Return to Minimalism: the Second Time Hits Different

06 Dec, 2025

Fifteen years ago I discovered minimalism.

I was an Electrical Engineering student at McGill University, and I was at a crossroads.

During my 1st year I partied too hard. During my 2nd year I took myself and my studies too seriously. Entering my 3rd year though, things began to change:

• I read my first self help book and learned how our thoughts paint the canvas of our reality.
• I read “The 4 Hour Body” and learned that diet was the main building block of a healthy lifestyle.
• I read “What Smart Students Know” and learned to allocate time toward / focus exclusively on what my assessor (ie. the professor) thought was most important.

My lifestyle and perspective reaped the rewards of these learnings and ...

I stopped drinking (for a semester) and gave up my cell phone and mindless screentime. I started a greens supplement, started volunteering, started journaling and reading voraciously, started exploring Montreal, and started spending more time outside.

The positive momentum spiraled when I discovered the Minimalist’s blog and read “Everything That Remains”.

Finally, an amalgamation of the ideas and themes that had worked for me up to this point.

Less is more.

Applied to possessions, commitments and information.

It was refreshing and liberating.

I still remember the charge it gave me.

Clarity. Awareness. Energy. Creativity. Lightness. Freedom.

They were all at my fingertips when I walked the path of a simpler, more intentional life.

The principles of minimalism, applied to my life, worked for me.

At least, they did for a while. Until I lost sight of them.

...

Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves. - Henry David Thoreau

In 2020, I had my first backslide.

COVID. A return from living abroad. Going back to school. Living in other people’s spaces.

Living with clutter monkeys, while good for the wallet, was horrible for the headspace. And with normal, functioning society all but locked down I couldn’t revert to my past ways of going out to escape feeling “locked in”.

I couldn’t escape the feeling of being trapped. I was in it.

It felt like I was getting force fed the standard American way of life. The lifestyle I loathed and tried so hard to shed all those years before.

Consume, consume, consume.

Distract, distract, distract.

Spend, spend, spend.

I could feel myself getting pulled into the vortex of mindless consumption. Inch by inch.

It had been more than a year. My girlfriend (now wife) and I reached our breaking point.

Even though it would have been nice to have saved a bit more while she finished her Doctorate in Physical Therapy, we needed to get out.

We left for a place to hit “reset” and start over.

We escaped to Austin, Texas.

To a new place and our own space.

A place that worked wonders for our relationship, headspace and perspective.

We stayed for 20 months or so, and owning little was easy.

Getting away from the noise made it all the more clearer. ATX (god bless it) was where I truly realized the woman I was with was meant to be my wife.

It was just us, our lives were simple and my wife never looked at our space there (or ATX) as “home”. I loved the energy of ATX and felt blessed for having gotten to experience it but my wife had an inkling that we had to move closer to the coast and closer to family.

Eventually, we boomeranged back up to the Northeast (New Jersey).

We’d left the North with just our cars and the possessions that fit in them and returned to the North just the same (plus a small tow-along trailer).

Since that time, there was a second backslide.

It was slow and insidious.

We got married and recently had our first child. It’s been 2-3 years since we got back to NJ.

And along the way, we accumulated.

Possessions and bad habits.

Many married couples and young families, take on “comfort habits”. As time seems to slip into the ether, we lean heavily on the “easy button”.

Amazon. Doordash. Mindless scrolling or screentime. The list goes on …

My wife and I found ourselves slipping into the same groove we’d sworn off when we’d hypothesized being parents. And now that we were parents and we found ourselves falling into the same traps, it was time to break the damn cycle.

Pappa had to put on his “Dr. No” hat and take it back to the basics:

• Diet (the fire starter): a Paleo / Animal Based hybrid style of eating during the week.
• Movement: light, daily practice and 2-3 trips to the gym per week
• Night routine: screenless nights where we instead prioritize connecting or reading
• Decluttering: room-by-room, closet-by-closet (aside from the baby room)

We’ve moved past that initial strained feeling that’s all-too-common for newborn parents.

My wife’s taken to early motherhood wonderfully, and I’ve gone back to work seamlessly.

We both feel more present and grounded than we did even before the baby.

...

Return to the root of the root of your own soul. - Rumi

The standard American way of life leads to broken people.

We're over-stimulated and soul poor.

The longer we stay on the default path, the higher our rates of obesity, debt, anxiety, and ADHD climb. We're beyond epidemic levels already.

What if that "default" path isn't actually serving you?

The alternative is a stripped down, intentional life. Where your time goes to people and pursuits that matter. Where you vote with your dollar. Supporting small businesses and organizations that add real value to your life and the world as you see it.

Our baby girl was a God-sent reminder to get back to ourselves and what really matters. We're molding the next generation now, and the last thing we want is for her to sleepwalk through life. To deter that, my wife and I have got to be living examples of what we believe.

Fifteen years ago I never would have anticipated how my life unfolded, but one thing's for certain: minimalism works.

If anything, it's more powerful now than when I was single and 20. There's a compounding effect. One that's helped us control what we can control so we can better accept what we cannot.

Like a rocket shedding pieces of itself on its way to space, each piece serves its purpose at the right time. It's on us to figure out what's serving us today. And if something's not, if it's keeping you held back, to drop it.

Join me. Let's move onward and upward together.