So it turns out that it’s not a good idea to stop everything else and work on just one problem.

That means that even when a really big event happens in life, you can’t just focus on that. The everyday things still happen. You still have to go to school/work, you still have to eat and drink, you still have to do the dishes and laundry, you still have to spend some time every day with friends and family. You can’t ignore any of these ‘tiny’ things just because something ‘big’ happened.

In TV series’, there’s usually only one big problem every episode that the hero needs to fix. He can afford to forget about his daily chores while he figures out how to solve that one thing. Life doesn’t happen like that. Everything else still goes on.

It took me a long time to realize it; that you don’t have to solve the problem before you can get back to your life. This way of thinking is one of the cores of the perfectionist mindset. This mindset was slowly destroying me.

If I don’t complete it, I can’t move on from it, and therefore, I can’t move on with life.

False.

It turns out that any problem can be ignored and life will still go on. It might not go on well, but it will still go on. You can fail exams and life will go on. You can have cancer and life will still go on. Loved ones might die and life will still go on. Your life will go on and the life of everyone around you will go on.

Right at this moment; as you’re reading this; a whole bunch of different thoughts are flying through your head. Most probably you’re disagreeing with what I just said. That’s okay; it’s what I call your ‘first reaction’ to whatever I just said. Catch as many reactions as you can, write them down before you forget. What did your mind say to counter the concepts I just mentioned? Here are some common ones (and by common, I mean what went through my own head):

1. That’s not fair.
2. I shouldn’t have to deal with other things when I’m down/vulnerable.
3. Why isn’t the universe stopping for me? I need time to deal with this heavy stuff.

Life might have its own rules, but I don’t think anyone has figured them out yet. So what makes you think that one of those rules is for life to be fair? What makes you think that when you’re down for the count, the whole boxing match should stop until you fix your life and you get back up? Why does everyone need to be “understanding” of what you went through and treat you specially?

These were the questions that I asked myself when these ideas first occurred to me. This is an example of me “taking the red pill”. Ask the questions that might make you realize that all this time you might have been living your life wrong.

I realized then that I had somehow started believing that I deserved some of these things I just mentioned. That it was somehow a right that the world was obliged to give me. That the world should ‘pause’ for me. And if I didn’t get it, I felt betrayed by… by ‘something’. And I didn’t know why…

When problems happen, we press pause and tell ourselves that we need to fix this issue before we move on.

Pressing “Pause” for the big problems

At this point, you’re probably thinking to yourself,

That’s ridiculous, people don’t try to “pause” life. And even if they do, I never do this kind of thing.

Well, let’s see then. Have you ever crammed for an exam? Crammed to the point where you didn’t bother socializing or doing your laundry or thought about your family for a few days? Then yes, you’re ignoring normal life and expecting it to “pause“. After a few days, you expect to come back to normal life and “un-pause” and just continue on your merry way.

Or have you spent a few weeks working on a big project and ignored everything else in your life during that time? It’s the same thing. You’re “pausing“. You expect to “resume” life later.

Or perhaps you have a family problem where you need to be off from work or school for a while. You expect everyone and everything to let you off, and that you can just forget everything in life while you take care of this problem. You feel that you deserve it because if not life “wouldn’t be fair”. Ok, so let me ask you again:

Do you think you might have “paused” life before?

Now, let me make it clear that I actually agree that it’s great when people make allowances when you have problems. And help you out. Or give you space. But it becomes a problem when you start to expect it and feel that the universe is obliged to pause for you and help you out when you are down.

When we start to feel like this, we start to behave as if life “pauses” for us automatically when we have a problem.

Everyday pausing and procrastinating

We do this on a smaller scale in our everyday life. When a small problem comes, we don’t move away until we deal with it. Then another problem comes and we rinse and repeat.

Let me tell you a story:

This is the story of a young man who wanted to get into shape. So he told himself that he would, just as soon as the time was right. After a few months, New Year’s rolled around and he finally said to himself, “This is the perfect time to kickstart my exercise with a New Year’s resolution“. But then, he has to find a good gym to join.

So he looked for one, and after many weeks, found one. Then he thought to himself that he needs the right workout clothes (because you can’t just look sweaty in any old clothes now, can you?). So he went out and got himself the right ones.

Then, of course, he wanted to make sure he was doing the right exercises, so he just HAD to spend a few weeks first researching an exercise regimen online.

