A decade ago, Matt D’Avella’s documentary on minimalism streamed over 100 million times, Marie Kondo had parents debating whether their spatulas sparked joy, and the word ‘minimalism’ was inescapable. Then, almost as quickly as it arrived, it vanished from the cultural conversation. What happened to the movement that once felt like a genuine answer to the problem of too much stuff?
Consumerism didn’t slow down, it accelerated
D’Avella sat down with Levi Hildebrand, who has spent years dissecting consumer culture, from the Stanley Cup craze to the psychological tricks companies use to separate people from money they don’t have. The verdict was blunt. ‘I think consumerism has 10xed in the last 10 years,’ Hildebrand said, ‘but I think it has actually been an exponential growth curve post-COVID.’ The combination of pandemic isolation, social media addiction, and the fracturing of real-world social circles produced something nobody predicted: a spending surge built on loneliness and dopamine. One-click purchasing replaced Black Friday stampedes. TikTok and Instagram became the most efficient sales floors ever built. The current that minimalism once swam against, Hildebrand argued, has become a raging torrent.
The practical fallout is harder to look away from than any trending water bottle. Housing costs have outpaced household income by a significant margin. One person in the conversation described standing in a grocery store soup aisle doing ‘financial calculus’ over whether they could afford lentils and toilet paper at the same time, then going home to find an Instagram post about ‘leveraging your time to increase your value.’ The gap between that advice and that aisle is the story of the decade.
Why inequality, not clutter, is the real engine
The most clarifying voice in the piece belongs to Juliet Schor, economist, sociologist, and one of the original contributors to D’Avella’s documentary. She pointed to a dynamic the film never addressed: rising inequality fuels rising consumption. When the distance between earners widens, economist Robert Frank’s concept of expenditure cascades kicks in. The wealthy pull away, the middle stretches to keep pace, and the people at the bottom go into debt just to cover a car repair or a utility bill. Schor noted that societies with lower status anxiety and less debt tend to be more equal ones, pointing to Japan as a comparison to the United States, which she described as ‘really an outlier on the scale of how consumerist it is.’
Americans, when surveyed, consistently underestimate how skewed the actual distribution of wealth is. The survey picture looks like a reasonable spread. The reality looks like a near-flat line for everyone below the top tier, and a vertical spike for the top one percent and above. Some weddings now reportedly cost an estimated billion dollars, with private celebrity performances. Space tourism has become a hobby. The excess at the top, Schor argued, is not just offensive; it structurally compels spending further down.
Minimalism, in that context, was never going to be sufficient. ‘A cultural movement is not going to ever be enough to really transform society,’ Schor said plainly. What she called the ‘poly-crisis,’ a term from academia meaning many simultaneous crises, has buried the overconsumption conversation under climate anxiety, authoritarian governance, and the social costs of AI. Overbuying on Amazon now feels like a minor footnote.
D’Avella’s own read is more measured than defeated. He frames minimalism not as a failed ideology but as a tool, a hammer in the words of one collaborator he spoke with, useful for clearing space at home and in the mind, but not built to knock down broken institutions. That job, Schor suggested, requires something closer to a wrecking ball: union power, antitrust enforcement, tax reform, and the kind of broad democratic pressure that historically only appears after a system cracks hard enough that people say enough is enough. She pointed to the Great Depression producing Social Security and the New Deal as evidence that structural change is possible, just rarely comfortable in its timing.
The person still doing the grocery store math
Somewhere between the economist’s data and the creator’s documentary rewatch is the person standing in a soup aisle, phone in pocket, deciding between two items that should not require a decision.
Minimalism helped a lot of people find steadier footing inside a system that was never designed to be fair. The system, D’Avella concludes, is still the problem, and it is going to take something far larger than a tidier closet to fix it.
