Goodbye, Things: The New Japanese Minimalism

the joy of victory isn’t nearly as strong as the despair you experience in defeat, and those happy feelings after winning are fleeting compared with how long you suffer from a crushing defeat.

The problem starts to occur when we buy things just to convey our qualities to others, and our collections start to grow too big.

My feeling is that minimalists are people who know what’s truly necessary for them versus what they may want for the sake of appearance, and they’re not afraid to cut down on everything in the second category.

an attempt to reduce the things that aren’t essential so we can appreciate the things that really are precious to us.

It’s also partly why I wrote this book. Though it isn’t my sole motivation, I want to prove to myself that there’s some kind of value to my existence.

You’re simply inexperienced—that’s all there is to it. You aren’t familiar with the habit of discarding your possessions and you’ve gotten used to keeping them.