That vaguely fictional story is a story that’s repeated around the world. We lie to ourself. We procrastinate. We ‘pause’ our exercising because we convince ourselves that we have to solve a problem first before the plan can go on. Just like we sometimes convince ourselves that we have to solve a problem first before life can go on.

Don’t forget the big picture

Life is killing you, one detail at a time

Okay then, here’s what I’m really trying to say from all this. Don’t forget the big picture.

Don’t get caught up in looking for a job so that you can save up money to buy exercise clothes so that you can exercise. When you worry about those details and put everything in a sequence like that, you’ll never get anywhere. You’ll waste so much time worrying about the details that in the end you forget that the whole point of this whole thing was to get some exercise…

Small problems occur all the time. This means that your time will be so filled up with handling the details that you miss the big picture. This is the humdrum of daily life. Everyday, you’re focusing on these small small things and worrying and obsessing over every single one.

Like in this xkcd comic here, sometimes we find a method to solve the problem. Then, rather than solving the original problem, we zone in on that ONE SINGLE method and spend an ungodly amount of effort trying to execute that method perfectly. We forget that we can just ‘ring the doorbell’. We forget that the original purpose is to get the guy to unlock the door, instead of trying to figure out how to remotely change the volume on a computer through the internet.

Conclusion

Let’s recap.

Life doesn’t happen in a nice sequence like a TV series.

1. Problems don’t come to you one by one and you can’t ‘pause’ everything in your life to solve this episode’s problems.
2. When you tell yourself that you HAVE to do something first before you move on to the next step… check again. Maybe you can already do the second step even if you haven’t completed the first.
3. Make sure you’re solving your original problem. If you find yourself fixated on sending out resumes when your original purpose was to exercise, then you just might have a problem…
4. Yes! Have priorities. No, don’t forget everything else.
5. It’s ok for the world to pause for you and give you space when you have big problems. Just don’t expect it and then feel betrayed when it doesn’t happen.

Well…. so far this made sense in my head. I wonder if it made sense to you?

Step back and smell the roses

You hear them say it, and you know you’d like to, but you just don’t have enough time. The next big project is just around the corner, and there’s another debate this weekend, and you already have 3 deadlines on the horizon and on and on and on… And so, when decisions come around, we sometimes don’t research them properly.

We feel smart. We feel like we know what we’re stepping into. Changing jobs? Buying a house? Furthering your studies? Getting married? Most people I know will research how to do it. I believe very few ever try to find out how it is to live in the shoes of someone who woks in that company. Or is a house owner at that location. Or is doing his post-graduate studies. Or is married. You get the picture.

I know the facts. I’ve got Wikipedia.

We’ve turned into a society of

I have read and agreed to the terms and conditions…

because with all the world at our fingertips, with all the articles and expertise of the world on the internet, we’ve started to feel like we know it all. Wikipedia has given us data and facts about every possible subject, and we’ve confused having the facts with being  smart and knowledgeable. We don’t bother reading the fine print to understand the consequences of our choices. Rather, we just press ‘NEXT’ and expect the world to have prepared a way for us. Newsflash: sometimes… there isn’t a way.

Sometimes, you step into your decision and only then realize what you’ve gotten yourself into. Well then, too late. You already agreed to them, didn’t you? The terms and conditions of making that decision in the first place.

It’s a wide world out there. Before I graduated and stepped into that wide, unforgiving world, I was lucky enough to have a sister who was candid enough to tell me how the world really was. Specifically, the working life. I’d heard stories before of people going back from the office late and having to work weekends, but they never really bothered me. After all, they were stories.

Thank God for my sister

But my sister made me understand what those stories really meant. It meant late nights pleasing a boss who couldn’t care less about you (seriously, if you were fired, do you think he’d keep your position empty in protest? Hah, good luck with that), weekends spent in a cold office, far away from the light of the sun, and 2 hours of commuting back and forth daily (that’s 2 hours out of 18 waking hours, thankyouverymuch. More than 10% of my valuable time). Lucky for her, she didn’t have to go through all that, but she told me stories of those who did. It’s a miserable existence, when the whole purpose of getting a job is to help you live a happier life in the first place.

So the question was, before I entered the workforce, did I read all the terms and conditions of my choice? Or would I join the industry expecting an ideal job, only to be rudely awakened by the harsh realities of life? I did my research. I didn’t ask about salaries and how fast I could get promoted (although that was important too). I asked about working hours and commuting distances and whether I could ever live with myself doing that job. It wasn’t for me. I read the terms and I didn’t like them. I just couldn’t see myself as a salesperson selling technical things or as a technician installing products at the client’s offices. I wanted to be an engineer dammit! I wanted to do research and make new inventions, I wanted to find problems in society and find new ways of solving them, I wanted to be an engineer!

