Break the Twitch Articles

Happy Break the Twitch Day, everyone. For those of you who don’t know what that even is, I’ll explain. It all started six years ago.

The Back Story

On November 14th, 2014, I decided to do something that unbeknownst to me, would change my life in drastic ways. It wasn’t anything particularly distinctive. I had registered dozens of domain names over the years. But this domain (the one you’re reading right now) ended up being quite different.

Two months before, a friend invited me to come to SimpleRev, an event he hosted that invited people from all walks of life to gather around the principles of simple living, minimalism, and sustainability.

It’s the event where I met many of the friends I have today, and after getting up to share my experience during ‘participant storytime’, I heard, “Hey! You should write about this.” (Never underestimate the power of encouragement in your life and the effect it has on others).

The Twitch

At that point in our lives, Amy and I had been married for about two years and we were both working in fairly demanding jobs. I was working as the Marketing Director of a nonprofit, and Amy in corporate finance. We had bought our first home together about a year earlier and were still in the process of figuring out what all of that was supposed to look like for a couple in their late 20’s.

Looking back, it’s easier for me to understand what was going on—but at the time, I was struggling. I knew I was not being mindful of my spending, but it felt like an impossible habit to break. In trying to juggle so many different projects in my work, hobbies, and home life, it was inevitably impossible to manage it all effectively.

I realized that the frequent one-click purchase pattern I had recognized months earlier was not an isolated spending problem, but an intention and attention problem. I began to see that many of the small daily actions I was doing were more impulsive Twitches than intentional actions.

Small Steps, Big Changes

Over the last six years, we’ve done (and tried) a lot—but here are some of the highlights of what has happened since then.

We became a one-car family. We quit our jobs (at different times) and became self-employed. I wrote a book and gave a TEDx talk. We produced a 30+ episode video podcast with 250k downloads, and built a YouTube channel with 4.5 million views (and counting)! We got rid of 80% of our belongings, starting from things as small as old business cards to barely-worn clothing, to most of our furniture in our big move across the country a year and a half ago. We’ve helped bring an intentional community of kind, wonderful people from all over the world together. We also prioritized our health, began exercising regularly, and cook the majority of our food at home. Don’t worry though, I still eat and enjoy ice cream.

But, these things didn’t happen all at once. They came through small changes and considerations, consistently showing up (some days better than others). It took taking one small step after another for six years—even when the next step wasn’t perfectly clear.

The big changes all came from the topics we talk about here on the site—minimalism, habits, and pursuing creative endeavors. All tools that allow us to love our attention and continue working towards using it well.

While the tagline has changed a few times since that day in 2014, there has always been a thread running through our work at Break the Twitch, and that is intentional attention. Exactly how that shows up varies, but whether it’s minimalism (removing distractions), habits (directing attention and action), or creative flow (the result of minimalism and habits), it all boils down to loving your attention and using it well.

Coming Together on Break the Twitch Day

This year, we decided to celebrate this milestone publicly, and invite you to join us in some intentional reflection. It doesn’t have to be anything at all, but you can spend it doing something analog, journaling, meditating, or just existing screen-free for an hour. We laid out some helpful guidelines over on the Break the Twitch Day page where you can find out more.

We’re grateful for your readership, for being a part of this intentional community, and for venturing forward with us for the next six years and beyond. Cheers.

When it comes to living a life of contentment, minimalism is a common contender for the heavyweight title. The movement to surround ourselves with things that spark joy has furthered this perception—that simply getting rid of enough clutter and only having the things we loved would be the key to success.

While there is some truth to that, there’s an even more profound opportunity hidden in minimalism itself.

Two Reasons Why Minimalism Is Not The Answer

An answer would mean it’s a proposed solution to a question.

When used effectively, minimalism is not a solution. In fact, there are very few solutions at all when it comes to changing your life in meaningful ways.

We’ve all tried time and time again to set goal posts for when we’ll allow ourselves to feel like we’ve “made it.” Time and time again, those goal posts just keep moving further down the field as we set higher or different standards for what it’ll take to find contentment.

Over the last six years of exploring this, I’ve found minimalism to be the same. There’s no magical point where your house starts to look like the magazine covers we covet. There’s no number of items one should own that contains the keys to eternal bliss.

Minimalism is not the answer because it’s not an answer at all.

Minimalism is a question. In a life so easily filled with overwhelm, clutter, chaos, and exhaustion—one where digital devices and marketing messages use every possible strategy to capture moments of our precious attention—we must ask ourselves a question.

We must ask a question of which there is no singular “good” answer. Looking at minimalism as a process, one that helps us remove the clutter that keeps us from a meaningful life, we can ask that question. With regularity.

The most beneficial aspect of spending six-plus years asking this question is not a bare household with two cereal bowls and two spoons with which to eat every meal. It’s not owning less than 100 items, either. Both of these scenarios are not even remotely true for Amy and me.

The most beneficial aspect of asking this question with regularity is that it reinforces and affirms one essential fact: That our attention has immense value.

We have less attention than we do time, and our time is limited—so to embrace minimalism in a way that forces us to ask, “What do I want to pay attention to?” is to live the question of minimalism.

Six years in, I’m still discovering and uncovering things about myself about ways I have allowed clutter to hide for decades. I’ve increasingly gained a greater understanding that my false first steps were not just careless purchases but rather attempts to personally feel like enough.

It’s painful, yes. There’s a reason we bury ourselves in this clutter—coping with the overwhelm of the world at large. But, so far, it’s worth it—and I encourage you to explore what answers might come from asking: minimalism?

You can read more about the Break the Twitch approach to minimalism in these other posts:

• The 70/30 Principle (How Minimalism Works)
• 10 Minimalism Guidelines
• What Is Minimalism?