Minimalism is trend now. It’s no longer a fringe activity like collecting bugs or freeganism (people who eat food that they find in trashcans). You can practice it and not be judged harshly, if that’s what you’re worried about. Minimalism is mentally freeing because as you get rid of possessions, your living space looks less cluttered. That clutter may be causing you mental stress. It also has an effect on your life span.
When you buy something, you are not really buying it with dollars. You have to work a certain amount of time at your job to get those dollars to exchange for the things that are cluttering up your home. You work for the dollars, then you take the dollars and give it to someone for some physical object. So if you take out the middle step–the dollars–you are trading minutes or hours or days of your life for each of those things, no matter how trivial. That expensive sofa that you decided you don’t really like after you’ve owned it for 2 weeks? You exchanged that for part of your life. Those stupid little tourist souvenirs sitting in a drawer somewhere that seemed like a fun idea at the time, that cost you part of your life too.
When you walk into a Walmart or an Ikea (or a Nordstorm, if you’re fancy), everything that you see is mass-produced, there is nothing special about them. But you only have one life, it’s one of a kind and it’s irreplaceable. Do you really want to trade something that is unique and irreplaceable for something that is so common that factories can produce thousands of them a day? Those things that you see ads for when you turn on the TV or surf the internet, are not products, they are parasites. To buy them you are exchanging your life energy.