Daily Dose of English 63
Minimalism
Daily Dose of English 63
Intermediate
Hey everyone, my name is Ben and you're listening to a Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're going to be talking about minimalism. Minimalism. A very fun word to say. Minimalism. Minimalism. But what is minimalism? Let's start with the first, breaking down the word a little bit. There's two parts to it, minimal and ism. And then minimal could be further broken down to mini as like the prefix and then mul is the kind of suffix. However, we'll talk about minimal and then, or we'll talk about ism and then we'll get to the minimal part. Ism is a common ending for words that turns something into a noun, like a thing, usually more of an idea or a concept or like something that's not in the real world. Right, so you wouldn't like take a physical object and make it a thing by putting ism, right? So if you took like a word like red as an adjective, right? You wouldn't say redism to mean like something that is red. It means like an idea or an ideology is also pretty common. An ideology, that first part comes from idea, and it's like a way of thinking essentially. And so an ideology is a way of thinking, and that's generally what an ism tends to be. There's lots of different isms that you might come across. They're like Buddhism, Taoism, where you can hear in the end of it sounds like ism. And they give their, and they talk about an ideology, right? It's sort of that ism says it's a talking about an idea or a way of thinking or something like that. It's not strict, right? You can have different isms, but that's generally what it means. And so this, the minimal part, minimal is something that is as little as possible. And so there's as little happening as can be possibly done for something to be minimal, right? So the minimal amount of effort is the least amount of effort that you can give. And so one of my goals with this podcast is actually to make the extra work as minimal as possible, to minimalize the extra work I have to put in. I think I've talked about this before, but I don't do any editing. I don't add the video. All of this stuff is basically automatic. because I want to be able to do this quickly and easily in my day while still giving you good content because like editing something or tweaking the audio levels isn't necessarily making the content better and so I can just do it automatically and make that process easier and make the extra work minimal. The word minimal, like I said, kind of has that part at the beginning that tells you that it means something that's small, mini. I'm sure you've heard of something that's a mini-sized or mini, just in general, as a small thing. And so we can look at this word together as meaning an ideology of less, of keeping things as small as possible or as little as possible. Small is not necessarily size, but also just how things look is a general thing. And so minimalism is a way of thinking or a movement, a way of living, actually, that was pretty popular, I think in the 2010s, so about a decade ago. And it's still around, it's still known, but it's not as popular as it was. And the idea of minimalism is to reduce things in your life to make your life easier and more straightforward. So for example, a minimalist wardrobe, so your clothes, a minimalist wardrobe is to have all of the same thing in your wardrobe. So for example, a pretty famous person with a very basic wardrobe is Mark Zuckerberg, the owner of Facebook, also known as Meta. He, I believe, only has one type of t-shirt. He has like 10 of them, 20 of them, and they're really, really nice t-shirts because he's a bajillionaire. I think each t-shirt costs a couple hundred dollars, but he's able to wear those every single day and And that's the minimalist part, is that he's not trying to constantly think about what he's going to wear or how he looks, and just made the choice once to always wear a plain gray t-shirt. I'm sure he puts on nicer clothes for events or other things, so it's not literally every single day of his life, every single hour. But that's the idea behind, for example, a minimalist wardrobe, is that you don't have to make a lot of decisions on something that, for you, isn't that important. Or another example is minimalist design. Minimalist design is where you have as little something on to like visual elements. And so for example, a living room that's minimalist might have one clock on the wall and a TV and a couch, nothing else. Everything else is completely bare, a single color and doesn't add what you might call visual clutter. Visual clutter is where there's just a lot of things to see. Actual just clutter is when there's a lot of stuff around. So your desk might just have a ton of crap on it and that would be considered clutter. Visual clutter is specifically referring to when there's a lot of stuff to look at and it's just busy and it's generally a negative thing. However, it can be a positive thing if it makes you feel good. There's actually an opposite movement to minimalism which is called maximalism. Right, same sort of idea, the idea of having a lot going on. And if you go back to like the 60s or 70s style in the United States, that's pretty maximalist, where there's a lot of bright colors and patterns and things going on and pictures where, and it makes people feel, it can make people feel happy and excited, which is sort of the goal of to evoke emotion. Minimalism does a similar thing, but it's trying to invoke something more like calm or you don't feel like everything's happening at once, you can focus. I use some minimalist ideas in my life. However, not, I wouldn't say that many. I wouldn't say that I am a minimalist. However, I do look towards minimalist things when I'm especially planning out how things are going to look or how I'm going to work with something. So I think the best example actually is my phone, which I think is pretty minimalist in how it looks. It still functions normally, but with my phone, the lock screen, so when I tap the screen to turn it on, is black. There's no image, and there's just text. It says the time, it has the weather, it has the date, and that's it, pretty much. When I open my phone, the home screen, so the screen with all my apps and things, is actually also just plain black with text. At the top, it says the date and time, so whatever the time is and the day of the week and whatever. And then below that, there's just five text. It just says Maps. There's no image, there's nothing, there's no color. If I press the word Maps, it opens the Google Maps app. I've got a couple of other apps that I really commonly use, but if I want to get to any other app, I have to swipe up and I have to type out the name. It's not that hard, but what it does is it makes my phone a lot more streamlined, I think is the word I'm gonna use. Streamlined is when the process of doing something is very clear. You can go to A, B, C, D, and you're done. It's a very clear pathway. For example, on your phone, you probably have a typical structure, and so if you wanted to go to an app, you might have to open your phone, swipe to a different page, enter into a folder, and then click on the app. And that's, to me, kind of clunky. There's a lot of steps to that, and you're really likely to get distracted. I very frequently open my phone or used to open my phone to do something and forget what I meant to do because I got distracted by something else. And so that's where I see this idea of minimalism being really, really helpful, especially in the digital world. Because the digital world, so online, the internet, is so full of stuff, of content, of images, of colors, and it's really distracting because everybody wants your attention. And so I try to minimalize my other distractions by reducing the options in a lot of ways. But I can still do anything that I want to do, but instead I choose to do it instead of accidentally opening an app and then going, oh, this could be interesting. I've made that choice. I also like minimalism in a couple of different areas. When I take notes, I try to make things as simple and clean as possible. A couple other things, but I'm not really gonna go into it right now. But I hope that this video was, video? This is a podcast. I hope this video, oh my God, I said it again. I hope this podcast was interesting and helpful to you. If you want to learn more, Google minimalism and see what comes up and maybe do some reading in English or watching of some other videos and see what you think of the concept and maybe you can implement some of the ideas somewhere into your life. But I hope that you enjoyed this episode and learned a thing or two about the words in English or whatever. And I'll see you again tomorrow for another episode. See you then. Bye.
For email updates, subscribe to my blog via email or RSS feed.