Life’s too short to be buttering existential crises out of a plastic tub.
This morning I found myself scraping the bottom of a Lurpak tub.
A white, gently bowing receptacle with just enough residual butter to tease the knife, but not enough to make it worth the effort. And yet, there I was: wrist contorted, scraping sideways, skimming over craters of cold margarine laminate, determined to liberate one last smear.
For toast.
I paused, mid-scrape, and felt the creeping absurdity of it all. Why do we do this? This frugal choreography. This dignified desperation. Is it habit? Shame? Some Protestant hangover of moral rectitude that equates waste with weakness?
Or is it worse than that, is it training?
A kind of domesticated eco-asceticism, learned not out of genuine conviction but out of decades of thinly veiled moral instruction. Don’t waste. Save scraps. Rinse your yoghurt pots. Aspire to net zero in all things, including pleasure. Butter, it turns out, is not neutral.
I don’t want to be the kind of man who scrapes the last dregs of butter from the corners of a tub. It feels small. Slightly emasculating. A man reduced to margarine management. And yet, aren’t these the very values we claim to admire? Moderation. Responsibility. The quiet dignity of thrift.
There’s a strange modern tension here: the aesthetic of abundance, paired with the rituals of restraint. Middle-class frugality presented as virtue. A lifestyle of minimalism, yes, but premium minimalism. We don’t waste Lurpak because it costs £4.50 a tub. Because we bought the “Spreadable” version as a treat and now feel complicit in dairy decadence.
But scratch deeper and it’s not really about the butter at all.
It’s about effort. It’s about where we place it. We pour our energies into small, containable acts of domestic diligence because the larger systems feel untouchable. We cannot fix politics, housing, the climate, or the cultural entropy of our time, but by God, can we finish a tub of butter.
And maybe that’s OK. Maybe part of surviving modern life is choosing the scale at which we can still act meaningfully, however trivial it seems. Scraping the butter is absurd. But so is most of life, and at least this kind of absurdity ends with warm toast.
Still, I didn’t finish it. I threw the tub away, started a new one, and felt a small thrill of liberation.
No one applauds the man who knows when to stop scraping. But they should.
There’s a jacket hanging by the door in my house that I haven’t cleaned in two winters. A Stutterheim. Patina-stained cotton lining, scuffed hems, smells faintly of trains home. It’s not there for effect. It’s there because it does the job, and does it well. Keeps me dry, holds its own in a cold wind, and feels like continuity. Like something I’d pass on.
I think about that jacket sometimes when I work on digital products.
Because that jacket belongs in the doughnut. Not the jam-filled kind, the one drawn up by economist Kate Raworth. A model for living that rejects the old story of perpetual growth. (Aside: I came across Kate after listening to her talking with Wendell Berry on an old Start The Week. I’d gone on a recommendation from a friend to listen to Wendell Berry but it was Kate’s words which stood out).
In her diagram, the inner ring marks the essentials everyone should have access to: housing, education, dignity. The outer ring is the ecological ceiling: carbon, biodiversity, planetary boundaries. The goal is to stay in the middle. A safe and just space for humanity. Not too little. Not too much.
If that sounds like the Swedish concept of lagom, it is, except Raworth turns the cultural instinct into an economic framework. Lagom is what you feel in a table spread done right. The doughnut is how you design a city, or a system, to honour that logic at scale.
I like that the analogy might be in the Scandi larder: leftovers, carefully labelled. No waste, no lack. Just enough. The doughnut was already there, sitting quietly behind the knäckebröd.
And it maps cleanly onto UX.
The inner ring is what users genuinely need: clarity, trust, human-scale interaction. The outer ring is where the harm begins: deceptive patterns, compulsive loops, the kind of design that counts your seconds, not your needs. The good space, the space between, is where most digital products ought to live. Few do.
I’ve sat in rooms where product success was measured in taps and minutes. “More engagement,” someone would say, as the design team quietly recalibrated the interface to make it just sticky enough. I once worked on a platform where the proudest achievement was a spike in repeat logins. But when you zoomed out, those logins weren’t signs of confidence, they were symptoms of anxiety. People checking their accounts too often, not because the experience was smooth, but because the world wasn’t.
The real win would’ve been a design so clear, so calmly informative, so self-contained that users didn’t feel the need to check at all. But that wouldn’t have shown up on the dashboard. So we built noise instead. Goodhart’s Law anyone?
Doughnut thinking asks: what if we stopped designing for addiction and started designing for enough?
That principle runs through how I live. I’m not a minimalist, but I edit constantly. I favour things with integrity, materials that soften over time, ceramics that stack properly, garden tools that can be sharpened and passed on. When I write, I do so in iA Writer not because it’s clever, but because it clears the room. No distractions. Just text, gently weighted. A space with boundaries. A space that respects my focus. The writing comes better that way, less like performance, more like sorting the drawers in your head.
Same goes for the shelves at home. They hold only what earns its place. Books we’ve read. Things we actually use. Jackets that walk. Nothing there for the feed. Just our curated, persistent things.