Facing a decision

So, facing a decision, I made my choice. And it’s a choice I’m happy with so far. It let’s me do what makes me happy. And I’m glad for that.

That little bit extra…

In physics, and in math especially, you require an extra skill besides just “understanding” to fully understand something. In debating, I never faced this problem. When I joined debating in my undergraduate days, it was a simple process of listening to something in a debate and understanding it. And using that understanding, you could pretty much explain and debate the next time. But the sciences require an extra skill. The skill to know if the answer is reasonable.

This is an odd thing to say, but I’m sure it’s true. When you take up law or economics or political science (themes debated heavily in varsity tournaments), you’re bound by reality. There are no moments when you would ever think of a person being able to float, or walk through a brick wall. The hard sciences are slightly different. In order to understand the universe, we have to look at it on a different scale, either very big (physics and cosmology) or very small (biology, physics and chemistry). It’s beyond a human to properly understand those concepts so we do it the only way we can. We cheat.

How do we cheat?

We cheat by not imagining everything at once. We forget the magnetic fields and the sunlight and whether there’s a brick wall in our way and just look at the muscles moving in a person’s leg. Does it matter if he’s walking off a cliff? Nope. We cheat by thinking of tiny atoms where you can apply “energy” to it and it will move faster and faster, without ever asking, “what energy is this”? We cheat by making things so abstract, that they lose their link to reality. So what happens is a situation where you make up a question about a boy running 200 meters in 5 seconds. Impossible, I know, but there you go.

And this is why answering questions are so important. It lets you practice questions and get a feel of their limits. What numbers are reasonable? How should the calculations look half-way through? What are those numbers you’re calculating?

I don’t have to calculate! That’s what my calculator is for!

In this day and age, we have powerful calculators and computers to do the dirty work for us. When I say “calculating”, I don’t mean adding and subtracting. Calculating is about understanding the numbers you’ve put on the paper and knowing what they represent. If you don’t know what the numbers mean, you’ll never be able to use them at the right place and in the right way to make meaning out of things.

Taking that previous example of a boy running 200 meters in 5 seconds. That’s a real question I did. In the middle of my calculations I had the number 200 and 5 and I was supposed to calculate speed. So I divided 200/5 and got the answer as 40. 40 meters per second. Ok, no big deal right? Then suddenly I looked back at the question and realized what I was calculating. This wasn’t a car or airplane moving at high speeds. This was a simple boy. And somehow he was moving over 200 meters in 5 seconds! 40 m/s! That’s crazy. And most of the time I wouldn’t even realize what I was calculating because it’s been abstracted so much. I later found out I messed up a step and it was supposed to be 200 meters over 80 seconds. Much more reasonable.

Answering the question

So what happens once you’ve “answered the question”? It means that you took the question, understood the meaning of it, were able to extract the relevant numbers, and use them appropriately in the calculation of the answer. This SHOULD mean that you truly understand. Congratulations.

Hold on…

Wait a second, now that I think about it, it applies in life too. There are so many concepts and quotes that are spouted all the time. But we never follow them even when we “understand” them. Worse, we don’t follow them even when we know them to be true.

Life lessons you’ve heard before:

1. Be good to your parents
2. It’s easier to take care of things on time (Don’t wait till the last minute)
3. Love what you have
4. There is nothing to hold you back, except yourself (Be confident)
5. Know what you want
6. Sometimes you have to say no (Be assertive)
7. Ask questions
8. Your health is your life (Take care of your health!!!)
9. If you never act, you will never know (Take risks sometimes)
10. It doesn’t matter how much you know unless you can explain it (Learn to speak well)

Unfortunately, a lot of these things we only know intellectually. We think we understand them, but we don’t really. It’s only when, one day long after you first heard it, something big happens to you and you go, “Oh wow, my mom was right”. That’s the moment you really understand the importance of that life lesson. But some people will forget it again afterwards. They’ll have a brief flash of understanding, then they’ll just forget again. It’s only when you apply it that you can truly be counted as having learnt the lesson.

So don’t just listen to all that excellent advice your parents have given you. They love you, you know? “Answer the question” and apply these life lessons.

Then, and only then, will you “understand” life.

As a palliative care worker, Bonnie Ware spent a lot of time with people who were in the last stages of their life. Surprisingly, every male patient she had nursed mentioned the same regret.

