Minimalism is not that minimal

Recently I stumbled on blog of Mr. Money Mustache who writes about different ways one can save quite hefty amount of money in long run by giving up minor niceties, like daily Starbucks coffee. It rang a bell that went silent since I moved to well-paid full-time job in US, but I decided to give it a try.

https://www.mrmoneymustache.com

The wasteful habit I decided to eradicate first is having burritos from Chipotle down the street, so now I am forced to cook. Nothing fancy, something simple as rice or buckwheat, yet I discovered that now I need so many tiny tools and expendables: can opener, pots of different sizes, supply of ingridients. Also, now I have to play Sokoban in my refrigerator. I still consider all this fuss worth money saved, though.

https://www.chipotle.com

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokoban

Life of minimalism and frugality is not minimal at all in terms of physical objects that surround you. Probably that is trivial observation for somebody more versed in housekeeping, but it just never occurred to me. Desire to live cheap and desire to abstract myself away from mundane things are at odds.

Actually, now that I put that into words, it sounds ridiculously trivial. Anyway.

In some way it is similar to the situation with software. If you want to keep your system minimal, you will need bunch of compilers, linkers and other developer tools, which you normally wouldn't need. I just never considered developer tools to be an overhead.