Raworth talks about moving from extractive to regenerative economies. I think homes can be regenerative too, giving back emotionally, energetically, even ecologically, if you can. They absorb chaos. Offer rhythm. Ask less from you over time.
What does that actually look like?
There are just enough chairs for the family and the odd visitor. You can find a corkscrew without rummaging. There’s PIR lighting that flicks on as you walk from the landing to the bathroom at night. The house soaks up the mess. Fewer decisions when you’re tired. You can sit down without having to clear a pile of crap off the sofa. You can find your bloody keys.
It offers rhythm because your day moves more smoothly. And it asks less of you because it doesn’t make you work just to function.
My old boss used to moan that he couldn’t do a simple task at home because, to do that, he first had to find the tool. To find the tool, he had to get into the garage. He couldn’t get into the garage because the door was jammed. And on it went. That’s the opposite of regenerative. That’s a house that’s extracting energy from you just to stand still.
I wrote recently about the psychology of our stuff—the emotional residue it carries, the complexity it adds, the space it quietly swallows. The art of owning lessisn’t about minimalism. It’s about clarity. About asking not ‘is this useful?’ but ‘is this mine to carry?’ That same lens applies here. Whether it’s a shelf, a digital feature, or a mental habit, we need to ask: is this giving something back? Or is it just squatting in the system?
And if that principle holds for homes, it can hold for digital spaces too. Interfaces, when well-designed, have the same potential, not just to serve, but to settle. To restore a little order. To give back time, attention, clarity. The question in both cases is not just what they contain – but how they behave when no one’s watching. Do they hold their shape under pressure? Or do they reveal they were only ever designed for the demo?
That’s what I try to bring into my UX work. Not scale for its own sake, but structure. Not novelty, but fidelity. In one recent project, we reduced a sprawling mass of order summary calculations by half. It had grown lopsided: multiple totals, stacked qualifiers, contradictory line logic. It looked thorough but made people pause. Double-check. Drop off.
We didn’t cut because someone asked us to. We cut because the excess wasn’t helping anyone. The business didn’t love it at first, there was concern we’d sacrificed transparency. But the users did. Completion held. Conversion held. No one missed the clutter.
You don’t need to call it Doughnut Economics. You don’t even need the diagram. Just ask: is this too much, or just enough? Is it serving someone, or keeping them circling?
I’m learning the same rules apply emotionally. The inner ring is what I need to function: rhythm, ritual, some quiet between the noisy pulses of family life. The outer ring is burnout, distraction, the endless need to ‘improve’. If I stay within those boundaries, wake early, behave deliberately, write when the coffee’s still hot – I do better work. I’m a steadier father. Less reactive. More intact.
We’ve built systems that confuse excess for success. But maybe the most humane thing we can do now is not build something. Or build something simpler. Or design the thing so well it doesn’t need us anymore.
Like the coat. You don’t notice it most days. But when the rain starts, you’re glad it’s there. And when you finally pass it on, it still fits someone else.
This piece was refined using AI. I used it to generate the image prompt, the tags, the excerpt, and to help sub-edit the copy while keeping my tone intact. The ideas, references, and rhythm are mine. The tools just cleared the room.
We are drowning in stuff. Not because we need it, or even want it, but because we’re conditioned to accept that accumulation equals progress. The shelf groaning under unread books. The kitchen drawers overflowing with gadgets of single, niche utility. The wardrobe packed with ‘just in case’ items for situations that will never arise. We are not only possessed by our possessions, we’re buried under them.
Minimalism, at its best, is not about an aesthetic. It is not an Instagram-perfect arrangement of neutral-toned objects, nor the breathless fervour of bin-bagging everything you own because an influencer told you to. It is, simply, about knowing what you have and choosing to have less of it.
The Great Clothing Cull
I have watched every episode of Sort Your Life Out. Stacey Solomon and Dilly are the nation’s best mates, empathetic therapists disguised as decluttering gurus. They don’t arrive, Kondo-like, with mystical pronouncements about joy. Instead, they open up a warehouse, making you confront your past in a clinically lit aircraft hangar, and then gently shame you into ditching 99 odd socks, 2,000 greetings cards, and a spoon collection that could fill the drawers at Blenheim Palace.
It is the perfect decluttering show because it understands the British psyche. Where American organisation porn offers up pristine linen-clad perfection (hello Duchess Sussex), SYLI makes people sort their stuff in hoodies and leggings, exhausted and occasionally tearful, before finally seeing it all artfully categorised in a set of MDF storage solutions. But the key is this: it works. When Stacey’s crew is on your side, urging you to let go, you listen. She is not just helping people tidy up, she is their therapist, helping them face their own histories, attachments, and deeply ingrained anxieties about waste, memory, and identity.
