My Minimalist Apartment

[Music] so I recently sold pretty much everything that I own let me explain last month I moved to the city of Philadelphia with the intentions of simplifying my life I found that as I moved from apartment to apartment in the past few years that I started to really acquire a lot of stuff and there's really no other way to put it than just stuff multiple blenders slap chops Christmas gifts that I got from my uncle four years ago and a number of those as seen on tv items that are supposed to simplify your life but I found that as I moved around and moved into these new places that having more stuff didn't necessarily make my life any better and I noticed that in America especially where we're so materialistic where we just keep acquiring thing for one of the only places in the world where we have so much stuff to the point where we have to go and rent storage units somewhere else to store our great uncle's couch from the 1930s that will probably never use so I found that overall as I started to get more stuff my quality of life actually started to decrease and it's not that I've ever had a problem with the quality of my life I've always been very happy but I noticed that when I was getting more my life wasn't getting any better necessarily and it's difficult to put a measurement on happiness but I noticed that as I started to scale back when I moved into this new apartment I really had quite an effect on myself so this is what I really discovered something called minimalism which is scaling back the items that you have and really focusing on the things in life that do add value to your life so in the next few minutes I want to show you around my apartment and I want to show you some of the things that I did away with things that I just found that I don't need that aren't necessary to improving the quality of my life and then also some items that bring joy to my life some things that I find to be very valuable and useful throughout my everyday life so let's go do that now but first I think we should start this video however the apartment tour video starts and that's at the front door so let's go do that now Oh what's going on so uh I'll show you around the kitchen a little bit this is it you know this is pretty much all we have here the first thing you might notice is that I don't really have many appliances and there's a reason for it you know I noticed that people in their lives they'll have on their kitchen counter they'll have a toaster they'll have a microwave they'll have an oven they'll have all these different sources of heating something and I realize that all you really need is just a stove so this is a gas stove it's pretty nice but you know if I want to heat something up I just use the stove I don't need a microwave I don't need to use a toaster to make toast I just use the pan and it really just works out pretty well so at some point next week we'll make a video about how I end up eating you know thirty to forty dollars of food per week I'm pretty cost effective when it comes to making food I make all of my food at home in this kitchen and one of the best things about it is that I keep the counter very very clear so I don't like having so many different things on there and it kind of stresses me out in a way where I've been in apartments in the past where there's six people in three bedrooms and the kitchen counter is absolutely destroyed there's like raw chicken everywhere is absolutely disgusting so I like to keep it very simple very clear but you'll notice that okay I do have a couple of things here like this blender for example but that's because I use it every single day so this is something that I can't go without but then there's other items like say a coffee pot that I don't really have any use for now maybe that's just me being lazy I'm not quite sure but usually when I make coffee I just put some coffee grounds into the cup and drink it like that you just wait for the coffee grounds to settle I don't know does that make me weird I'm not sure in mine a little bit but I don't know that's what I do alright so let me show you the living room here you'll notice that it's pretty simple and you know I found that there's a lot of things that I just don't really need but there's also things that you know I'm willing to spend less money on and then items that'll pay more money for so for example this couch right here as far as couches go it's relatively inexpensive this is about $400 for this couch which if you've ever bought sofas in the past new you'll know that that's pretty cheap you can pay a thousand two thousand dollars for a sofa but honestly it doesn't really make much of a difference to me I think it's pretty comfortable and I'm not very picky about it maybe that's just cuz I'm 21 years old and just out of college I don't really care too much but I'm pretty satisfied with this purchase and hopefully I'll have it for the next couple of years but then you'll notice some things that I will pay a little bit more money for something like these speakers over here which I paid a couple hundred dollars for and you know some people say what the hell is going on here you talk about saving money and then you spend $200 on speakers but I honestly think that they really make me happy I love listening to music that I love just blasting music in here and they're pretty thick walls so the neighbors don't really care too much I think I don't know I haven't got any reports yet but this TV you know I do like watching the news in the morning usually for the first thirty minutes so I'm eating my breakfast after I make different types of food I'll probably put that video out maybe next week about how I really live on thirty to forty dollars a week on all of my groceries so make sure you subscribe to the channel for that but this TV I got from my friend he's moving to LA and he didn't need it anymore and he gave it to me so that's why I have it I'd probably would have gotten a smaller one I think it's kind of a little bit large it's the only thing that really doesn't really fit this room very well that I don't like as much but everything else I got for a purpose and you know it's nice to have an extra chair in here and I guess when have some people over and I had my little plant friend over here it's pretty cool alright so let me show you my room you know I don't have very much in here a couple reasons for it I did just move here not too long ago the only problem with this apartment is that it's a little bit echoey because I don't have very much stuff but yeah so this is the room you know a bed is the one item that I think is important to pay quite a bit of money for so I paid over a thousand dollars for this bed and some people will say you're crazy what are you doing that's a lot of money you talk about saving money right and you're buying expensive speakers and mattresses that are $1,000 but I really did this for a purpose because if you look over here you see this weird-looking homemade type desk and that's because I built that desk when I was 12 years old and I probably paid $5 in bolts and found the wood laying around my house so it like I said earlier it really does come down to finding the things that do provide you more value and then this desk I mean it's just a slab of wood I don't really carry you know you