Minimalism is killing us: Re-awaken your senses, bring back joy | Ingrid Fetell Lee

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Ingrid Fettell Lee:
I think one of the reasons we don’t feel joy as much as we might like is because we have a culture in which joy is judged often as frivolous, as childish, as superficial. And it’s interesting to think about where this actually comes from. It has pretty deep roots in our culture. So if you look in 1810 Goethe wrote in his Theory of Color that “savage nations”, uneducated people, and children typically prefer bright colors whereas “people of refinement” avoid color in their dress and try to banish color from the objects about them. And what happens in this equation is that we’re seeing the equivalency between “savage nations”, so uncivilized people, primitiveness, a lack of sophistication or education and children. And those are being equated to the sort of aesthetics, the tangible manifestations of joy in our culture. And when you look at the roots of this a lot of it stems from colonialism. So you had a bunch of Europeans getting on boats going around the world trying to conquer other people’s and when they found these sort of “uninhibited” displays of emotion, when they found festivals and dancing and drumming and colorful dwellings and outfits they felt a need to distance themselves from those behaviors.
And so what happened was European culture became more and more emotionally repressed as a result. So we had to get rid of the color in our surroundings because that was “uncivilized”. We had to get rid of our sort of exuberant and playful displays. And you actually see this when in certain colonies when settlers would arrive they would bring their pretty raucous festivals—I mean Carnival originated in Europe and it was a pretty raucous festival there. They would bring it to these colonies like In Trinidad and Tobago, for example. And then once they got there they realized the had to stop visibly celebrating and they started having formal balls instead of, you know, wild celebrations, because that made the seem “too close” to the natives. And so joy became repressed within our culture, and in its place we got this sense of seriousness that this is what is valued. And that became reflected in our aesthetic culture as well.
Over the past few years the dominant aesthetic has been an aesthetic of minimalism. And we’ve been encouraged to sort of simplify and strip back our possessions in our homes and sort of get to very simple gray, beige interiors.
And in a way this has been described as sort of reaction to all of the overstimulation that’s going on in our devices, that it sort of helps us relax. But, in fact, what we find is that minimalist interiors actually can be very stressful. That when you look at our sort of natural love of abundance and lushness and textures and sensation, when you actually deprive us of sensations we go a little bit crazy. And a study I love that sort of explores this had a bunch of people sitting in a room, and all they had to entertain themselves was a machine that gave electric shocks. And after only a few minutes of sitting alone in a bare, unadorned room they started giving themselves quite painful electric shocks rather than sit without any stimulation. So the brain seeks and craves stimulation. And when it doesn’t have that it will sort of seek it out even in ways that maybe aren’t so adaptive.