Fact: I love minimalism primarily because I despise moving.
When I was in college, my parents (quite graciously, I might add. Hi, Mom!) came to help me pack all of my dorm room things into a storage pod after every year of school. Every year, I would say to myself, "Okay this time I will actually be mostly packed by the time my folks get here.".
Alas, every year, my mother would open the door to my room and say some permutation of, "WOW you have so much stuff. How does it all fit in here?". Sigh.
I'd always start packing while I was taking finals, which admittedly was not the wisest plan in the world. I'd pack the easy things first - books I never read, winter clothing, that giant array of crafty things on the bottom shelf of the bookcase, SO MUCH YARN, et cetera. This meant of course that all the annoying/oddly shaped things were the ones left to pack by the time my parents arrived.
Tangent! One year, I decided to store my stuff in the creepy basement of the house I lived in over the summer instead of using a storage pod. I'm not sure why I decided to do this, since one of my first experiences at college was bleach-staining my pants trying to salvage a new buddy's stuff that she'd stored downstairs...and an entire gallon of bleach had spilled on her things. Gah.
Anyways, the stuff stored in the "trunk room" had to meet various and sundry standards to avoid being thrown out over the summer. No storage of furniture was allowed, yet anything that could be packaged into a box was permitted. My mother constructed a large, awkward box for my papasan chair. When I praised her for cleverly skirting the rules, she said, "It's not sneaky - it's technical compliance!".
Once in vet school, I realized - hey, if I have less stuff, I will have less of it to move. The seemingly endless horrible dusty-handed, achy-armed, cobwebs-in-hair ordeal will not last as long. THIS IS AWESOME.
Anti-consumerism, tiny living, and simplicity are all well and good, but I kid you not when I say that this is the thing that got me on the minimalism train.
So, you know, now I have two pairs of khakis, which is usually fine. As a vet student on clinics, I can budge in enough time to do laundry approximately once a week.
However, sometimes it's rough when a dog explosively defecates all over your last clean pair of khakis (it's okay, it wasn't his fault). That's the moment when I fleetingly really want about eight pairs of khakis, all stain resistant and exactly the same.