Introduction

Minimalism has become a growing trend in peoples lives. What was once seen as an empoverished life, has become desirable among those who can afford lavish, or even modest living. Minimalism can be defined as a way of living, or a worldview, that objects should be “multi-tool” like, in the sense that one object can achieve many different ends. One internet personality, Felix PewDiePie, noted that “everything is a bowl,” when citing the philosophy of Diogenes. Others, such as Joshua Blais, and Luke Smith, have noted the same “bowls” in their lives and have, since their acknowledgement, led a different life of minimalism across several domains: social, entertainment, didactics, things seen and unseen such as religion, and many more. This essay seeks to associate commonalities across these three people mentioned. This essay aims to reach a conclusion of a “minimalism to religious pipeline,” as it is well-known that religious people tend to live ascetic lifestyles. Likewise, general affect in a bipolar method will be appraised: happiness, such as gladness and fortitude in their minimalist journey; sadness, such as dissatisfaction and malaise about their minimalist choices.

Are minimalist people happier? Can we extrapolate that happiness is associated with owning fewer things? In a world of post-capitalist consumerism, can we find happiness in turning off the television, ignoring advertisements, and the like? This essay argues that happiness can be found in minimalism and ascetic practices which seek to fulfill early schools of philoaophy, such as what Aristotle said, “happiness is eternal contemplation of the unmoved mover.” Let this be a breath of fresh air, and a refusal of a “life in plastic,” that is supposed to be “fantastic.”

PewDiePie, Felix

PewDiePie’s relationship with subscriptions, Big Tech, and his change. Are these minimalist tendencies a track towards God? The two following examples will speak to that.

Felix published a video that I came across only because of Joshua Blais speaking about “PewDiePie ushering in the decade of the Linux Desktop,” or something like that. He spoke briefly about PewDiePie and transfered the topic to technology, which is the focus of his YouTube channel. From there, I went to PewDiePie’s video. I never followed large-subscription-count people before because I found that their opinions, thoughts, intuition, or other “worthwhile factors” that they present to their audience was babyfood milquetoast, unbecoming of anyone who had an organic thought within their lifetime. Though, this organic thought from (PewDiePie) PDP, was one that I encountered during COVID. Those thoughts are as follows:

1. why do I pay subscriptions to things that I’ll never own?
2. why don’t I seek ownership, but instead put my money in the hands of a copyright holding company who makes money off of, and pays musicians (in one case) a fraction of what that company makes?
3. why are Google, Apple, and Microsoft “clouds” a thing? It’s merely some user accessing and storing their data on another persons server.
4. is it difficult, or otherwise inaccessible to host my own things? What about accessing them remotely?
5. do I need to learn career-level detail to simply self-host my own entertainment, data, and so on?
6. what benefits are these big companies getting from my usership?
7. if I leave this walled garden of spoon-fed technology, what benefits do I get?

PDP hit them all, mostly. He is still speaking to an audience of people unlearned of the ways that exclude the world from personage, and personal identity infiltration. However, he was on the right path, so far, and I continued listening. What PDP did was exit from Google, as much as he could because YouTube is his bread-winning career. He left google drive, and the rest of their suite. He took that projected cost (subscription over years) and saw that if he bought upfront hardware and used FOSSware for hosting, then after a couple of years, he’d no longer be a consumer of subscriptions. For me, this made a lot of sense, and thats exactly what I did. What’s beautiful for PDP is that he doesn’t need to rely on software owned by big corporations for his daily life, other than YouTube. For me in school, I have to use the Microsoft suite of programs for everything: communication, file sharing, lectures, and so on. However, I avoid most of it. My classmates opted out of using those Microsoft products that are monitored by our school, and decided to make q Facebook chatroom. I strongly disagree with technology such as Facebook, Instagram, and so on. It’s a black hole, a Plato’s Cave, a bowl; though, when speaking about bowls, Facebook is still a multi tool, but one other thought is that it walls you in. Your multi tools shouldn’t be specific for a field. Your drill bits can be used on all materials, and objects should be made in that way. I digress. PDP left, got everything set up on an overpowered computer that ran multiple GPUs for AI, and for other things that can benefit his family. Of course, everything is run on Linux. Felix isn’t finished his journey, yet. From what I understand, his technology minimalism isn’t extant, yet, but he made efforts to change his ways. This is still good. Instead, he is reducing his tangible, day-to-day life ownership. For instance, he used to own a home gym, but now he owns only a small pull up bar that looks something like a fingerboard. Before we had iron, a bench, and so on. He only uses one pair of shoes at a time; before he would save up to buy, in this case, shoes, and be elated with a new purchase. That was all meaningless to him, or at least those experience didn’t hold enough meaning that could sustain his outlook. He went on to speak about generalities of Big Tech, but never spoke to the power that they hold over us, which is alike to the following two other examples: Jason and Luke.

Jason Blais

Jason Blais’ developed a different relationship with technology and in tandem, he approached Catholicism as a universal Truth. Sadly, I cannot say the same about Luke Smith. I do value Luke’s commentaries, and technology coverage. Likewise, I enjoy his online projects, his github repository, and so on. However, the schismatic Orthodox beliefs aren’t aligned with the Church. Regardless, Luke seems to be on an overall journey with a correct direction. I just pray that his direction doesn’t become derailed.

