16 Reasons Why Minimalism Might Ruin You

In a world that's becoming more educated about climate damage, encouraging people to consume can seem counterproductive.

When a kind of unconscious money fear is holding out too long to consume essentials like underwear, food, a winter jacket, etc.

This form of unconscious money fears often result in a martyr complex, where self deprivation is linked to ideas of moral correctness, trapping people in victim mentality that view current suffering as atonement for past mistakes. 

The focus shouldn't only be on reducing consumption, it's also about buying preloved when you do need to consume. 

You won't hear much of it inside minimalist groups, who usually see having as little things as possible as minimalist success.

If to reach that clean streamlined aesthetic, much of the purchasing is first hand items or done through a cycle of quick mindless trashing, it's a step above hoarded homes for sure, but frankly, what isn't? 

When minimalism is done without considering how chronic decluttering result in poorer mental health, passing the buck to outside of their homes. End up becoming more work for overworked and underpaid city garbage disposal employees, it still ends up letting more things go into landfills. 

It doesn't solve the problem at the root, which only addressing money fears will do. 

Enforced rigid self deprivation can come from many valid reasons, a popular one is a parent who refuses to replace essentials, constantly complaining about how money doesn't grow on trees, stressing out over each minor purchase. 

Witnessing this hand wringing anxiety around money then becomes a false belief that money is the root of all evil, kids can frequently self sabotage, feeling trapped between wanting to be financially self reliant and feeling overwhelmed with organising money as well as objects within a home. 

This parent could be paranoid, while having more than enough money to get it, inflating imaginary threats to doomsday levels, always preparing for the worst case scenario, unable to live without policing people within the same space. 

In cases of abuse, it can be encountering distressing mood swings, the parent replaying one money event for months, even years.

Chronic worrying results in irrationally insisting faded ragged items are still useable, broken items can't be discarded, waiting for one fine day that they will be put to good use. 

That day never comes, it ends up as a hoard. 

It's common that unwell parents will nag non-stop, making the child feel like asking for essentials such as deodorant, menstrual pads, school stationary or face wash is imposing and therefore "wrong". 

Hoarder parents make it so difficult for their kids to ask for anything essential, so much so that they start to adapt to survive. They learn how to live with the bare minimum, the way kids of hoarders live due to self neglect, it can make any minimalist proud!

It however can hide underlying resolved trauma, that erodes the quality of life. They often suffer low esteem, high self doubt, difficulty with decision making and see thriving as a far fetched dream. 

The disbelief is so entrenched in them, combined with their trust issues, they even suspect thrivers are lying, becoming isolated guarded individuals, who suffer loneliness from superficial relationships without genuine connection. 

Minimalism can be good for the pocket, good for the environment if used mindfully but not so good when children of hoarders want to furnish a new home, change out a wardrobe for life stages such as the start of a career.

It gives another restriction for kids who're already psychologically stifled enough by growing up inside a hoarded house. 

When someone has lived with so little, grew up with this idea that their minimum needs will crash family finances at any moment, they start to take on distorted ideas that they're capable of also crashing and burning their own finances.

Mundane activities such as buying groceries is now punishable by negative self talk, they struggle to function on a daily basis. 

There's also a portion of people who focus on the aesthetics and don't see beyond the surface to understand the psychological effects on certain groups. Whether it's cluttercore or minimalism, as aesthetics go, as long as it's comforting, that's all that really matters. 

Regressed psychological states make children of hoarders unable to navigate the nuances of relationships, ask the right questions to get a sense of who a person really is, making them vulnerable to exploitation. 

It can also be other forms of material neglect at home, for example, using leftover hoarded adult curtains to "not waste", sheets or blankets that're too hot or too cold for the season. 

Being extremely frugal to the point of settling for broken sofas with springs showing, using posture breaking sunken cushions on chairs so old, that they swallow people up, is a kind of self harm. 

Hoarders often want things to last forever, have an over the top sentimentality to objects that expire, refusing to discard old sets even as they buy replacements. They end up keeping duplicates of just about everything, stressing themselves out with an unimaginable volume of things that other people don't possess. 

It's common that hoarders will swing between extremes of feast and famine thinking, symbolic of a victim mentality and a survivor mentality. They spiral between hoarding and organised, broken cognitive processing and poor working memory are two common symptoms of hoarders. 

These are also the same symptoms that haunt any stressed out overworked employee as well. 

There's an amount of physical discomfort that comes with all these kids tolerate, which becomes a psychological crutch, sometimes resulting in body autonomy issues, where they fear standing up for themselves will cause them increased discomfort and not move them one step closer to solving the problem anyway. 

