dotCowboy

On this site, I embrace a 400-word limit (unless it doesn’t make sense). It forces me to be concise, to focus on smaller topics, to choose the important, to be creative.

Yes: constraints force us to be creative.

Often, constraints, limitations, are seen as a negative, but to me they’re a feature. They might restrict freedom and [...]

Today I deleted 1,031 friends from Facebook. It was liberating.

As I talked about before, having a ton of friends on social networks is a major pull on your attention, and results in superficial relationships anyway. I prefer deeper relationships when possible.

Facebook hasn’t worked well for me as a social network in the past. I loved [...]

Now that I’ve learned to look at things with the lens of simplicity, I can see others making mistakes I’ve made in the past.

I want to gently say to them — and to my past self — “Stop making things so complicated!”

I’m not going to criticize how other people do things in this post, but [...]

There’s a famous Zen story that goes:

A monk told Joshu, “I have just entered the monastery. Please teach me.”
Joshu asked, “Have you eaten your rice porridge?
The monk replied, “I have eaten.”
Joshu said, “Then you had better wash your bowl.”
At that moment the monk was enlightened.

I’m not going to try to explain that story, as I [...]

A couple days ago I wrote about alternatives to buying new things, and someone replied on Twitter:

“I want to have the money to buy new things!”

Or something like that (I’m too lazy to go back and find the tweet). This echoes a pretty common sentiment: many people don’t want to be frugal, to conserve, to [...]

This is a test entry.

Pls ignore.

Just testing:

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This post will strike a nerve with some readers, as many minimalists or aspiring minimalists are die-hard carnivores. They love their meat and don’t want to hear anything against it.

Well, hear me out, please. If you could read to the end of the post before disagreeing, blasting me, or dismissing me, I’d be grateful.

In this [...]

We all have desires – it’s part of the human condition.

We want to be loved, to have friends, to experience joy, to have security.

But a desire for things is not as natural as we’re often led to believe. Sure, we all have desires for things: nice cars, nice clothes, nice houses, cool computers and iPhones, [...]

One of the hardest things about simplifying your possessions is figuring out what to do with the mementos you have from loved ones: photos, notes, letters, cards, little gifts, and more.

It’s hard to let go.

Recently on Twitter someone asked: “Both parents gone. Tried to keep small things, photos – even then it’s alot of stuff. [...]

When it comes to minimalism in doing, distractions are the biggest obstacle.

We must first identify what’s most important to us, what we’re passionate about, what we want to spend our time on. And then we must focus on those things first.

But the distractions. They get in the way of this focusing, no?

And so we must [...]