Those who despair of ever attaining the pristine aesthetic of Insta-worthy Scandinavian fever dreams, take heart: Becca Rothfeld thinks clutter and mess are OK. More than that, she actively celebrates them in her new book of essays, “All Things Are Too Small,” bringing a critical eye to, among other cultural trends, minimalism and mindfulness.
Minimalism is often held up as an aspiration, whether or not anyone actually attains the bare-bones look of a contemporary art museum in their own home. But in an essay entitled “More Is More,” Rothfeld goes against the grain, making the case that the pursuit of totalizing simplicity a la Marie Kondo is misguided — a conclusion she came to after reading “something like 20 decluttering manuals,” including Kondo’s infamous “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up.”
“Almost all of the books converge on counseling people to keep what they need, not what they want,” said Rothfeld in a Zoom interview. “The sort of house that the minimalists are envisioning is sufficient to provide shelter and a place to sleep, and not much more.”
In her book, Rothfeld points out that much of the language used by minimalism proselytizers couches disaster in terms of liberation; for instance, Erica Layne, author of “The Minimalist Way,” “writes with a tinge of envy about a woman who survived Hurricane Irma: ‘As she sat precariously in a kayak with her husband and . . . one small plastic bag of their belongings, she felt a sense of peace.’”
Rothfeld doesn’t buy that — or at least, she believes that the peace gained by the obliteration of possessions is devoid of meaning and history.
“I think that you should strive to be a person with entanglements and complements, both physical and emotional,” she said.
Beyond the question of how many pairs of shoes to keep, however, Rothfeld, the nonfiction book critic for The Washington Post (and philosophy PhD candidate at Harvard), sees the minimalism trend as part of a larger, more troubling impulse that seeks to control the chaos of human experience in insidious ways. In the essay “Wherever You Go, You Could Leave,” she voices a number of critiques of the mindfulness movement, among them the idea that mindfulness, with its emphasis on only perceiving rather than critical thinking, leads to “an impoverished mental life.”
Advertisement
One of her more serious allegations is that mindfulness gurus are distracting people from real, systemic social problems by turning them into nonjudgmental lambs. An example culled from one mindfulness manual presents an overworked, stressed-out woman, “Lucy,” whose job “gradually took over [her] life, leaving her with less and less time for herself.”
“We might suspect, then, that the solution is for her to unionize her workplace and agitate for better hours — or at least seek a less oppressive job,” Rothfeld writes. But it turns out that “the solution is meditation, which will train Lucy to ‘step outside of [her] troubles and liberate [herself] from unhappiness . . .’ After all, it is not the ‘netherworld of overwork’ itself but thinking about the netherworld that is so unpleasant,” she concludes, with more than a touch of sarcasm.
Less theoretical but more acutely alarming are Rothfeld’s examples of mental harm that has occasionally been brought about through extremes of meditation. The Brown University researcher Willoughby Britton has conducted studies which found that meditation has the alarming capacity to stanch not only unpleasant feelings but the whole range of human emotions along with them.
Advertisement
The potential ill effects of mindfulness are “becoming more widely acknowledged,” according to Rothfeld, noting that the Financial Times recently launched “Untold,” an investigative podcast about the perils of intense meditation.
Does Rothfeld, as a student of the history of philosophy, have any theories as to why we live in an age of peak minimalist yearnings? She references the Stoics as folks who also believed in reducing attachments to stuff, the better to “get in contact with truth.” As for our own age, she posits that the way tech has reshaped some ideas of work may have something to do with the desire for less.
In a new, digital- and remote-enabled economy, “people are supposed to be able to go wherever they need to go for work, they’re not supposed to be particularly rooted and in a given place,” she said, citing the example of workers called Anywhereists, who “pride themselves on being able to pack up and move anywhere with their laptop to do their corporate job from anywhere in the world.”
“Maybe as lots of forms of labor have become more digitized, there’s less reason for members of the workforce to be in a particular place,” she said. “And it’s actually become more in the interest of capital for people to be constantly mobile. That is one possible explanation for some of these tendencies.”
Advertisement
Becca Rothfeld will be in conversation with James Wood at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, April 3, at Harvard Book Store.
Francie Lin edits the Books section of the Globe.