Their interactions with stubborn hoarder parents make them feel deflated about helping themselves, whatever they advocate for the house is invalidated and shot down. 

When a child grow up having to keep small, physically due to space constrains and emotionally due to parent's need for unquestioned obedience, moving from cluttered hoarded environments to sudden empty wide spaces can result in panic attacks, even spiral into suicide ideation. 

Sudden removal of unhealthy coping mechanisms is plugging one hole and digging a new one, causing years of frustrated cyclical trying to get it right. Ending up with no true permanent improvement in mental health, quality of life or genuine productivity. 

It's common that children of hoarders never felt a sense of ownership over a space, age appropriate memory goalposts that help us develop self identities are absent within a hoarded home. 

As their hoarder parents age and their health worsen, they find themselves stuck with the dilemma of being elder caregivers to people who didn't care for them when they were kids. They now struggle with the duty of caring for them in a way that they were never cared for. 

Without these aesthetic visible markers of growing up, kids inside hoarder homes often lose a sense of time, as they straddle the real world and this alternate indoors one. It's common they start to isolated as social stigma reinforces how "dirty" they feel and how ashamed they're for adult consequences that shouldn't have been theirs to shoulder as children. 

Since things were never customised to their age, self care is as elusive as financial freedom. They can dress more mature than their age because they're forced to be adults to their parents, unable to relate to their peers. When it comes to shopping, they can hunt for special objects that help them stand out, over compensate for never feeling special enough as a child. 

Hoarders can shove odd size clutter into a child's room, their kids are so used to leftovers from them, they're taught to make do with whatever's given, even if it obstructs walkways within a room. 

They will bend over backwards to accommodate high levels of inconvenience, burying their true wants and needs, to normalise a parent in self denial. This conditioned habit is then brought into adulthood, where they sideline themselves aside to support other people's careers instead of prioritising their own financial freedom. 

It's common that hoarders will hoard up bedrooms and make kids sleep on couches, they displace people to make room for their things. This materialistic prioritisation can overflow into renting outside storage rooms to continue hoarding. 

When a child grew up pressured to center things, instead of centering themselves, they struggle with debilitating shame when they self care. Subconsciously, they have to fight the domineering critical voice of the parent that dictates their every decluttering move, long after they pass on. 

Told to have gratitude for what's uncomfortable, making them miss out on many childhood experiences that others take for granted. Leaving a huge gap between adulthood and childhood, which becomes an emotional inner void, that compulsive shopping can be sought to fill. 

A neglected child can overcorrect, shower their own children with high volumes of gifts, to make sure they never ever feel unloved. When equating gifts with affection becomes the norm, kids struggle to find a way to foster discipline without being rewarded for every step. 

It can also swing the other way, depriving themselves and their kids even if they can afford it, stressed out about potentially turning out like their parents. 

Their minimalistic houses can be clean but sterile, like a show flat, lacking the lived in warmth that others have. Any hint of clutter is eliminated with a vengeance, they wage war on things, reducing an emotionally fulfilling home into a stone cold hospital. 

They can also lack warmth as people, filled with chronic anger about what happened to them, putting up a tall emotional wall to avoid being hurt ever again. 

There's a fine line between frugal and cheap, cheap is when things need replacement and it isn't done.

Not throwing away broken items, not replacing clothes that no longer fit or wearing shoes with holes is both cheap and self neglecting.

Buying preloved that fits a budget, wanting to get a good deal at a bargain price isn't being cheap, it's being a savvy bargain hunter. 

Frugal is buying daily necessities at a good bargain, still making a good impression, whether it comes to a home or an outfit.

Whether we like it or not, people judge, first impressions matter, looking like something the cat dragged in is detrimental for our careers and relationships. 

When someone forces self deprivation, they try to deny themselves what they need, as a test to reinforce a false sense of control over life's uncertainties. They see it as being logical when they're being uptight, their bodies are filled with the tension of anxiety, unable to relax inside clean organised homes. 

They often think of themselves as good when they self neglect, bad when they spend. Shopping then becomes a time waster of spending hours adding to cart then abandoning it, impulse buying then returning all of it. Keeping busy with hours of window shopping for fun, all with no concrete goal in mind. 

Self deprivation can be collecting free unfulfilling physical objects that lose its shine soon after purchase, it can also be refusing to celebrate occasions such as birthdays or anniversaries. 

Activities that take minimal effort can be overwhelmingly daunting, carrying their trauma forward to a new space, zapping them of the joy that enjoying a new home should come with. 