I wish I hadn’t worked so hard

I wish I hadn’t worked so hard

Every man, and some women, mentioned this same regret. Bonnie mentions that perhaps it was because there were fewer career women in the previous generation. I believe that it was only on their death beds that they realized their moments of happiness didn’t come from work, but from relationships and time spent with those close to them.

Those that dedicate themselves to work? There’s a gnawing hunger for something more, as if life isn’t yet complete. They feel guilty a little bit, for not having spent time with friends and family. And they’ll only realize it when that moment comes, when life feels dark, and they pick up the phone to call their best friend, but they pause… because they just don’t know anymore how close the both of them are. And they’ll think back on these past years. Years spent more with bosses and colleagues rather than friends and family so that now the closest person to them is the guy over in cubicle 28. Not exactly the best person to call with a problem.

Maybe… just maybe… we don’t really need to work so hard.

Luckily there’s a third choice. Not as popular, but infinitely more productive. Where  you spend a short while on ‘research’ then make a decision based on whatever info you have.

Because the best decision you can make, is often the fastest one.

Actions always speak louder than words.

In the end, when you look back on life, you’ll reflect on the choices you made, not on the discussions you had about those choices. You won’t judge yourself and be proud that you took 2 years to come up with a decision.

Those same 2 years could’ve been put into trying out those choices instead of simply thinking about them.

Thinking about it for a long time probably won’t improve your decision.

In economics you call it decreasing utility. It means that as you spend more and go higher up the expensive scale, the returns you get become less and less per dollar. Example, spending 200 bucks on a phone gets you a phone. Add 200 more? The phone will be 3 times better. Add 200 more? It’ll only be twice better. Keep doing this and you’ll realize later that even adding 200 bucks more won’t improve the phone by any noticable amount.

In the same way, spending more time will not improve your decision much. Spending half an hour thinking on a problem will probably give you 90% of the choices you have. You’ll probably even know what you should do by the end of it. Or maybe it’s a decision that needs a few days of thought, where you need to also ask friends and family. That’s fine. Spending 3 weeks on it probably won’t improve the decision you will make. It might even make you more confused as you over-analyze it.

Spending 2 years? It’ll probably just destroy your self-esteem as someone who can’t even make up your mind. And you’ll never make a decision. So it’s a guarantee that you’re not making the ‘best’ decision.  As they say, “you can’t win unless you play the game“.

But most people never actually think about their futures?

You’ll probably misunderstand when I say this, because generally people DO think about their futures. In fact, a lot of people can’t stop thinking about it. But they only really worry about it. They don’t sit and think about what they really want in their futures, they only follow what society expects them to do and think about how to achieve what society wants from them.

Maybe my vision of life on earth is different from others but I can’t imagine having a job that eats up my nights and weekends, or to live in a house that’s so big that I never get to see my own kids, or to work in a place half an hour away (and that’s without traffic thankyouverymuch), or to be in debt (while the bank is charging interest!), or to while away my life listening to the latest and greatest tunes “because they describe my life so very well!”, or to follow the lives of such strangers on tv that you don’t follow the lives of your own friends and family, or to update my Facebook statuses and my Twitter in the hope somebody will notice me and retweet. But ohmygod, don’t you know it, I’ve just described 95% of the population.

And if I ask where they want to be 20 years from now, they don’t have an answer to give. After thinking a little, they’ll tell you that they want to be a manager, or earn 10 thousand a month. They never say that they want to be the best dad in the world.

It’s almost as if they don’t know what they will want in the future.

Do YOU know what you want in your future?

But once you know what you want, you’ll often have to make a choice on what to do to get there. And life unfortunately offers many choices. Which choice do you take?

I read once before (I forget who wrote it) that when you have a few business ideas in mind, you should always start with the one that fails the fastest. Time is money. Time is the resource that is most precious to you. So if the chances of them succeeding are all decent, choose the one which will fail the fastest. If it succeeds, all is well. But if it fails, at least it will fail fast and you can quickly move on to the next thing.

Faster! Faster!

You never want to try something that is slow in failing. Imagine trying something out where it will take you 5 years to see the result. What if it fails then? 5 years wasted. And if you had another business where you could see the results in 4 months instead? It would’ve failed and you could’ve moved on to the next thing.

I figure life choices can be made the same way. If you’re trying to figure out a new direction in life and you have the choice between an 18 month management program and a 3 month introductory course to PhotoShop skills, it’s probably better to take the 3 month course. If it’s bad for you, you’ve only lost 3 months instead of 18.

