I wrote the Korean version of this essay in 2019, during a summer of throwing things away. This isn't a translation — it's the same experience told from where I am now. I still own almost nothing. What started as survival became philosophy became the way I build everything.

My hands paused over the trash bag. I was holding a sweater I'd had for six years — the kind of thing you keep not because you wear it but because throwing it away feels like erasing a version of yourself. My fingers knew what the brain hadn't caught up to yet: letting go of this object was letting go of the person who bought it. That person didn't exist anymore.

I put the sweater in the bag. Then I put most of the apartment in the bag.

The minimalism wasn't philosophical at first. It was financial. When you leave your country with negative two thousand dollars and one backpack, you own nothing because you can't afford to own anything. There's no Marie Kondo moment, no gratitude ritual, no "does this spark joy." There's just: this bag has to fit in an overhead compartment, and I have to carry it through airports for the foreseeable future.

I wrote about the leaving in "I Left Home With -$2,000 and No Plan." What I didn't write there was the strange relief of it. Not having things meant not maintaining things. Not maintaining things meant not making decisions about things. And every decision I didn't have to make about an object was a decision I could make about my life.

In Bali, I accidentally lost my phone in a taxi the night before a flight. I bought a $50 burner, stuck an Indonesian SIM in it, and spent a month without social media, without messaging apps, without the reflexive scroll that had become my primary relationship with time. I checked email once a day on a laptop at 11am.

That month was the freest I'd ever been. Not because I was in Bali — because my attention belonged to me for the first time in years.

The philosophy came later, after the survival phase. When I had enough money to buy things again and realized I didn't want to.

Owning less didn't just make me lighter. It made me clearer. With fewer objects to manage, fewer subscriptions to track, fewer possessions to store and insure and worry about, the signal-to-noise ratio of my life improved. I could hear what I actually wanted underneath the noise of what I was supposed to want.

What I wanted was: to make things. To build. To ship. To document.

What I didn't want was: to manage a household, maintain a wardrobe, accumulate proof that I was a successful adult according to someone else's criteria.

The overlap between "things I own" and "things that make me a better builder" turned out to be very small: a laptop, good headphones, a comfortable chair, and reliable internet. Everything else was decoration or obligation.

This extends to how I build products. "Why I Said No to Every VC and Built Alone" is partly a story about funding, but underneath the funding question is a minimalism question: what's the smallest version of this that works?

Every product I've shipped started as the smallest possible version. Soulin Social started as a script that ran on my laptop. KINS started as a single room on a booking platform. The membership started as a Stripe checkout page and a welcome email. No infrastructure I didn't need. No features nobody asked for. No overhead that existed to impress rather than function.

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The same principle that made me throw away the sweater makes me cut features from products. If it's not actively doing something, it's actively costing something — attention, maintenance, complexity. The cost is never zero.

People romanticize minimalism. They make it aesthetic — white rooms, capsule wardrobes, carefully curated emptiness. That's not what I'm talking about. My apartment isn't beautiful. It's functional. The walls are bare not because I chose a minimalist design but because I haven't hung anything, and I haven't hung anything because it doesn't occur to me, and it doesn't occur to me because my attention is on what I'm building, not where I'm living.

The minimalism I practice is boring. It's not owning a car so I don't think about parking. It's not following fashion so I don't think about what to wear. It's eating the same three meals so I don't spend mental energy on food decisions. It's eliminating the categories of decision that don't matter to me so I can be fully present for the ones that do.

I've been doing this for seven years now. The question people always ask is: "Don't you miss having things?" And the honest answer is: sometimes. I miss having a kitchen with good knives. I miss having a bookshelf. I miss the comfort of a space that looks like someone lives there.

But I don't miss it enough to go back. The lightness is worth more than the comfort. The clarity is worth more than the coziness. And the building — the thing I do with all the attention I've freed up — is worth more than anything I could put on a shelf.

What are you holding onto that's costing you more attention than it's giving you back?

Thread: The Lost
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