I was thinking about macrobiotics the other day. That was the miraculous diet that, at its most restrictive, consisted only of whole grains (in practice, as I recall, mainly brown rice and small amounts of green stuff), and was supposed to balance the yin and yang and cure cancer. It lasted from the 1960s into the early 1970s. I knew people who were on it, though I didn’t know them well; they tended to be gaunt and ethereal young white men with long thin hair, in my experience. I don’t know whether the gauntness and ethereality came first or second, but probably it was a mixed sequence. It mainly resulted in the kinds of malnutrition that appear in fundraising photos for children in war-ravaged countries.

I was thinking about macrobiotics because I read a post by someone denouncing minimalism. Not the art movement, or the business philosophy, but the concept of simple living. Minimalists own only the things that are necessary, and pare their lives down to the essentials, with a bonus for avoiding waste.

Books and magazines about minimalism use cover photos with a lot of smooth white walls, pale wood, and glass containers, signaling abstention, but a lot of the minimalists I run into look more like practitioners of macrobiotics. And people who own almost nothing, like the malnourished, are more common in places with extreme poverty.

As with macrobiotics, luxury minimalism offers the illusion of purity, as if by taking yourself outside of the practices of capitalism you could somehow reverse it. As if by reducing the illusion of ownership, you could own your own self.

I admit I own only clothes I will actually wear, and admit that I have been steadily ridding myself of possessions for several years. Only this morning, I checked outside and saw that a bookshelf unit I put outside with a “free” sign had been taken away by someone who could use it. But I’m not a true minimalist.

I don’t reduce my possessions because I think it’s a way of escaping capitalism, though that’s a nice side benefit. I do it for a number of reasons, mostly personal preference.

For one thing, I like open space, high ceilings, and the absence of clutter. Clutter makes me uncomfortable and unhappy. It’s just a personality thing. Now that my husband is gone, and I don’t have to accommodate someone who always left his tools out when he finished a job, and who owned five or six Tumi bags, lots of fashionable clothing, and much hardware, I can live the way I want.

What do I want? I want tidiness, spaciousness, and everything in its proper place, stored neatly out of sight. That even goes for the basement, even though I don’t go down there much; I am steadily emptying it out, and my ideal is to have almost nothing stored down in that dark space. I have already emptied out my third floor.

For another thing, at my age, it’s practical. I just don’t want to have to deal with the problem of getting rid of my things as I become less mobile. That’s not solely out of kindness to my adult kid, though kindness is certainly a factor. (I am appalled when friends my age say about their jammed houses, “I’ll let that be my family’s problem.” That’s just mean.) I didn’t have to clean out my mother’s house when she moved into a senior care community, because my brother came into town and took care of it all, but I saw how much stuff had to be evaluated, one by one, to see if it was worth selling, donating, or hauling away to a dumpster somewhere.

And yes, I want to be light on the earth, to be able to say, in case of all the disasters to which we are prey, “I don’t need much,” and that’s because I want to be clear about what I do need. If I have time to get out of the house, I know what possessions I’m taking with me. If I don’t have time, just the cat and my go bag with the important papers will be enough. I can’t protect myself against the possibility that I might end up out on the street with absolutely nothing, though. That’s the illusion of security. There is no such thing.

The last reason I have reduced what I own is because I want to be comfortable. I live on a small income. If I live within my means, my life can be objectively luxurious: enough to eat, warmth in the winter and coolness in the winter, clothes to wear, and books to read. If I spend more than I have, I will be afraid all the time. I know, from experience, how draining being in debt is, and I don’t want to go back to that.

No, I’m not a minimalist. I’m not renouncing anything. I don’t think it makes me virtuous to own fewer and fewer possessions.

It makes me rich.

I’m sitting here at my little escritoire with several lovely fountain pens in a tray. The desk cost quite a lot. I’m waiting for an expensive recliner to be delivered once it has been built. The pens cost me almost as much as the desk, and I have other pens I’m not using right now in a nice case nearby, glinting in the sunlight. I will buy more pens this year, even though I don’t need more, just because they are beautiful and pleasant to use. I also have other pretty things, though not very many. I still enjoy shopping, because I’m a hunter-gatherer by biology, and there’s nothing so pleasing as finding absolutely the right thing in a store and bringing it home.

The person who wrote the online rant I saw, however, denounced minimalism not because it was extreme but because he was extreme himself. He was writing an ode to accumulation, and to the joy of clutter. It made me shiver, because it was as if someone, seeing that macrobiotics caused severe malnutrition, dedicated themself to eating only meat and candy.

I have lived long enough to watch these philosophies ebb and flow, and I have read enough history to know that it’s part of culture to seize on some answer to life problems, and live in the answer, until it’s time to drift on to the next miraculous solution. Usually, we denounce our former ideas as we depart, as if shaking the dust of life from our feet and becoming a new person. The commitment to the bit is impressive; I just wish it didn’t keep repeating, over and over.