I guess that in the end it just means that if you have to make a mistake, start with the mistakes that aren’t so expensive. And expense is measured in terms of time.

So in the end there are two aspects to making fast decisions:

1. Don’t spend too much time making decisions. Often you’ll know what to do in the first 5 minutes anyway. It’s just about whether you can bring yourself to do it.
2. When torn between 2 decisions (because you’re not psychic and can’t predict what will happen in the future), choose the one that will fail the fastest.

The world around us is flawed. As it should be. If it was perfect it would be God. If it was close to perfect, it would be paradise. But it’s not. It’s just life on earth and life on earth is flawed. But it doesn’t mean we can’t make it better.

Intellectual change is not enough

Intellectual change is a good start, but it’s far from enough. When someone is convinced intellectually, they might change what they DO about it, but it can’t change their first thought. That instinctive response you get whenever you hear a topic. Example: “War” immediately brings to mind “bad”. “Eco-friendly” makes people think “good”.

It’s instinctive. It’s reflexive. It’s destructive.

It’s destructive?

Or it CAN be destructive. Imagine if the society you were in accepted corruption as the norm? Imagine if the instinctive response somebody had when he was caught was “I have enough money to fix this” and not “maybe it wasn’t so smart to rob a bank”.

When the majority of society has the same instinctive response, it becomes the culture. When everyone instinctively feels that women are inferior, or one race is lesser than another, then it sets the tone for every interaction in society.

On the upside, if everyone had the same instinctive response that was GOOD, then we immediately have a society and culture that is good. 3 questions that come with that:

1. Who decides what is good?
2. How do we create that instinct?
3. Do we have the right to change society?

Who decides good?

Human morality is relative. It changes from day to day, from age to age. 2 thousand years ago slaves were normal. It was moral to have slaves. A thousand years ago it was moral for daughters to be buried upon birth. 60 years ago “Blacks” weren’t supposed to be in the same school as “Whites”. Human morality is relative.

Perhaps we need to look to a different source for morality? Say religion?

How do we create that deeper instinctive reaction?

It can’t just happen through intellectual discussions. It needs emotional upbringing. Nurture. In my case, I’d like society to be brought up in a situation where they taught Islam and could freely ask questions (and those questions were encouraged!) and there were people around them that had answers to those questions.

The idea is that who you are changes over time, but a lot of it is based on your childhood. When people grow up in an environment that accepts slavery as the norm, then 99% of them will have the instinctive reaction that slavery is alright.

Do we have the right to manipulate society?

Always. Whether you notice it or not, you always try to change and manipulate people and society. You may call it advice, you may call it a discussion/conversation, and you may even call it a question; but we always try to manipulate things so that they fit our view of how to make the world a better place.

Noble intentions? Yes. You want to make your friend happier, hence the advice. You wonder why they made such a stupid mistake, hence the conversation. And you ask leading questions, trying to make them understand what they’re doing wrong. And all the time, it’s because you think you know better than them.

Which I completely support.

I think everyone is free to influence others to become better people. It’s up to those people whether to accept that influence and judge it as good or bad advice.

So what are the steps of changing the inner response?

We can learn from how the eco movement managed to brainwash the world.

1. Spread information and convince people intellectually.
2. Let the “intellectually convinced” people educate their children and have the children grow in an environment where the new belief is the norm.
3. The children are now “instinctively convinced”.
4. Wait for the kids to grow up. Some will be famous/influential people. They will spread the belief to their supporters (who have also been brought up in this new environment).
5. Movement becomes a new fashion trend.
6. Everybody turns off their light one hour a year and feels good about it (while spending tons of electricity promoting Earth hour).

I’m sure this will happen with Islam too. I’m just not sure whether everyone will be convinced that Islam is good, or that everyone is convinced that it’s bad.

I guess we’ll see.

I’ve been taking up rock climbing recently. It’s only been twice but it’s really fun. Like all physical sports though, those three components are there. And the question that comes up is, which do I need the most first?

Power is the foundation of any physical activity.  Without it, you simply couldn’t do much. Even with great technique, you still need power to pull off those techniques. It’s said that in martial arts, it’s 70% power and 30% technique.

But of course, without proper technique, a lot of that power would be wasted. Technique provides efficiency that minimises the power used. It doesn’t remove the need completely, it just minimizes it.  Technique is about the right way to climb.