can buy a thousand dollar desk and it's still a slab of wood versus a five dollar desk and it gets the same thing done I mean I've made thousands of dollars using that piece of wood but then this bed I noticed that when I was in high school I had some pretty bad back problems and I didn't understand why that was the case and I thought maybe those I was thinking what's wrong with me I'm 16 I had these back problems turns out I had a bed that was like 2530 years old probably a hand-me-down from a great-uncle or something and it was really bad for me and that's what ended up messing up my back so once I got a new mattress paid more money for it I realized that that's really really helpful and if you're not sleeping well then you're not going to be thinking well and you're probably not going to be too happy in life you're gonna be miserable if you have back pain throughout your day so get good mattress and it's going to pay off so much you don't have to spend thousands on it but get something that's pretty decent it goes for pillows as well sleep is incredibly important to make sure that you get some good sleep so there's a couple of things I'll show you actually one of them is this cookie jar the reason for this it's pretty interesting it's actually a locking cookie jar and this little device here has made me so much money and it's kind of sad that it's gotten to this point but essentially what I do is I take my phone and I think we're all kind of addicted to our phones in some way one way or another so what I do when I'm really trying to be productive I don't do a lot of work in here maybe we'll do some type of office tour later on but I put my phone in here and I lock it up so you can see the time on there I don't know if you can see that but we just crank up the time anyway that's five hours but I'll usually put in there for a couple hours and then press the button counts down from five and then it totally locked so now I'm not gonna be able to get my phone out of here even if I tried I guess I'd have to throw it out the window but there's no override and this prevents me from essentially being addicted my phone you know as much as we'd like to deny it I think a lot of people spend too much time on their phones and it's it's almost to the point where you get that feeling you start reaching on your pockets just like where where's my phone I need to check my messages maybe that's because I'm Generation Z I don't think I'm a millennial it's born in 98 I don't know what that makes me but yes so that little cookie jar device really does helped me a lot in terms of productivity in my life that's what I'm really about just optimizing things in my life now before we actually started filming this video I did have papers all over the wall I put a lot of my goals I write them down sticky notes everywhere you know some people like paintings in the room but I like to just kind of throw my ideas up on the wall with papers but I took those down you know it's kind of personal so I don't really want to go over that entirely but yeah so this is my room let's go back to the couch just to kind of summarizing things so let's talk about some of the benefits of what I've been doing and why having less stuff has actually impacted my life in so many ways other than just simplifying it I think one of the biggest things that it really did for me was it ended up saving me a lot of money we're talking thousands of dollars now if you've ever moved into a new apartment or a new home you'll know that expenses really add up you might pay $400 for a carpet you might pay more money for all these different things that you want to have these materialistic things and lamps for a hundred dollars and it really adds up quite a bit so I found that by not having all of this stuff I calculated it out and I found that I saved at least three or four thousand dollars by not getting all these different things so it's much more cost effective and it's not that I'm cheap it's not that I don't want to spend the money it's just that I don't really need to I don't think it actually improves my life by spending that much more and with the money that I saved from not putting too much stuff in here I can take that three or four thousand dollars and I can go spend it on vacations I can go to Asia for a month I can go over to Europe I can do a lot of traveling things that I actually do enjoy instead of a carpet that's overpriced now I can also take that money and I can invest it and I can make that money make me more money that I can then use the money that I made from that money to actually buy furniture with the interest that I made from it so it's a weird concept but it really does work in a lot of ways if you can just kind of hold off on some purchases so financial reasons is something that really does have an impact for myself for this and like I said I could probably spend thousands of dollars more on this but I just don't really want to but another thing that I did find is that when you're using less stuff when you have less stuff in your house it's actually kind of more environmentally friendly as well I didn't really think about that until after the fact and I realized how many things if you're buying a table and then you move out of your house or your apartment a year or two later you end up throwing it in the dumpster in a lot of cases or a sofa you throw it away and it just kind of creates more waste in society as a whole and I'm not an eco freak I do like to be eco friendly but that's just something that I did think about that I do feel better about it actually by doing that it's also much easier to clean my apartment when I have very few things I find that it's easy to just get a broom sweep everything up and I don't have to worry about moving things around and when I do move out of this apartment because I'm 21 and I'm probably gonna be moving the different cities every couple of years just to kind of get a different idea of different cities in America and maybe throughout the world it's gonna be so much simpler to get rid of this stuff or to give it away or to sell it rather than trying to rent multiple u-hauls to actually get rid of this stuff so those are really the things that did affect me and I feel like I'm so much happier not to say that I wasn't happy in the first place so I've always been fairly happy in my life I've never had any issues really but I think that I'm just so much better off right now I really do so if you enjoyed this video make sure you drop a like subscribe the channel if you haven't done so already and really appreciate all the support we're coming up on a quarter million subscribers I'm really excited for that so thank you and I'll see everybody in the next video which will be next week when I'm gonna show you how I end up spending 30 to 40 dollars per week on all of my groceries while still getting the right nutrients so thanks and I'll see everybody next time [Music]

Channel: Nate O'Brien

Views: 2,517,591

Rating: 4.8256764 out of 5

Keywords: minimalist apartment, minimalism, minimalist living, minimalist apartment tour, minimalist, nate o'brien, minimalist lifestyle, apartment tour, simple living, minimal apartment tour, minimalism for beginners

Id: VpoJc4cq0nA

Length: 13min 26sec (806 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 02 2019