> I don't own much physically. I spend my days volunteering and traveling living a pretty simple life.

That's the nub - you don't live a simple life, you live a very complicated life where the "stuff" in your life has been abstracted out of sight.

To define ownership by physical possession is utterly facile. The economic decisions you make result in great mountains of "stuff" being made and used and consumed. You haven't structured your life to have less "stuff" in it, only that you avoid having to carry it.

Aviation fuel is stuff. It has mass and volume, it smells and tastes of something. Huge facilities have been built to extract and refine it, and vast areas of land and sea have been irrevocably damaged by that process. Very real, physical wars were fought over it. Your plane ticket is a stake in all of that, a fractional ownership of the machinery that puts a plane in the air.

Viewed from inside your head, your life seems minimal. But from a bird's eye, it looks like a bulldozer on the rampage.

This community is one of hackers, people who strive to look more deeply, to understand how things work at the most fundamental level. If we do not understand the deep impact of the things we consume and the lives we lead, who else?

tl;dr -- Parent said, essentially "I could own 15 things too if I were allowed to go shopping once a week (because of a vast, costly infrastructure in place to support that)", and that this is not Minimalism but merely shifting the impact of your demand. You responded to none of that.

The parent comment made some really good points. You papered over them with a straw man argument about the "immigrant army," then you shrugged your shoulders and said "meh", and there's also a hint of New Age silliness in there (Questioning a person's sense of "what is possible" is a silly way to claim the moral high ground. It's the New Age way to say "oh, you must not understand art".)

The original comment was that you are able to maintain a footprint of the same magnitude as you had before by simply living life "on demand" as it were, instead of storing stuff. If you really want to tout this lifestyle as minimalist, post your credit card statement so someone can fairly consider the actual cost of living this way.

In fact, parent alluded to another point that I would enunciate here: from the definition of Minimalism that says you actually have to reduce your impact -- a person who owns all of those things you don't, but doesn't eat meat, is more of a Minimalist than what you've laid out here.

Sorry to be harsh, I often don't take the time to clean up my comments after I've written them, to filter the wrath.

To be fair, the parent commenter is the one who introduced the "[reliance] on an army of [poor, brown] immigrant workers" straw-man argument.

No. The straw man is not the claim that OP is reliant on such people. The straw man is the response, which distorts the argument from one of

There are certain people upon whom you rely and are not acknowledging

to

You must have an army of personal slaves

so that he can conveniently dismiss it with a laugh.

Tom Brown claimed (I'm not sure of it's validity, but let's say it's true) that he walked into a forest one day with nothing but clothes on and a Knife and walked out several years later feeling fine. THAT is minimalism.

Anyway, I don't think that this commenter is 'angry', he just doesn't feel like what your doing is really all that minimalist because you don't kill/grow your own food. Of course I'm not really sure I agree with him. You are minimalist in some ways and not others. I don't really see what's wrong with that.

I think the original post is good feedback for you.

Your angle might be that you can save time and be happier by owning fewer things? That's good advice. As an innovator, you've offered advice that can help other innovators with our first-world problems finding happiness.

There's some anger in the response, yes. But you are being made an example of. There's still a life of privilege in the way you're living, that probably you'd be happy to acknowledge. There's also some things that might not care about that others do - like carbon footprint, modern consumerism, money inequities, vegetarianism, etc. Or maybe you do care about those things too.

What's the point of minimalism if not to reduce one's impact on the world? Am I understanding this "movement" incorrectly?

From one perspective, reducing your greater impact on the world by some amount seems to at least be routed in a desire to improve things - to make a nobel idea a reality as much as possible. Whether or not the overall impact is measurable is countered by the nobel gesture of the person at least.

From another perspective however, simply reducing the number of "possessions" one has to a ridiculously small amount by offloading the benefit provided by having said possessions to other segments - in essence, renting everything - doesn't seem to have much of a purpose at all beyond being slightly inconvenient. While I highly doubt anybody can only "own" 15 things - no, underwear cannot be excluded, even if you don't wear them more than once - whether the low bound is 15, 30, 75 or 200 seems rather irrelevant. As such, I'm not sure of the point.

Personally, I'd read deeply into some of the other very intelligent comments here. Ignore any perceived anger, because I don't think it exists.

    What's the point of minimalism if not
    to reduce one's impact on the world? Am
    I understanding this "movement" incorrectly?

It is very similar to agile. Don't optimize prematurely. "You aren't going to need it"

I wouldn't stress it too much. Sustainability extremists will make you feel guilty for eating a diet of wild berries -- you're pillaging the bird's food.

It sounds like a pretty cool adventure that you're having. My first reaction was "15 possessions and no pan?", but I can understand that in context of the travelling that you're doing.

I was just telling my son that a Buddhist monk is only allowed to own 4 kinds of items, not necessarily 4 items. Nowadays when people think they need to "own" things to be happy, hopefully it serves as a call to others that it is not only possible, but liberating.