When they get it together, they start to fear they will lose all they worked for, if they ever make a tiny mistake.

This crash and burn doomsday idea carries forward through inherited false beliefs from their parents, into each aspect of their lives. 

Children who lived in emotionally neglected homes, can project the emptiness inside them onto the outside, finding comfort in sparsely furnished spaces that serve no reminders of their past. They can also project inner emotional turmoil onto their surroundings, needing clutter to feel in sync with the familiarity of a chaotic childhood environment. 

Different people react differently to trauma, they do share similar experiences that make them able to seek solace from each other. 

These homes can go through endless rounds of binge purge cycles, in an attempt for people to find who they really are, under a cycle of over buying, hoarding, over spending, over working and constant unhappiness. 

Since objects can be taken for free from free cycle groups, bought at low prices at large corporatised discount stores, hoarding doesn't always come with debt.

The small price tag can tempt bargain hunters to devalue the labour that went into making goods, discarding them casually, ending up in environmental damage. 

When consumers jack up expectations to unsustainable rock bottom prices or expect things for free, labour is devalued along with the unsustainably low price tag that comes from slave wages. 

Many people who give things away for free are also pressured to meet takers at their convenience, asked to accommodate entitled requests for other things they want to sell and not give.

Pressured to throw in delivery services for already discounted products in good condition, they're asked to make up for how life has shorted changed people who grew up poor. 

When even giving away comes with stress, it's not a surprise that people find it easier to chuck it into bins, to not bother recycling at all. 

It sets a precedence that people are entitled to free labour by default, that they don't have to reciprocate in any way shape or form. That they deserve handouts and not hand ups.

Those who genuinely need hand ups after they did all the right things, suffer under forces of systemic discrimination, are now generalised into intentional personal failures, who should bootstrap their way to wealth. 

Psychological research shows that people don't value free things, when they pay, they will think twice before getting them. Free giveaways often not only devalue the price of goods, it devalues the labour that made it, therefore keeping wages depressed to the point of unliveable. 

It also ends up with the Zero Price Effect, that's when people forgo the things they really want, for the cheaper or free option. When there's no free things, they become more thoughtful, most are willing to shell out for luxury versions when no free versions are found.

It's not a matter of they can't afford to pay, it's a matter of the reluctance to pay, what's often socially perceived as cheapskate mentality. 

So, charging reduces environmental waste, it reduces overconsumption and is good for creating employment opportunities, encourage small business entrepreneurship. 

I also struggled with this dilemma in the past, I still sometimes help my wealthy friends give away their personal decluttered products to others in need, most of them are brand new things still in their packaging. 

These are products that don't fit into this online store that I want to curate, I don't want to carry a million categories. I however have encountered too many unreasonable requests in the past to bother with taking individual photos for free cycling. 

Consuming up my time only to end up with no shows, verbal abuse or encountering people who're too cheap to pay even if they can, is a form of waste as well. 

Yes, time can be consumed too, this is not something people talk about when it comes to consumption. My time has value, as much as products have value,  experts help people save time. Consumption isn't only about material goods, it's wasting time, whether mine or theirs. 

I now put them all on a community table with a note, ask people to take them, I find this method doable. Large corporatised chain stores are known to trash a large volume of things anyway, because they have such a large amount of returns that cannot be resold. 

Unrealistic consumer expectations can also result in buyer's remorse, wasting time to return items that're as advertised but fail to the bar of absolute perfection for a small price. This feeds shopping addiction, the need to chase an impossible fantasy of the perfect item, putting addicts in debt.

This impacts small solo retailers the most, they can be single profile resellers or single brick and mortar shop owners, who don't get charity grants through the government or public donations to subside their battles to go against climate change.

Completely self funded like us, they face mass manufacturing retail giants that can churn out fast fashion at a rate that the planet can't sustain, flooding the market to force closure, gatekeeping wealth and authority within mostly an old boy's club. 

Resellers die off due to the competition of free donations to charities, who can afford lower prices, due to state subsidies from taxpayer dollars and also direct financial donations. While cannibalising small start up entrepreneurs, making it hard for people at the bottom to gain financial stability. 

If you want to resolve your subconscious money fears, get a copy of You Work Too Hard To Be Broke, I helped many hoarders, shopping addicts and people who struggle with money confidence to find liberation from their financial anxieties. 

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I have a degree in Fashion Merchandising, another in Mass Communications, worked for global fortune 100 companies.

I'm CEO of Home Magic Creator, with 5 years of holistic healing experience, 26 years in volunteer activism.

I taught myself garment construction from scratch and love animals.