At age 30, Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus left their six-figure corporate careers, jettisoned most of their material possessions, and started focusing on life's most important aspects. And they never looked back. This book's foreword and first chapter examine Joshua and Ryan's backgrounds, their troubled pasts, and their eventual spiral into depression. These chapters discuss why the authors didn't feel fulfilled by their careers and why they turned to society's idea of living: working ridiculous hours, wastefully spending money, living paycheck to paycheck. Instead of finding their passions, they pacified themselves with ephemeral indulgences, inducing a cocaine-like high that didn't last far past the checkout line. And then, after a set of life-changing events, they discovered minimalism, which allowed Joshua and Ryan to eliminate life's excess and focus on the essential things in life. The subsequent chapters explore their journey into a lifestyle known as minimalism and discusse why these two successful businessmen eschewed their excess stuff in favor of focusing on life's the more important aspects: health, relationships, passion, growth, and contribution. The authors discuss how minimalism allowed them to focus on each area, citing personal examples of how they changed everything in their lives over a two year span, during which time they left their corporate jobs, got out of debt, changed their diets, started exercising regularly, strengthened their core relationships, established exciting new relationships, began pursuing their passions, contributed to more people, and found ways to be content and happy with their lives. The final chapter, Confluence of Meaning, binds together these five dimensions and asks the reader important questions about his or her life. This book's content is different from the content at TheMinimalist.com. While the authors' website documents their journey into minimalism and their continued growth through experimentation, this book discusses minimalism in a different way: it discusses in great depth the five dimensions of living a meaningful life. It also gives the reader much more insight into the authors' personal lives, into the painful events that led them to journey into minimalism, and into their world outside the web.

'The Minimalists show you how to disconnect from our conditioned material state and reconnect to our true essence: love people and use things. This is not a book about how to live with less, but about how to live more deeply and more fully.' Jay Shetty, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Think Like a Monk 'Joshua and Ryan have penned an urgent manifesto for the growing movement away from the material and towards the meaningful. An important book for our current moment.' Cal Newport, New York Times bestselling author of A World Without Email and Digital Minimalism AS SEEN ON THE NETFLIX DOCUMENTARIES MINIMALISM & LESS IS NOW How might your life be better with less? Imagine a life with less: less stuff, less clutter, less stress and debt and discontent - a life with fewer distractions. Now, imagine a life with more: more time, more meaningful relationships, more growth and contribution and contentment - a life of passion, unencumbered by the trappings of the chaotic world around you. What you're imagining is an intentional life. And to get there, you'll have to let go of some clutter that's in the way. In Love People, Use Things, Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus move past simple decluttering to show how minimalism makes room to reevaluate and heal the seven essential relationships in our lives: stuff, truth, self, money, values, creativity and people. They use their own experiences?and those of the people they have met along the minimalist journey?to provide a template for how to live a fuller, more meaningful life. Because once you have less, you can make room for the right kind of more.

People don't know how to love the ones they love until they disappear from their lives. As he approaches thirty, Jody Grafton's career as a singer-songwriter falls apart: he loses his record deal, his money, his fame-even his desire to create new music. While he stares at the rubble of his one-hit-wonder musical career, his mother is diagnosed with lung cancer, his marriage ends abruptly, and Jody starts drinking heavily to deaden his new reality. When he hasn't a single reason left to live, he attempts suicide and ends up in a psych ward where he's prodded with questions he isn't yet prepared to answer. Amid the tailspin, Jody receives a phone call from his recently estranged girlfriend and she has unexpected news: she's pregnant. As a Decade Fades begins with this phone call. As his twenties twilight, Jody Grafton grapples with loneliness, depression, lust, and infatuation while glancing at the mounting wreckage in his rearview. When he can't fit-or force-the pieces of his life back together, he leaves his native Ohio to search for answers in the most unlikely of places: Bed-Stuy Brooklyn.

At age 30, Joshua and Ryan left their six-figure corporate jobs at age 30 to pursue more meaningful lives. MINIMALISM: ESSENTIAL ESSAYS highlights essays from the first nine months of their journey into minimalism. MINIMALISM: ESSENTIAL ESSAYS is an edited collection of 29 of The Minimalists' favorite essays about living a more meaningful life with less stuff. This collection also contains a special forward by Joshua and Ryan, as well as two bonus essays you can't find anywhere else: "Dealing with Overwhelm"and"Focus On What's Important." The book is organized into seven interconnected themes: Living in the Moment, Emotional Health, Growth, Contribution, Taking Action, Passion and Mission, andChange and Experimentation. Theorder of this collection is deliberate; it is meant to be read from beginning to end. Doing so will result in a better overall experience-a different experience from reading these essays all over the web-connecting various concepts that might otherwise seem unconnected.

"Like Henry David Thoreau, but with Wi-Fi." -Boston Globe What if everything you ever wanted isn't what you actually want? Twenty-something, suit-clad, and upwardly mobile, Joshua Fields Millburn thought he had everything anyone could ever want. Until he didn't anymore. Blindsided by the loss of his mother and his marriage in the same month, Millburn started questioning every aspect of the life he had built for himself. Then, he accidentally discovered a lifestyle known as minimalism...and everything started to change. That was four years ago. Since, Millburn, now 32, has embraced simplicity. In the pursuit of looking for something more substantial than compulsory consumption and the broken American Dream, he jettisoned most of his material possessions, paid off loads of crippling debt, and walked away from his six-figure career. So, when everything was gone, what was left? Not a how-to book but a why-to book, Everything That Remains is the touching, surprising story of what happened when one young man decided to let go of everything and begin living more deliberately. Heartrending, uplifting, and deeply personal, this engrossing memoir is peppered with insightful (and often hilarious) interruptions by Ryan Nicodemus, Millburn's best friend of twenty years.