rid of the Toys | Dallas Moms Blog by Denaye Barahona. “The answer to my problem was having fewer toys, and picking the right toys.”
Man (Dis)connected: How Technology Has Sabotaged What It Means To Be Male | The Guardian by Stuart Jeffries. Boys now spend 44 hours in front of a TV, smartphone or computer for every half hour in conversation with their fathers.
Thanks for linking to “Man (Dis)Connected” Josh. I found that article particularly poignant and I enjoyed reading it. The nature of masculinity is changing, and not necessarily in good ways. (Just as the nature of femininity has changed.) Social commentary that indicates things aren’t as great as we’d hoped, are never popular. “Stereotyping” is a silly word people like to throw around when a view isn’t deemed progressive enough. I notice women in particular getting upset. Being a 30-something woman myself, I find the ideas presented in the article very unsurprising and bitterly true. Women are NOT men. We have some fundamentally different psychological requirements. Studies show women are much more resilient emotionally, whereas boys are (surprised?) more delicate. They need a different kind of nurturing than girls, to bring them to the final point of strength and mental independence we call masculinity. Women can’t model masculinity. Only men can model masculinity. Certainly, we can model strength, discipline, courage, etc. but we cannot, as women, model how to be a man. Just as men cannot model womanhood. We have a lot of cases of arrested development. Unfettered use of technology (porn, gaming, etc.) ensures boys are entertained while they remain boys the whole of their lives. Not surprisingly, some men regress to boyhood whims and behaviors as well. Connecting all of this to minimalism is obvious: Temper the use of technology. Know what your sons are watching and doing online. If they’re showing timidity, facilitate interaction with life/women/the outdoors, whatever the case may be, to give them a broader experience. It’s just too easy for boys to sink into social apathy these days.
Since everyone’s talking about the article from “The Guardian,” I suppose I will, too.
I read all the comments–positive and negative–then I re-read the article with these comments in mind. I appreciate the dialogue because it forced me to examine my own thoughts. I find myself disagreeing with the majority of critical comments.
I agree with some aspects of the article, I think other aspects need more refinement, and I felt uncomfortable reading certain sections (e.g. inner workings of the adult industry).
However, I find nothing mean-spirited or contrary to my personal experience. My wife and I worked at a number of churches and parochial grade-schools in urban settings. I recall the boy raised by a single mother telling my wife that he’s “sick of women telling me what to do.” Other single-parent boys nodded in agreement.
When I taught creative writing girls did better in writing assignments and had better character development than boys did. Boys had more action and fights.
I’ve counseled a number of men who became involved in pornography at a shockingly young age; they themselves made the connection between porn and personal disconnectedness. They feel shame and the develop a low self-esteem.
Prying away kids from their smart phones is becoming increasingly difficult for me and I notice that the boys I teach react with physical tantrums and yelling while I have very few problems getting girls to put their phones away.
The solutions don’t appear off-base either. Boys and girls would benefit from a diverse grade school faculty. Unstructured free time (recess) allows time for reflection, creativity, and mental space for all. Boys’/Men’s clubs and mentorships are as valuable as Girls’/Women’s clubs and mentorships. Dancing isn’t really my thing, but “Dancing with the Stars” seems to be a popular show among women. Encouraging fathers to parent their children provides numerous societal benefits.
This article explored some of the difficulties boys face growing up in a Western society. The article argues that boys deal with the stress through escaping into technology, which only leads to more problems. The article suggests developing personal relationships with mentors is a potentially-effective way to deal with stress in a healthy way. The article’s focus is young boys, not adult husbands. There was nothing about homosexuality.
I agree that the line about women going to college to find a husband detracted from the article. I also agree that the tone was too informal for a serious topic. I also see a lot worth taking to heart.
And finally, the connections I see with minimalism are (a) invest in your relationships, especially with the young; (b) excessive screen time should be limited because of its harm; (c) be true to yourself and allow others to be their own people. That being said, I would like to see more articles that are more explicit in their minimalist connection.
But if you asked any kid if they were sick of adults telling them what to do, wouldn’t they say yes? That is what childhood is like– adults telling you what to do! I think what is telling is that we feel sorry for boys for having to listen to women, as if this is some kind of burden, when we would not feel sorry for them for having to listen to men! And research bears this out– men and women alike are more critical of women in authority, more resistant to following their instructions, more likely to interrupt and talk over women, and more likely to ignore the input of women.
We teach boys that women aren’t important. One of the ways we do this is when we pity them for having to have women teachers or listen to their mothers.
^^ YES SADIE!!!
None of the critical comments have argued that boys don’t need fathers or male role models. None of them have argued that there are no differences between boys and girls. What we have objected to are sentiments like:
-“Boys don’t write diaries!” (someone please inform Jack Kerouac, Harry Truman, Elie Wiesel, Thoreau, etc)
-Mothers cannot set disciplinary boundaries as well as fathers
-Fathers do not unconditionally love their children
-“…boys don’t man up as previous generations of males ostensibly did.”