Jason is a low-subscriber YouTuber who speaks about philosophical minimalism, and God. He’s been quite pleasent to experience because his videos don’t offend the senses with Apple-like colours, loud noises, and other child-like attention grabbers. His videos, akin to his overall lifestyle, seems to represent minimalism. Like PDP, Joshua started out in his technology in a similar way: he noticed oddities, made efforts to self-host everything, bought loads of hardware that was unneeded, the rest of his life followed suit with Felix. There is a commomnality of Felix, Joshua, and Luke: they all began with minimalism, but they had a “new and shiny” optomism with technology. Joshua had the exact same experience as Felix: they both spent a lot of money on server hardware that could otherwise be saved. They each thought that, “to run my personal type of data store, entertainment, and other software replacements, I need to have a big-ass server with networking capabilities, and so on.” In reality, and that’s what Joshua and Luke discovered, this isn’t necessary and most of what people want (not need) can easily be provided by a $50 eBay machine (I’m looking at you, ThinkPad people). So, Joshua spoke of getting rid of his big-ass server, and replacing it’s functionality with several thinkpads. It’s actually quite a beautiful idea, and I would go down that path if I didn’t already have an old desktop to turn into a server. What I have works beautifully, and there’s some luxury there, too: I can use my GTX 1050Ti GPU to make Jellyfin run better. The only downside is that the computer kicks off a lot of heat, but again, I digress.

One topic that Joshua covered that I never considered is that a lot of old, forgotten software technology still exists and is readily availble for adoptoion, and it is even easy to transfer. He, like many others on YouTube in the technology minimalism sphere, bounced between Emacs, Vim, Vi, Neo Vim, and so on. Personally, I was one who began university by making my notes in Libre Office. Then I moved onto Joplin so I could nest PDFs in my file hierarchies. I used Joplin for my entire BSc in Psychology and Creative Writing degree. However, for medical school, I’m using Zotero for literally everything, and currently I’m using Emacs for all of my personal writing, such as this essay that will be published to GitHub sometime soon (today is Oct 13th, 2025). Anyway. Joshua didn’t take things as far as Luke, who is a wide adopter of “Suckless” technology, in that it “doesn’t suck,” and “isn’t bloated.” This seed was planted in my head long ago, and I wanted to be rid of Joplin because it was trying to reinvent the wheel. Alike to that thought, and the three other men I’m writing about: Joplin was a bowl. I can’t replace Zotero because it is so useful for school, and otherwise cataloguing libraries. My non-school Zotero library is about 40 Gb big, and I’d be quite annoyed if I lost those files, since many of them cannot be found anymore, without great difficulty.

Luke Smith

Luke Smith in his journey, choices, and approach towards Orthodox Christianity.

God, the Commonality

Joshua (Catholic), and Luke (Orthodox), both began their journey towards God, and they often speak of God and minimalism together. When I began noticing this association, after seeing Josh’s video on Felix, I remembered a lot of common themes. One, those within my generation, and one above me (Millenials), all have developed a fascination with the Roman Empire times, philosophy, theology, and world views. It makes much sense because most of us were raised, in part or whole, but the Boomer generation, or Generation X, who both had very little to give as intellecual inheritance. Many people are left hungry, wanton for God and sobriety. Though, those young people cannot find it any corner of the world: wherever young people go, they see TikTok, Netflix, and whatever other time-wasting horrors exist. Some, thanks be to God, have seen the abyss, and likewise the abyss looking back at them. They made great strides to rid their life of “bloat,” as Luke Smith would speak. Though, this bloat can be redefined as materalism, which the Church has always warned about. Trusting in princes (big tech, etc), has been a warning of the church: don’t do it! Many other ascetic choices that are coming out of the younger generations become solidified by encountering God, and His teachings of life, and how they agree with young observers’ expereinces. Deo gratias, again.

In a contrasting way, there have been a lot of investors of BitCoin who killed themselves after the market “crashed” which made some people lose hundreds of thousands of dollars. They killed themselves over ficticious “gold,” which becomes defunct as soon as the internet, or power goes off. They laid up their treasure in this basket which is not eternity. From their poor choices of killing themselves, they didn’t get to finish the experience that God started for them: God wants you to give up everything, be in that self-imposed darkness, and to find Him. Nothing else matters because life is, and has always been, so fleeting. Nothing matters other than passing along the keys of knowing this truth to the nexet generation, the generations above us, or the kindred generations next to us. Owning more things makes us miserable, and I refuse to quote any scientific papers in this essay because it’s so evident. People cling even to citations as a worldly affection. Stop. If you can’t read something, and see it’s internal and external validity, then please consider encountering a very difficult life experience, and re-evaluating everything. Life is meant to be a short test, and not a competition of how much you have in possessions. The rich man is unlikely to enter the Kingdom of Heaven for obvious reasons: he’s too attached to his golden toilet seat, and polished spoons to give a damn about what exists beyond his breath and sensational experiences. Though this life is a test, there is no competition. Heaven has the infinite capacity to fit everyone in there, though I’d argue that only 33.3…% will make it into heaven due to one-third of heaven falling with Satan after the Angelic Creation. I digress.

This fits in well with the ascetic choices that Joshua, Luke, and Felix are making because it’s tangible proof of God working with people’s souls. He prepares a place for Himself, and He wants to be within our hearts, soul, and mind. He wants everything to be about Him. He is the selfish God; rightfully so! As people move away from the bright colours, the subscriptions, and time-stealing non-labour occupations, then they can see how disgusting this life is: sticky, like a wet blanket; heavy like a sheet of lead. All three have made room, and now their life has begun to weigh if they want to have God in their life for eternity, and to spend their eternal life with God or with those who planted these horrible ideas in the minds of CEOs, NGOs, and whatever other puke-letters you can thing of. That’s the big question; the big answer may come in 2033.

** Conclusion Conclusion that, yes, people are moving towards God and moving towards minimalism at the same time. Though, one common point that is missed with Filux (PDP) is that of privacy. I’ll cover this topic in another essay, but in my province of Nova Scotia, we are headed towards OPOR (One Patient, One Record). This is paving the way for privacy invasion, and an easy time for police, among other people who want to know your private information, to make files against any dissidents.