weekly Go Flip Yourself

This little encounter between three disparate people, who would never meet otherwise, explains the uniqueness of the Bay Area.

The serendipity is what makes my now hometown so special. In San Francisco, technologies, new ideas, and people collide randomly in the oddest of places, at the oddest of times.

If Japan truly were a minimalist paradise, why would it need Kondos and Sasakis in the first place?

The world still turns to Japan for things; it also turns to Japan to rid itself of them. There’s only one problem: Japan isn’t anywhere near as tidy as outside observers give it credit for.

Subtractive is contemplative; additive is stimulating. But, above all, the Japanese are master ‘editors’, he says, picking and choosing between polar opposites to suit the occasion. This is why Japanese people continue to remove their shoes indoors, even as they choose to live in Western-style houses. It’s why they continue to distinguish between Japanese-style and Western-style foods, hotels, even toilets. To Matsuoka, the subtractive and additive approaches aren’t inherently in opposition; the distinction is simply a matter of context.

‘Today, the idea that you’ll hold on to a lot of things for your whole life is fading,’ said Tsuzuki. ‘Take clothing. It used to be the case that good clothes cost a lot. You’d buy them and take care of them and wear for years. So you’d naturally build up a collection. But now we’re surrounded by low-cost retailers that are just good enough. You wear it for a season and that’s it.’

Going through this upheaval has helped me discover that it’s actually much easier to simplify your life in order to do something you love, than it is to be miserable at a job you don’t like, spending all your earnings on things to cope with that. My new life now is very local and offline, making it simpler and slower.