More beguiling to Chayka are artists who have no interest in directing the lives of others. He writes about Agnes Martinwho considered herself an Abstract Expressionist but whose poised, transcendent paintings have been claimed for Minimalismand Walter De Maria, whose installation The New York Earth Room, a field of dirt in a mostly empty white space, has been quietly confounding people in SoHo since 1977. He visits Donald Judds 100 Untitled Works in Mill Aluminum, in Marfa, Texas, which defies any attempt to ascribe emotional meaning to itthe aluminum boxes are just there, Chayka writes, empty of content except for the sheer fact of their physical presence, obdurate and silent, explaining nothing and with nothing to explain. Such a sculpture might sound deathly boring, more math problem than artwork, but, as you walk through the exhibit, with the desert sun setting the silvery containers alight, they become a constant affirmation of the simple possibility of sensation. Elsewhere in the book, he writes about the philosopher Keiji Nishitani, who described ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arranging, as a practice that links beauty to ephemerality and death.

These are the models for a deeper, more honest, less self-centered minimalism, Chayka believes: a way of living that makes simple things more complicated, not the other way around. Still, he is not immune to shallower forms of the aesthetic. When he flies to Tokyo, hoping to understand concepts like mono no awarethe Japanese idea of sensitivity to impermanencethe first thing he encounters is the stark, white, dehumanized Airbnb where he will be staying. Despite his intent to critique, he is being catered to, sometimes successfully. A developer puts up a condo building across the street from his Brooklyn apartment, and stages one of its units as an Instagram-ready tableau of white bed, white nightstand, white table, white kitchen cabinets, visible through big windows. Chayka admits, grudgingly, that the place looks stylish.

The Brooklyn apartment and the Tokyo Airbnb are examples of a style that Chayka has called AirSpace, a term he coined in 2016, in a piece for the Verge, to describe the look of cafs, co-working spaces, and short-term rental apartments all over the globe. I cant say no to a tasteful, clean, modern life space, he wrote then. But, he added, thinking through its roots and negative implications makes me reconsider my attachment. Chaykas writing tends to center on phenomena that conjure aspiration, emptiness, and emotional distance: as a journalist, hes covered luxury cryptocurrency, the blandly appealing life-style magazine Kinfolk, and the streetwear brand Supreme. The Longing for Less revisits earlier essays and reporting on the Minimalists, the Japanese philosopher Shz Kuki, and Marie Kondo.

His dual response to the all-white apartment is one of the only moments in The Longing for Less when Chayka acknowledges his attraction to superficial minimalism, but that attraction pulses throughout the book. The writing has a careful tastefulness that occasionally conforms to what Chayka, in a different context, calls the house style of the non-place and the generic city. The table of contents is presented as four pristine boxes, with high-toned, one-word chapter titlesReduction, Emptiness, Silence, Shadowarranged in a perfect grid. Each chapter is subdivided into eight sections, and Chayka suggests that The Longing for Less might be wandered through in the manner of an art exhibit, that the blank spaces between contrasting examples will generate unexpected lessons. (Chaykas reporting on Supreme, which was published by Racked, was also organized by a gridded table of contents, guiding readers to considerations of Hype, Japan, and Fandom, among other subjects.)

Nonfiction forms that rely on the generative potential of white space, like poetry and the lyric essay, require a distinct forcefulness of voice and vision to succeed; in its absence, this kind of mannered subtlety can be frustrating. Most of the sections in The Longing for Less end on a glancing note of epiphany, such as Simplicity doesnt have to be an end pointit can lead to new beginnings, which is the last line of a paragraph two-thirds of the way through the book.

In a way, Chaykas book replicates the conflict hes attempting to uncoverbetween the security and cleanliness of a frictionless affect and the necessity of friction for uncovering truth. He does have moments of productive discomfort: outside the concert hall where John Cage dbuted 4'33", he wanders for four and a half minutes of silence in honor of Cages blank composition, and finds himself disappointed by the mundane sounds of leaf blowers and airplanes, before becoming unexpectedly attuned to the gentle sound of a hidden stream. He goes to the Guggenheim to hear Erik Saties proto-minimalist composition Vexations, an experiment in extreme monotony, and it proves intolerable, creating a jarring awareness of the often inadequate here and now. But Chayka best conveys the unnerving existential confrontation that minimalism can create in his capsule biographies of figures such as Julius Eastman, the composer who used minimalist structures as a means of asserting personal dissonance. In the nineteen-eighties, Eastman began living, on and off, in Tompkins Square Park; he wrote music on the subway and gave his compositions away in bars. Explaining the titles of his pieces Crazy Nigger and Evil Nigger, Eastman said, What I mean by niggers is that thing which is fundamental, that person or thing that attains to a basicness, a fundamentalness, and eschews that thing which is superficial or, what can we say, elegant.

True minimalism, Chayka insists, is not about consuming the right things or throwing out the wrong; its about challenging your deepest beliefs in an attempt to engage with things as they are, to not shy away from reality or its lack of answers. I suspect that some recent converts to minimalism have already come to this conclusion. Underneath the vision of less as an optimized life style lies the path to something stranger and more profound: a mode of living that strips away protective barriers and heightens the miracle of human presence, and the urgency, today, of what that miracle entails.

The self-help minimalists say that keeping expenses low and purchases to a minimum can help create a life that is clear and streamlined. This practice can also lead to the conclusion that there is not only too much stuff in your apartment but too much stuff in the worldthat there is, you might say, an epidemic of overproduction. If you did say this, you would be quoting Karl Marx, who declared that this was the case in 1848, when he and Friedrich Engels published The Communist Manifesto. Comparing a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange to the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells, they contended that there was too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. Hence, they suggested, the boom-and-bust cycle of capitalism, which brings the periodic destruction of a mass of productive forcesas, perhaps, we experienced in 2008, before the rise of Kondo and company.

Todays most popular minimalists do not mention Marx. Sometimes they address the importance of freeing oneself from the dictates of the market. In Goodbye, Things, Sasaki writes about the importance of figuring out your minimum required monthly income, and encourages readers to consider the environmental consequences of their life styles. Millburn and Nicodemus write about the joy that comes from choosing to earn less money, even if they avoid discussing the more common situation of having your wages kept low against your will. But they also assure their audience that capitalism is not brokenwe are. They insist that theres nothing wrong with earning a shedload of moneyits just that the money doesnt matter if youre not happy with who youve become in the process. Even these sincere prophets of anti-consumerism are hesitant to conclude that the excessive purchasing of stuff may be a symptom of larger structural problems, or that a life built around maximum accumulation may be not only insufficiently conducive to happiness but actually, morally bad.

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The Pitfalls and the Potential of the New Minimalism - The New Yorker