How We Live a Minimalist Life In Brazil

I follow @jsantana recommendation and watched a documentary called Minimalism on Netflix. Summing up briefly the documentary, in case you haven't heard about it or haven't added to your Netflix list, it talks about having a life that goes against the consumerism trends, where you live with the minimum possible.

The impression I had was that for us in Brazil, and probably South America in general, the challenge of having such life is much smaller. Not because we don't have as much money to spend. But because we are ok with living a simpler lifestyle.

To give an example, something that impresses foreigners when they visit Brazil is the size of our houses. They might seem quite small for the international standard. If you visit some Brazilian friends in their houses, you might feel claustrophobic or uncomfortable having people so close to you since it won't have much space to move around. Small Brazilian families are used to live in houses of 70m². If you are single you can find tiny apartments of 20m².

I actually don't believe our houses are that small as they may think they are. They have just enough space for one to live. When I visited the US in 2014, I stood at a family's house that was huge. It was the biggest and fanciest house in a quite simple neighborhood. It was a family of 3 people, a couple, and their 4 year-old son. I bet there were places in that house that they hadn't visited for a while. In Brazil, unless you are a Brazilian celebrity, not visiting a place of the house for a few days is just inconceivable. And to be honest, if I had to live in a house with 5 times the place I need, I'd feel completely lonely.

Another example of our minimalist style is our closet. Or the lack of it! Different from the US houses or countries with similar constructions we don't use built-in closets attached to the bedroom. We have a furniture in the bedroom where we store our clothes, shoes, towels, sheets, etc.

It does take a considerable part of our already small bedrooms but the good thing is that it keeps us from having more clothes than we need. We know exactly when we have accumulated too many pieces than we need, and when there's no more space for a new shirt, we know it's time to donate some clothes. Another good side of it is that we probably produce the most beautiful wardrobes in the world!

Some brand new houses and apartments now are being planned with built-in closets. And some people with spare rooms in their houses sometimes do uses those spaces as closets, although it looks weird having a closet almost the same size of your room, so most of the time it becomes more like a deposit space.

Most of the Brazilian houses also have only one bathroom... for the whole family. Some have 2. But even 1 bathroom works ok for us. We get to manage to keep it clean. Don't worry!

Another common thing we do is that, because inflation in Brazil is so high, we keep our objects until it breaks or malfunction. We don't mind having that old TV as long as we can still differentiate the teams by their t-shirts on the screen! Or that old-fashioned washing machine bought 12 years ago, as long as it keeps our clothes clean. We don't change our object for the sake of style or to keep up with the newest model. Unless we are talking about phones! In this case, our tolerance for old objects will drop to 2 or even 4 years if you have a gorilla glass screen.

Of course, there are lots of extremely consumerist Brazilians that finance their phones in 24x just to have the pleasure of having an Iphone 7, or a huge smart TV. In a certain way, we are indeed consumerist since we live in a consumerist society and we just can't be immune to it. But I believe if we had to live a true minimalist lifestyle, we wouldn't suffer as much as the rest of the world would.