Hello, everyone, and welcome back to an all new episode of the Financial Confessions.

It's me, Chelsea Fagan, your host, founder and CEO of the Financial Diet and person who loves to talk about money.

And if you've seen the title or the thumbnail of this week's episode, you might be a bit surprised at who I'm speaking to.

I'm someone who on this channel and sort of in my own personal

life has been a bit critical of minimalism, not of the art movement of which I really don't

have an opinion, but more sort of the life ethos, particularly as it intersects with politics,

policy, regulation, and how we perceive the various struggles that we live with

in American consumerism. We talk a lot on TFD about the choices that we make in terms of our

purchases, our spending, our consumer habits, and it can be very easy to frame those choices

through individual preference. We decide what we want to buy. And of course, there is also an enormous impact

of things like advertising, marketing, the people

that we're living with, the standards we might feel

we need to live up to.

But there's also an enormous policy impact.

For example, I live in New York City.

I live in a two bedroom apartment.

I haven't owned a car in 10 years.

And those are choices that feel in many ways natural to me and on some objective scale

are probably more minimalist. But I also live in a city with incredible bike and walking infrastructure.

I live in a city where I don't need a car. And it's important to remember that these choices

didn't happen in a vacuum. They're policy driven, they're political, and they're also much more about the collective

than the individual.

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