Mental minimalism

post by KatjaGrace · 2015-11-13T22:43:17.000Z · LW · GW · 0 comments

Hypothesis: 

It is nice to work in other people’s spaces relative to mine, because I am not supposed to interact with their stuff. Having fewer affordances reduces mental noise, in the same way that minimalism does. You can have something like the mental effects of minimalism even in a pigsty, just by firmly refusing to believe that pigs can be interacted with. Objects become scenery.

This suggests that instead of picking up my things, I could just make a solemn promise that I will not pick up my things. I am yet to run the experiments.

If this hypothesis is true, it might have implications beyond optimal tidying schedules. For many things in the world, I wish I felt more affordances. I wish they didn’t feel like wallpaper. Also, the world seems extremely noisy and cluttered. Maybe these things are related. Maybe if you can only cope with so much noise and clutter, then you have to demote affordances, to make the world livable. In that case, maybe there are other ways to increase clutter-tolerance, that would allow more affordances.

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