This is a quiet and discriminating Netflix documentary that charts some of the lives of two men who decided to give up – in the manner of the hero of ‘Fight Club’ – the trappings of success (high salaries, possessions) and to live their lives more simply. It’s a welcome antidote to the unceasing appeals to our cupidity screened every second on commercial TV, the endless ads for dishwashing liquid, jewellery, and car insurance that offer lures to a basic human need as, the makers of this film tell us, we are hard wired to want more.
The day before this show appeared on my TV downstairs in the living room (the TV upstairs in my bedroom isn’t digital) I watched a YouTube video a friend selected that showed electronic waste recycling in Ghana. A hellish scenario and one that ‘Minimalism’ might help us to better understand. Thinking about the contrast between the aspirational tone of this documentary compared to the journalistic grit of the YouTube video I am struck by the cognitive dissonance and I wonder how much change Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus can actually bring about with their measured approach to a problem that is so obvious once you look into it for even a day or so: that we produce and throw away more “stuff” than the environment can cope with.
Millburn and Nicodemus are prone to ending their conversations with a hug, and this is how the show leaves you feeling: as though you’ve been embraced by an emotion that only success can make. But this is confusing because we normally equate success in a certain way and these men are asking us to understand it differently. The two bags that Millburn packed for their nine-month trip around the US in an early-model Toyota sedan emblematise a desire but the growing sense that the men are gradually cutting through the noise in the public sphere offers its own kind of plenitude. Of course, once that peak is reached another issue comes along to divert the population, to engross its viewers, and to take precedence on the TV screens dotted around the United States like gems.
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