My wife has a wardrobe that could stock a small boutique. She loves fashion — the colors, the textures, the way an outfit can shift a mood. I love that about her.
Me? I have six hangers. A small cubby for underwear, socks, and shorts. Black shirts. White shirts. Black shorts. Black underwear. Shoes that are black or white. No logos, no graphics, no branding. Nothing that asks to be noticed.
That's it. She gets the closet. I get a corner. And honestly, I kind of like it that way.
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People hear this and assume it's about decision fatigue — the Steve Jobs thing, where you eliminate trivial choices to preserve bandwidth for important ones. And sure, there's truth to that. Every choice you don't have to make is energy you get to keep.
But that's not really why I do it.
The wardrobe thing is just one surface. The real thing runs deeper — it's a design philosophy I can't seem to turn off, one that permeates everything I build and, honestly, the way I move through the world.
Pick up my phone and you'll see it there too. I run it in grayscale — no bright colors, just black and white. I went into Apple settings and removed the text labels from the apps, so it's just the icons floating on a muted screen. Only the essential apps are in view. No visual clutter. No competing signals. Just the tools I actually use, and nothing else.
It might sound extreme, but for me it's calming. I've always been color-sensitive. As a kid, my mom used to dress me in every color imaginable — loud patterns, bright everything. And somewhere along the way, as I grew into my own aesthetic as an adult, I swung hard in the other direction. I found a deep comfort in black and white. Maybe the occasional neutral on a special occasion. But that's the ceiling.
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There's a German industrial designer named Dieter Rams who spent forty years at Braun distilling his entire approach to design into three words: less, but better.
Not less for the sake of less. Not minimalism as an aesthetic trend or an Instagram mood board. Less as a discipline — the hard, unglamorous work of stripping away everything that doesn't earn its place, until what remains is so essential it almost feels inevitable.
Rams designed from the inside out. Function first, then form. He hated the word "beautification" because it implied decoration — adding something on top of the work rather than letting beauty emerge from the work. He believed that if a product was truly well-designed, you'd barely notice the design at all. It would just feel right.
That resonated with me in a way I didn't fully understand for years.
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I think most people encounter minimalism as a visual style. Clean lines. White space. Sans-serif fonts. And sure, I'm drawn to all of that. The brutalist aesthetic — raw, unadorned, stripped to structure — shows up in almost everything I create. But here's the thing most people miss about brutalism: it's not about being cold or austere. It's about honesty. It's about letting materials and structure speak for themselves without hiding behind ornamentation.
Think of it like this: a brutalist building doesn't pretend to be something it's not. The concrete is the concrete. The beams are the beams. There's no facade, no decorative layer telling you a story about what the building wishes it were. You see exactly what holds it up.
I want my work to feel like that.
When I'm building something, I'm not trying to impress anyone with complexity. I'm trying to find the version of the thing that's so clear, so reduced, that it almost looks easy — even though getting there is the hardest part. Because simplicity isn't where you start. It's where you arrive after you've cut away everything that was pretending to be necessary.
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This connects to something I've been circling in previous posts — the power of subtraction.
In the gatekeeper post, I wrote about a billionaire who designed his entire communication system around removing access points rather than adding them. In the letter and the envelope, Jason Fried's whole philosophy is about keeping the business structure as thin as possible so the product can breathe. And in the judgment post, the sharpest operators I've met aren't the ones who know the most — they're the ones who've gotten ruthlessly good at knowing what not to do.
It's the same principle showing up everywhere. In my products. On my phone screen. In my six hangers.
Subtraction as strategy. Reduction as craft. Removal as a creative act.
There's a counterintuitive thing that happens when you take things away: what remains gets louder. When a room has less furniture, you notice the architecture. When a page has more white space, the words carry more weight. When a phone screen strips away color, you stop scrolling mindlessly and start using it with intention. When a person has fewer commitments, they show up more fully to the ones that matter.
The world is loud. It's not just visual noise, though there's plenty of that — it's the cumulative weight of a thousand things competing for your attention at once. Bright colors, push notifications, logos screaming for recognition, feeds designed to keep you scrolling. I think most people have stopped noticing how much of it they're absorbing. I never stopped noticing. And somewhere along the way, I decided I wanted to build in the opposite direction.
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I realize this might sound rigid. And I won't pretend there isn't a fine line between intentional simplicity and just being inflexible. But I think the key is understanding why you're simplifying. If you're doing it to impress people with how disciplined you are, that's performance. If you're doing it because you've genuinely figured out what matters to you and decided to protect it — that's philosophy.
For me, minimalism isn't a trend I adopted. It's how my brain works. I see excess and I want to reduce it. I see clutter and I want to clear it. I see a design with twelve elements and I want to find the three that are doing all the work — and let the other nine go.
Not everyone sees beauty in reduction. And that's fine — my wife's closet is proof that maximalism has its own kind of artistry. But for me, the beauty lives in what's left after everything unnecessary has been removed. In the negative space. In the quiet.
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Six hangers. A grayscale phone. Products stripped to their essence.
It's not a fashion statement. It's a design philosophy that happens to start in my corner of the closet. And if you look closely enough, you'll see it in everything else I build, too.