-That you can “trace a lot of that poor performance of black kids to not having a father present to make demands and not setting limits.” (as opposed to a demonstrable history of racism in the form of housing, school, job, and judicial discrimination, all of which also have a lot to do with the rates of single parenthood to begin with)
-That girls do not suffer from the lack of a father as much as boys do (demonstrably false; linking this with college education rates is misleading. Link it with lifetime earning potential and you’ll get a much better picture)
-“obviously one reason you go to college is to find a guy.”
-“Boys have never been self-reflective.” (someone please tell Descartes, Pascal, Proust, Augustine, etc)
-“Boys are focused on doing and acting, girls are more focused on being and feeling.” Girls are actively discouraged from doing and acting from birth (Remember this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XP3cyRRAfX0). Infant girls (or, as one study found, infant boys, if given pink hats) are held more, spoken to more softly, and engaged in less active play than infant boys. Boys are discouraged from visibly emoting in the same way.
-Female teachers “don’t like boys running around.” But we let boys run largely free before sending them to school, and so yes, they’re unprepared for what classroom life is now like. Even so, classroom analysis shows that boys typically receive much more attention and coaching from their teachers than girls do. Sexism cuts both ways.
The “war on boys” narrative conflates school performance with long-term success and earnings (particularly broken in the case of women and minorities, who do not reap financial gains from education as effectively as their male peers). It ignores the fact that school policy is increasingly set not by teachers or even educators, but by insurance mandates, lobbyists, and educational profiteers. It ignores the fact that our economy has been steadily moving away from manual labor, and we have asked our schools to prepare kids to live in this economy. It ignores that before middle-class women began working outside the home in large numbers, poor women had been working outside it for as long as men had (and we never discuss how it may have affected the children of what was a largely agrarian nation when their fathers left the family farms to “work outside the home.” Even less do we talk about how that shift may have affected the institutions of marriage and divorce).
Thank you for taking time to write your comment. I especially appreciate how you mention your experience with how difficult it is to take iphones away from boys. The commenters complaining are not mentioning whether their boys are addicted to technology…because it is likely they are.
There is no way to read the first article you linked to, which looks to be the most interesting. the last article from the wacko professor… yeah…not impressed. :(
I too have to say my piece about the last article because I am astounded that it’s being defended because part of the message inspired you. I would like to play devils advocate here and suggest the if the article inspired you to be more present with your son but all pushed mass consumerism as a be all end all to happiness or something else your public profile is vermently against you probably wouldn’t post it here. I don’t understand then how you can post something that is both subtly racist, and overtly sexist and homophobic, and then defend it as something that moved you to action therefore worth encouraging others to click through and read. The few good points this article make are made by thousands of bloggers who don’t pass on racist sexist outdated unhelpful messages. I usually love your weekend roundup but am super disappointed in this one article enough to stop clicking. Just like voting with my dollars when I buy I believe I vote with my clicks when I am online. That article does not deserve to go viral or any spotlight really and I hope the negative feedback from your readers inspires you to look inward and see how you missed all the offensive quotes in that article.
“Encouragement is important in all areas of life, but especially when trying to live a life different than those around us.” It takes courage and encouragement to strive for simplicity as you advocate. Or to be a single parent. It takes courage to be openly homosexual at all, and especially to be same-sex parents. Encouragement helps young women pursuing advanced degrees fend off questions about when they plan to “find a guy.” It’s a shame that people seeking encouragement about the first were met, in the last article, with the usual discouragement about the rest.
I’m so glad you found something wholesome and helpful in that article, and I absolutely believe you that you didn’t see it as offensive when you read and chose it. Still, I found it strange that a man who keeps what is essentially a public, introspective diary could endorse an article asserting that “boys have never been self-reflective” and that a diary would be the worst imaginable gift for a young boy. Perhaps in your next moment of self-reflection you could consider the ways in which being a heterosexual white male heading a two-parent household might have insulated you from the prejudiced overtones of the expert quoted in the article. Maybe it did, maybe it didn’t, but it might be worth a thought.
Oh I wish I had of read this reply before I wrote my own. Because I simply would have said “ditto”. Helen says it more eloquently than me, and with much fewer typos, although typing on my iPhone doesn’t help. Also I came from a place of anger (at the article) instead of a place of encouragement. Thanks Helen for so clearly articulating what I wanted to.
Forcing a boy to sit still in school, with no PE, no wiggle time, and then forcing him to write a dairy is likely to result in that boy not wanting to write. However, providing him with freedom and movement, and also inviting him to read and write by making great books and paper available can lead to a love of these things. Ask any teacher, ask moms of boys. This is why I homeschool. I grew up with them. I have 3 of them. :)
Seems to me the article accomplished exactly what it set out to do – get comments and raise the website ranking on google. Controversy does that. It actually got people thinking about values and proves once again – when we pass judgement on others we reveal who WE are…