Zen and the Art of Not Giving Advice in The Time of Plague

Adapted from a Dharma Talk delivered on April 11th, 2020

To inform this talk I want to share about a couple of things I read this week.

But before I get there, I too like most others, am in quarantine. I’m not sure how long this will last. And like many others, in an effort to find something to do that isn’t staring into one of the several glass screens in my home, I found myself this week, thinking this would be a good time to clean my office. I mean really clean my office.

This leads me to my first reading, Kyle Chayka’s recent book, The Longing for Less: Living with Minimalism, which is a new survey of the minimalism of our moment. In Chayka’s book he starts by exposing how folks like me, coming of age in the U.S., are particularly vulnerable to the charms of minimalism, linking it to the powers of self-definition and starting over and how we acquired the idea if we just sort through our homes or listen to a podcast, we are well on our way to becoming new people, unburned by the past.

He writes how we have twisted the idea of simplicity as something providing a kind of “psychological hygiene,” and how minimalism could be considered a new therapy, where we no longer depend on the accumulation of stuff for happiness, but craft new preferred identities, by sweeping our…