I read an article published by the BBC about twenty-something’s living with less. The article shared the stories of individuals and couples who have digitized their movies and music and have since made the shift to only purchasing (or repurchasing) media in electronic formats. While I agree that the shift to only consuming digital content is both inevitable and around the corner I can’t help but find issue with the notion that a person who’s sold their toaster but still buys hundreds of dollars of digital content each week can be considered a minimalist.

Sure that bare studio apartment makes it seem as if you’ve stripped your life to the bare essentials but having to carry less around when you go couch surfing does not necessarily mean you are living with less.

With the ability to store hundreds of books, songs and data its more than likely that these digital vagabonds (the BBC’s words not my own) will end up, if they aren’t already, purchasing, storing and subsequently carrying around tons of digital junk. I mean do you really listen to every song in your iTunes library? I learned a lot in college but arguably one of the most important concepts I learned was that the core benefit of a minimalist lifestyle (read: being broke) is that you have less shit to worry about!

Stripping your habits down, removing luxuries and living a pragmatic and ascetic lifestyle is a liberating experience. I’ll save my Tyler Durden Fight Club-esque rant for another post but appearing to live with less while still purchasing tons of content are inherently contradictory.

Having to carry around physical copies of books, music and movies makes their existence difficult to ignore and it also makes over-purchasing them much easier to notice. Much like swiping a card and receiving goods or services purchasing digital goods almost seems as if there really wasn’t a transaction at all. A momentary interaction and then instant gratification. Click it, buy it and forget it.

As we move into the era of a surplus of digital content filtering that content for both value and relevancy will be key unless we want to live in empty apartments with hard drives clogged with half read books, unlistened to music and too busy with work to ever get to the content we actually want.