But what about strategy? If technique is the right way to climb, strategy is about the right place to climb. Imagine climbing the hard way when there’s an easier route just beside you?  Strategy is about choosing what to do, which technique to use and where to use it.

So which training method should I adopt? Luckily, my short exposure to magic has given me the proper quote for this. “Practice doesn’t make perfect, proper practice makes perfect.”

And I’m a huge believer in that.

So I’m gonna go through the top down route. Strategy first. I’ll practice my strategy by visualizing my climb completely before making it. Technique second. I’ll practice my technique by trying the “only features for hands” training drill. Power third. Only after I’ve done these will I practice my upper body power more by doing static hangs.

Would this work?

After looking around a little more, it seems that forearm pump is the biggest problem for beginners (besides technique). So I’ll also incorporate some endurance to ward that off.

There, that sounds like the start of a reasonable training plan!

But recently, I’ve been unable to focus properly. I even had a whole hour when I just sat and stared at trees. Not because I was enjoying the scenery (which I do once in a while), but simply because for the life of me I couldn’t decide what to do next!

I’m one of those people who firmly believe that you should plan out your life, especially the big things. The little things sometimes aren’t worth bothering about. If things don’t flow according to plan, then it’s not your fault, but you still need to plan anyway.

So when I feel unfocused like that, it feels to me like I’m floating with nothing to hold on to. I don’t like it. I don’t like not knowing what to do next and not feeling sure of my life. It’s a bit alien to me.

It’s not like I’ve always planned every second of my life. Most of the time I don’t know what the best thing to do is. But I promised myself a long time ago that I’d try to live a life without regrets. So I thought a long long time before deciding on a few principles that I would always hold firm to. As long as I stuck to those, I could never regret whatever I did.

Yes, quite a few of those principles are based on religion. Quite a few more are based on family bonds. And the rest are pretty much based on common sense. And so far I haven’t yet regretted any decision I made using them. The very few that I do regret are all the times I forgot my principles.

But right now I’m in a quandary (always wanted to use that word!). Because sticking to my principles still leaves me more than one option.

So should it be another of those times when I just randomly pick? I’m pretty sure I won’t regret it, but I’m pretty sure that there’s a best choice here.

It needs more research, more questions. But I don’t know who to ask. Why can’t life be like a game, where you can google strategy guides?

“Why not make your house smaller instead of bigger?”

I’ve always been a minimalist. I prefer less stuff instead of more and I prefer to get items that can serve multiple uses. So the thought of a house that was just the right size for me (and no bigger than that) sounded very appealing.

I googled “smaller homes”

I googled “smaller homes” and… someone already beat me to it. A lot of someones actually. It turns out there are a whole group of people who try to use up as little space as possible in this world. Almost as if they’re planning to live in space and all they’ve got is a tiny box the size of a bathtub to live in. They cram a kitchen, living room and dining room into a 100 foot square area (link here).

That’s just a little bit bigger than my bedroom.

That’s a little too much for me.

Advantages

It turns out there are some distinct advantages to living small. Which is why these guys try so hard.

1. The cost goes way waaayyy down. All those loans you take to buy a home? Cut them in half.

2. Easier to clean. With less things to clear up, it takes a lot less time too.

But they’re trying too hard!! Some of these houses look too cramped to me. They can’t be comfortable.

Disadvantages

And it’s true, there are some disadvantages to living small as well.

1. You don’t have a cupboard to throw junk into. This means you have to think very hard before buying anything. It just might not fit…

2. In a small space, even a tiny mess can take up your whole house.

3. Your mother-in-law won’t have space to stay over anymore (Or maybe this is an advantage?).

Whitespace

Then it hit me! That’s why it didn’t look comfortable to me. There was no whitespace! Some people call it negative space but the meaning is the same. In minimalist philosophy, you take away the clutter and add plenty of whitespace. This will focus the mind and the eye on the few things which ARE there (which are supposed to be beautiful).

Cramped spaces DONT have whitespace. It turns out it’s not minimalist at all (at least not design wise. Maybe space wise).

Living small doesn’t have to mean living in a small space

So now I’m thinking of a compromise. Using the ideas and lifehacks I’ve found to help minimize my clutter while keeping my space large. Make corridors smaller and rooms huge! Cut away the useless rooms and make the remaining rooms even huger! Have closets to hide away the work office in and keep the room empty to make it LOOK even more huge!

Yes. Yes, I see it now. Living small doesn’t have to mean living in a small space. It just means removing everything that’s useless in your life. I could live with that. I could definitely live with that.