The Best Ted Talks about Minimalism and Simple Living

If you’re not familiar with TED(Technology, Entertainment and Design) Talks, they are short (under 18 minutes) talks to present and share big ideas.

TED began in 1984 as a conference where Technology, Entertainment and Design converged, and today covers almost all topics — from science to business to global issues — in more than 110 languages.

Here is the main TED website.

There are some really amazing presentations to enjoy.

Here are some of the best TED Talks on minimalism and simple living.

If you don’t have time to watch, I’ve pulled out a few sentences from each that gives you a sense of the talk.

A Rich Life with Less Stuff

The Minimalists at TEDx Whitefish

I was living paycheck-to-paycheck. Living for a paycheck. Living for stuff. Living for a career that I didn’t love. But I wasn’t really living at all…All those things that were supposed to make me happy — they weren’t doing their job. So I decided to donate and sell all of it. And you know what, I started to feel rich for the first time. I started to feel rich once I got everything out of the way and made room for everything that remains.

 

Less Stuff, More Happiness

Graham Hill TED Talk

First of all, you have to edit ruthlessly. We’ve got to clear the arteries of our lives. And that shirt that I hadn’t worn in years? It’s time for me to let it go. We’ve got to cut the extraneous out of our lives, and we’ve got to learn to stem the inflow. We need to think before we buy. Ask ourselves, “Is that really going to make me happier? Truly?” By all means, we should buy and own some great stuff. But we want stuff that we’re going to love for years, not just stuff.

 

Sell your crap. Pay your debt. Do what you love.

Adam Baker at TEDx Asheville

You need to define what freedom looks like in your life. You need to take steps starting today to realize that. Where does it start for most people? It starts right here, with your crap…What happens when this person loses their job? What happens when they’re offered a better job in a different city? What happens when they need to adapt either physically, emotionally, financially to any situation that comes up in life? The answer is—at best—that they’re restricted. They’re held back. They’re clogged. They’re congested from adapting to any sort of change because of the amount of crap they brought into their life.

 

The ten-item wardrobe

Jennifer L. Scott at TEDx St. George

One of the strange side effects of having too many clothes is we still have nothing to wear…We’re operating under the misconception that the more clothes we have the easier it is to get ready in the morning. When actually the opposite is true. The less clothes you have, the less choice you have, the more thought and organization you put behind your wardrobe, the easier it is to get ready in the morning.

 

Adventures with Minimalism and Happiness

Marty Stano at TEDx   U of M Dearborn

I began retracing my journey to happiness and I found a pattern. A pattern by which I’d been living most of my life whether I was conscious of it or not. Minimalism. By its simplest definition minimalism means “less is more”. One purpose of minimalism is to get rid of the things in life, the distractions, that we don’t truly need to find more of the things that bring us happiness. We can apply this idea “less is more” to all aspects of our life: material possessions, health and diet, our work, and non-material things like thoughts. When we practice minimalism we can benefit with more time, more energy, more money, more freedom, and ultimately, more happiness.

 

The Less You Own, the More You Have

Angela Horn at TEDx Cape Town

You see, living a debt-free or close to debt-free life is more than possible and it brings with it a whole lot of extra cash. Cash that can be put to far better use doing those things that you love, but just never seem to be able to afford. Traveling, weekends away, whatever blows your hair back….You see, stuff, it turns out, is a very demanding mistress. And as soon as we gave her the boot, our weekends and, in fact, our whole lives, went from being jam-packed with chores to wide open.

 

Tiny House Movement

Andrew Morrison at TEDx Colorado Springs

What I am suggesting is that we have to readdress how we look at housing and stop looking at these giant McMansions and start living in what I call “human scale.” Human scale is about having all of our housing needs met, but not strapping ourselves to the work wagon. Somewhere we were told that a bigger house with lots of square footage that’s going to make us happy and I would suggest that it’s actually the exact opposite of that. I think with less square footage we have more time to find our freedom and create happiness for ourselves.

 

Less: the lifestyle

David Friedlander at TEDx Dumbo

The way I think about it, from a literary standpoint, is the world in a certain way is like this big, rambling rough draft. There’s a lot of really great elements in it and there’s a lot of amazing things going on right now, but a lot of times it’s really just obscured by all the superfluous shit…What we’re talking about here is really reducing things down to its essence. Editing. And that’s why we say editing is the skill of this century. Really getting down to what’s important whether that’s an architectural conceit, whether that’s product design, whether that’s relationships or your job. Just getting down to the essence of things.

 

Tiny home, big life — an experiment in simple living

Erin & Dondi Harner at TEDx Front Range

[In designing our tiny house] we used the 80/20 rule: we took the 20% of our house that we use 80% of the time and we designed the house to include just that…we didn’t just take a regular house and shrink it down to be tiny either. We cut out everything we possibly could that wasn’t used daily or at least a couple times a week.

 

Minimalism – For a More Full Life

Grant Blakeman at TEDxBoulder

So we live in this world full of abundant choice and it’s really awesome. I mean, I can get on a plane and fly anywhere tomorrow. But that choice comes with a cost…we’re finding that consumers when faced with too much choice , are actually choosing not to choose. It’s just easier to not make a choice and have those choices be made for you…We want to live really full lives and that’s the way we should do it. But part of living a full life is finding negative space.

There you go. Some of the best TED talks on how to live a more minimalist and simple lifestyle.