(Active Ownership VS. Minimalism) X  Why I Buy Amazing Kit + Support Artisan & Artist Brands

 

“Active ownership, which differs from minimalism, is about investing your limited attention, money, space, and time to what you value so that those things will thrive. Being vested in something makes you care more about it. You can’t do or have everything, so when you choose to take active ownership, it becomes a commitment to it and decisions and compromise have to be made about what commands your limited attention. As a result of the explicit choice you make in how you spend your attention, you reduce the things around you to what’s most valuable. What’s not valuable gets cut from your attention budget. You end up with less around you and are more focused on the basic forms of things, like with minimalism.”

The goal for me in desiring and seeking out great gear is about making commitments to myself, to continue a trend in supporting the things I do with tools that I can trust and removing things from my life that can’t live up to those standards. Whether it’s strictly about gear or not, you’ll find yourself happier in the micro and macro of your daily life by committing to understanding the pieces of your day-to-day, deciding what to and how much to care about certain things, and gain a greater grasp how the process is cyclical an applicable to your life in a greater context.

Minimalism is attractive. Clean lines, clean desks, and universal simplicity can be calming and the systematic removal of all but complete necessities can reduce distraction. A core goal of minimalism is that by removing everything ‘extra’, you may become freed by the constraints, dogmas, and physical implications they impose. Minimalism works to display the essence of something by removing anything but the purest basic form. Dependence is only placed on the base form of a concept, desire, or product. The output of this is less clutter in your apartment and your brain which demands less attention, less maintenance, and creates less of a cognitive deficit.

Cognitive deficit is caused by an overwhelming amount of stressors, open loops, and plain stuffon your mind and will reduce clarity of thought and impact mental capacity. The Wikipedia explanation gives examples of learning disabilities and drug-induced states as situations where a cognitive deficit exists but I think that everything in our lives—when not controlled—can combine to create a deficit. A cognitive deficit is caused when the cost of attention is greater than the returned value of something. Simplified, it’s when a thing costs you more in brain power by having it around than having it improves your life. Relevant to minimalism, reducing the amount of belongings to your name can diminish the amount of time you spending thinking about, caring for, and paying attention to them. That pile of stuff you don’t use under your bed is an open loop and commands more cognitive power than you realize. Minimalists recognize this and got rid of that pile.

Active ownership, which differs from minimalism, is about investing your limited attention, money, space, and time to what you value so that those things will thrive. Being vested in something makes you care more about it. You can’t do or have everything, so when you choose to take active ownership, it becomes a commitment to it and decisions and compromise have to be made about what commands your limited attention. As a result of the explicit choice you make in how you spend your attention, you reduce the things around you to what’s most valuable. What’s not valuable gets cut from your attention budget. You end up with less around you and are more focused on the basic forms of things, like with minimalism.

Active ownership and minimalism share values but are rooted in different theories. In minimalism, the focus is on removal, where having less leads to gaining more. Active ownership is about having the things that matter most to you and leaving behind everything that doesn’t. It’s not about having less because less stuff will simplify your path to enlightenment, but about taking an active role in what is around you, what you take in, what you believe and say, what you do and who you are. Active ownership assumes active responsibility where minimalism is dependent on the absence of everything extra—even what’s out of your control—to be effective. Having less of something doesn’t automatically mean that you’ll appreciate and value what remains but when you are making active decisions about where you invest your limited attention, you choose what to love rather than being forced to love only what you have left.

This process of actively owning, continuously editing what you do, and explicitly choosing what’s around you results in a deeper passion for those things and is worth investing in.

http://hackmake.org/2013/07/the-life-cycle-of-gear-and-its-impact-on-our-lives

 

// Full-disclosure: I actively own. Practicing before I could ever afford the pieces of gear or apparel or technology that moved me. 

It’s a bittersweet bar of chocolate with bits of pride, embarrassment, excitement, geekiness, fandom and outright obsession (for aren’t those the ingredients of love?).  

While I admire the focus and perceived purity of minimalist active ownership, the reality of my worldview leads me down, over, around and through multiple parallel and Gordian pretzel paths. There are so many fascinations that it wasn’t…right… to choose just one. No more than I could ever ignore all other colours and eat only brown food.

And so I magpie, with purpose, and passion. Trying to be kind and not pass [too much] self-judgement or teeter into self-flagellation. Back in the day, why choose between trail-running, mountain biking, street hockey, skateboarding, climbing mountain passes on a road bike, snowboarding on paid trails or car-shuttling up Loveland Pass to cut lines between trees? House VS Techno VS Jungle VS Drum and Bass VS Future Bass VS Dubstep VS Burial VS Marco Carola VS Rich VS Marky VS Actress VS Mala VS Sneak VS…? ACRONYM or Margiela or ma+ or Julius or CdG or Veilance or CCP or Rick or Visvim or Sruli or Undercover or Boris? 993 or 4.6 SE? Leica or… well, it’s always been Leica, even when what was actually in hand was a used and beat up Nikon (but it started w/ their passable but buyable point-n-shoot until an M6 was within reach, and never looked back once digital became a reality with the 8.2, and now suffering the waiting list for the 240).  

I don’t wish this condition on anyone. Nor would advise its pursuit. Luck, and rationalization, are comfortingly beside me, that these, and a multiplicity of other interests, passions and obsessions, serve me well in a time when a creative director or someone paying attention to experience and product design (whatever that title might morph to…) must now be good at so many evolving design disciplines. One week, it’s a massive omnichannel campaign, blink, shift roles, and the next is an exploration of the future of mobile phones (give us a complete, coherent idea tomorrow, please). Even my hyperactive imagination fails to level-up to a suspension of disbelief that I’ll ever be THE best at a single one, but I’m at peace with being pretty good, to potentially quite good, at many. 

Freed from a static hula-hoop orbit, a wobbly Atomic Ant elliptical feels and functions better: allowing for many, many more passes and POV’s around ideas and problems.