I have recently paid someone (not Stacey) to come and help me sift through the detritus of my past: the things my parents couldn’t bring themselves to throw out when they cleared their loft, the remnants of a flat fire where possessions had already been forcibly edited down to a fragile minimum. And yet, still, there is more. So much more. Three house moves later, I’ve used each relocation as an excuse to cut back even further, paring things down to the essentials. But I needed this lady’s detachment from all that past, a task none of my family could have done with the necessary emotional distance required.
The wardrobe, a microcosm of the wider problem, is a particularly cruel landscape of regret. The clobber that fit a different physical version of me, a me that went out more. The memory-laden jumper you will never wear again but feel unable to part with. The shoes bought for a life you simply do not live. We keep these things not because they serve us, but because they whisper to our guilt, our shame, our aspirations. A curated wardrobe isn’t (just) about looking good, it’s about dressing with clarity, wearing only things that make you feel yourself, and being free from the burden of choice paralysis.
Let’s be frank: no one needs more than two tea towels, two sets of bed linen, and five pens. And yet, the natural order of modern life is to acquire. But if we follow the principles of good curation (the ruthless discernment of museum conservators) we begin to ask the right questions. Not ‘is this useful?’, because almost everything is potentially useful. But: Does this belong in my collection? Does it contribute meaningfully to my life? If I were choosing afresh, would I buy it again?
The Swedish Death Cleaning Perspective
There is a rather beautiful, if slightly morbid, Scandinavian tradition called döstädning – Swedish Death Cleaning. The principle is simple: do not leave your clutter for others to deal with when you are gone. Live lightly so as not to burden those left behind. It is a concept I think about often as the people around me age and I see what I’d be burdening my kids with. The weight of inheritance, not in money or property, but in boxes of ‘important’ things that, in reality, were just never thrown away.
Glenn Adamson, in How to Curate (Just About) Anything, argues that past the tidying stage, a more capacious process awaits when we curate. To curate is to care for, to actively maintain rather than merely accumulate. It’s a conscious approach to ownership that applies as much to possessions as it does to the books we choose to keep, the tools we use, the spaces we inhabit. The museum metaphor is useful: a curator doesn’t ask if an object is interesting in isolation but whether it adds something valuable to the collection as a whole. This is the mindset that makes for a lived-in, personalised home, rather than just a sterile, thoughtless minimalist, emptier one.
Melissa Norberg, in How to Have Less Stuff, touches on the psychology behind our attachment to things. She agrees that possessions often carry emotional weight, representing past selves, aspirations, or anxieties about the future. If you’ve ever held onto a stack of unread magazines (hello my pile of the stunning Road Rat), convinced that one day you’ll work through them, you know the feeling. But as Adamson reminds us, keeping something present in your awareness doesn’t mean keeping it physically, it means keeping it alive in your mental space.
The Digital Declutter: A Different Kind of Clutter
Of course, physical clutter is just one part of the problem. If my wardrobe has been whittled down to a sharp, functional selection, my Mac is the opposite: a sprawling archive of files, downloads, half-finished projects and forgotten PDFs, all strewn across the digital ether.
Here, though, the challenge isn’t one of tripping over stuff, which is why Stacey never gets involved, it’s the sheer complexity of filtering through it all and making the right judgments. Does it even matter, when storage is effectively infinite? Unlike a teetering stack of books or an overstuffed wardrobe, a bloated hard drive won’t physically intrude on my space. But the real problem in the digital world isn’t just what to delete, it’s what to retrieve, and how to retrieve it when I actually need it.
My Google inbox, for example, is a graveyard of correspondence stretching back over 20 years. And yet, every so often, a search dredges up an email that provides some vital context, a forgotten thread of a past conversation suddenly relevant again. Last week I called up the hotel I stayed at in Stockholm in 2016 for a friend of mine. The digital hoarder in me justifies keeping everything, because what if? But what if the problem isn’t too much data, but too little clarity? What if I’ve reached the point where I don’t even know what I have?
The real digital tidy-up isn’t about mass deletion, but smarter organisation. Tagging instead of mindless foldering. Search over structure. Curating a system where the past is accessible, but not overwhelming. After all, what use is owning less if I can’t actually find what matters? It goes without saying almost that AI and machine learning will be game-changing here.
Conclusion: The Art of Living With Less
This is why I now own fewer clothes than I ever have. It is why I keep only the books I truly covet. It is why my kitchen is free of pointless single-use utensils that promise efficiency but deliver only clutter. Living with less is a conscious act, not a sacrifice. It is an escape from the tyranny of choice, the stress of mess, and the dull headache of ownership.
Marie Kondo asked us if our things ‘spark joy’. I think a better question is: Does this deserve space in my life? And if the answer is no, we must learn to let it go.
Let us stop hoarding for the past, or stockpiling for an imagined future. Let us live in the space we have, unburdened. The art of owning less is, in the end, the art of living more.
AI disclosure:This piece was written by me, but I used AI to help refine the copy, generate the image, and nudge the tone into shape. Think of it as a sub-editor with better memory and no ego.
John Gibbard 