Just go there: BILL WATTERSON: A cartoonist’s advice

It's short on specifics, long on other things, but Ellen Huerta's "Why I Left Google" is worth reading if only to illustrate how it's possible to be unhappy at Google, especially if you're in your 20s.

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It's not just you.

I'm doing it, too.

It's annoying. I'm annoying when I look at Twitter multiple times per day on my phone.

Are you doing it? You could very well be an annoying pain in the ass.

The fix is easy. Are you with me on this?

Not all of these sites are the work of self-proclaimed minimalists. Most are. All are worth a look:

• http://www.becomingminimalist.com/
• http://www.missminimalist.com/
• http://www.everydayminimalist.com/
• http://minimalistwoman.com/
• http://postmasculine.com/minimalism
• http://www.penelopetrunk.com/
• http://mnmlist.com/
• http://zenhabits.net/
• http://zenofwork.com/
• http://www.theminimalists.com/

A Kohl's Black Friday parody ad inspired the following from Gizmodo's Mat Honan in reaction to the ad and Kohl's in particular, and the consumer culture in general. It is, as the title here states, a sentence for all holiday seasons:

It makes me want to get rid of all the crap I've already bought, to throw all my shit out into the street and set it on fire and shed my clothes and run naked through the neighborhood with a goddamn hammer smashing out all the lights and setting all the dogs free and upending all the mailboxes and cutting the power lines down and stuffing the HVAC systems with leaves and throwing dead fish in the vents and just going utterly feral as I let my hair grow out long and my teeth rot from my mouth because when I see cynical appeals to shop shop shop, done with a knowing wink to how utterly vapid and annoying the commercial itself is, without caring that it's like a steel toe boot to the teeth because it's got an earworm that will burrow itself into your head until you find yourself standing outside of a fucking Kohl's store at eleven thirty on a Thursday night when you should be at home in bed after spending a lovely day with your family, I worry that we are at the very end of America and I think that you, Kohl's, you are the Lt. John Pike of television advertising spraying me with your indifferent contempt and I wish you nothing but failure and a grim season of declining sales and the flu.

Read the original entry, where you can also see the "parody" video.

I'm noticing many writers calling the decluttering of their lives "minimalism," instead of "simplicity," or "simple living." Is there a difference?

A quick Google search yielded the following (we can read together; I'm just link-dumping at this point):

• Organized Geek: Minimalism vs. Simplicity
• Modern Simplicity: Minimalism vs. Simplicity
• Watch Us Rework: Simplicity vs Minimalism (more about web design, less about life)
• Design Thinking: Simple or Minimal? (more about industrial design, less about life)
• the_uncomplication_project: Simplicity vs. Minimalism (at least relevant; but I'm left thinking that any definitions are the opinion of the definer)

Is this tempest/teapot time? I'll gather more intelligence on this lexical battle as time permits.

Five minutes later: These entries didn't help much. All I seem to get from this small blogospheric sample is that minimalism is more hard-core than simplicity.

But as I say in the short comment after the final link, it's all semantics. Call what you do what you wish. As for me, I'm still thinking.