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The Minimalists
The Minimalists are Emmy-nominated Netflix stars and New York Times–bestselling authors Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus. Alongside their podcast cohost, T.K. Coleman, this simple-living trio helps millions of people eliminate clutter and live meaningfully with less. Learn More.

Love People, Use Things

In this new book, Love People, Use Things, The Minimalists move past simple decluttering to show how minimalism makes room to reevaluate and heal the seven essential relationships in our lives.

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Bonus: Anyone who purchases a copy by the end of September will receive two bonus gifts: a free 90+ page companion workbook and instant access to our private virtual event. Just upload your receipt here.

About the Book

This book’s title was inspired by two unlikely muses. It was the venerable Fulton J. Sheen, circa 1925, who first said, “You must remember to love people and use things, rather than to love things and use people.” Joshua encountered this epigram almost daily as a child, every time he walked past his Catholic mother’s bedroom and saw it, artfully framed and mounted, on the wall above her bed. Nearly a century later, pop-rap superstar Drake echoed Sheen’s line when he sang, “Wish you would learn to love people and use things and not the other way around.”

The Minimalists reworked this sentiment to create the catchphrase that has come to define our message: “Love people and use things because the opposite never works,” which ends every episode of our podcast. When we close our live events with this line, the crowd often echoes the phrase in unison. A few brave souls have even tattooed the phrase on their bodies as a permanent daily reminder.

Minimalism itself is not a new idea: the concept dates back to the Stoics, to every major religion, and, more recently, to Emerson and Thoreau and Tyler Durden. What’s new is the problem: never before have people been more seduced by materialism, and never before have people been so willing to forsake loved ones to acquire heaps of meaningless stuff.

With this book, we will shine a new light on minimalism’s time-tested solutions, one lesson at a time. The book’s aim isn’t to remove you from the modern world, but rather, to show you how to better live within it.

How do we learn to live confidently without the material things we’ve convinced ourselves we need? How do we live a more intentional and rewarding life? How do we learn to reset our priorities? How do we transform the way we look at ourselves? How do we get what we want out of life?

We explore these questions by examining the seven essential relationships that make us who we are: stuff, truth, self, values, money, creativity, and people. These relationships criss-cross our lives in unexpected ways, providing destructive patterns that frequently repeat themselves, too often left unexamined because we have buried them beneath materialistic clutter. This book offers the tools to help in the fight against consumerism, clearing the slate to make room for a meaningful life.

We believe that by highlighting our flaws and working through our issues publicly, we can help people deal with their own issues and the shame that surrounds the decisions of the past. It just so happens that this book is the best medium for us to pour our guts onto the page. Throughout these pages, we also use expert insights and case studies to peel back the facade covering the hidden truths of everyday people who’ve been hiding their shame, like we once did, under a mountain of useless objects.

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