SHENMO MOTTO: Virtue & Wisdom

When it comes to minimalism, people are more likely to interpret it from design ideas or art schools and maybe most people haven’t heard of the concept of “minimalist lifestyle”; however, in fact, minimalist lifestyle has already begun to influence people’s life.

The so-called “minimalist lifestyle” is not derived from material deprivation, and it is a high degree of expansion of human material and information; it is a new way of life appealed by people due to overload operation in modern industrial society; it is a kind of re-understanding on ourselves and redefinition of freedom. In modern society, to have a lot of leisure time or even have nothing to do is not only a kind of waste, to some extent it is not the thing that the young long for—excessive leisure often brings vacuity and emptiness.

To live a minimalist life, you should not envy the things that others have, which may lead to unpeaceful mind and body, thus ignoring the real important things to your own. First of all, you should know yourself and find out the most important things to you, and then pursue intently with your limited time and energy, so as to obtain the greatest happiness and spiritual freedom. The source of minimalism lies in the spirit burden reduction, so “minimalist desire” is especially important for career, life, and feeling.

The minimalist spirit makes our spiritual world quieter; for the young, it is to spend more time and energy sufficiently learning and improving, rather than coveting the things not belonging to your own; namely, do not blindly waste your time and energy.

Currently, we are in the era of rapid information updating, we see a variety of useful or useless material things. In such an environment, it is easy and mediocre to live a complex life; to make the life more delicate and colorful with limited energy and material is the first choice of more and more people. It is irrelevant to money; it is for self-practice.

To “simplify the desire” is to “simplify life”, thus achieving material minimalism. material minimalism is to simplify the items at home (throw away, give away, sell, or donate) under the premise of meeting your own requirements, such as the magazines and books you’ve read, spare old clothes, a variety of gifts or decorations received previously. To know clearly your desires and needs, do not buy unwanted items or too many decorations in addition to the necessary home appliances, and to keep life clean as new will make you very comfortable. Such a lifestyle is also highly consistent with the concept of environmental protection and low carbon.

A master once put forward the concept of “the power of sweep” to describe a person’s ability to simplify his/her life: the garbage that a person sweep out of his/her room and then throw away can reflect his/her comprehensive ability in work and life to a large extent. In fact, this is also a principle of minimalism.

Actually, the life philosophy of minimalist is advocating simple life, returning to the essenceof life.
People who advocate a simpler way of working will give a call for greeting instead of long-winded chat on WeChat; they can impress people with a very short statement in the meeting; they can clearly express the information within two lines in email; they choose the efficient and simple printing books instead of the bits and pieces of electronic information everywhere. Being simple, profound, and efficient, people living a minimalist life always have more energy and time to “work adequately” and “enjoy their life”.

People who choose a healthy lifestyle will get up early to enjoy the unparalleled quiet in the first ray of sunshine in the morning, have exercise habits, eat vegetarian food periodically, and maintain abundant energy and physical fitness. Minimalists will not indulge in the virtual world and they will pay attention to the real interpersonal relationships; they may go for a walk, drink tea, and enjoy the beauty of flowers with their friends, neighbors, or family by making full use of time; they treasure the valuable genuine emotion more.

Minimalism is to cut down some materials in life in order to reduce the affair with more harm than good, thus improving your life. In other words, to reduce the materials is only a method for reducing the useless affair in life, thus making time and energy to do useful affair, which is the core of minimalism.

In the work and life, we should find our own effective and suitable way to focus on one thing. To remove unnecessary life details is necessary because the simpler, the better. Complexity does not make life wonderful but burdensome and brings anguish. The minimalists always get rid of burden, make unremitting efforts, make prompt decisions, act with courage and determination, and will not consider over and over again.

Each minimalist has his/her own standards. For simplifying life, everyone has his/her own comfort zone, and what you should do is to find your favorite zone.