I think almost all activities require something like this
a) the skills (knowing already, hiring someone, learning how to)
b) the tools (having them already, renting them, buying them)
c) the supplies (owning them already, buying them when needed)
There's a fine balance between how work one does, how quickly it can get done, and the amount of time and money it takes.
ffj is an example of someone who knows a lot, owns a lot of tools, and owns a lot of supplies. So he can get a lot done fast. He doesn't need to spend time learning or money (and time) hiring. All tools are available. There's no need to spend time or money renting them. The supplies are mostly there too. I'm heading in that direction too (the "homestead" direction). The benefit is that one can get a lot of stuff done fast and for less cost in time and money if one knows how and have the supplies at hand.
Most minimalists I've run into (it's somewhat of an occupational hazard for me
![Geek :geek:](./images/smilies/icon_e_geek.gif)
) seem to get around not owning stuff or supplies by renting or buying services. For example, the majority seem to either eat out all the time (alternatively, they cheat and don't count their kitchen utensils as part of their 37 items) or live on a diet of rotisserie chicken and ready-to-eat salads or cafeteria food. Activities are either inherently minimal (the more typical choice) and is almost always travel, working on the laptop, running, or doing yoga; or again, or they are rented (e.g. an apartment that come with janitorial services).
But I think the minimalism--homesteading axis is separate from what is going on in "stuff---a cluttered life).
What's more typical is that people have no general skills (they're specialist worker-consumers and their specialized work skill stuff is at work), but they still have tools. The hope was buying the tools would magically instil the skill in the owner. E.g. buying new skis will make me get into skiing/become a better skier. They also have way too many supplies. Like the SABLE principle mentioned above but for most things: clothes in the closet that still have the original tag on five years later when it has gone out of fashion; shrink wrapped DVDs; unread books; ... There's also the tendency to buy the set, the tool-supply issue. Instead of buying two pots, people buy a set of 8 pots and 2 pans to spave instead of just getting the original two pots that were required. Add upgrade fever. The problem here is that it is so much easier (in time) to buy stuff than it is to both learn how to use it and to get rid of it again (at least mentally). So because inflow by buying is much larger than outflow through either using up or getting rid up, homes are now mainly used to store all this stuff. And the reason it becomes clutter is that houses haven't been able to grow fast enough (rate for newbuilds is +25sqft/year) relative to the exponentially growing skill it requires to organize it.
I suspect that something akin to the Dunbar number also holds for our environment. We can hold a fixed number of items in our environment. We can hold more if we abstract it it. E.g. I don't own 8 screw drivers, I own 1 set of screw drivers. It's easy to keep the perspective of 100 items. It's much harder when three rooms contain 2200 items. Consider the task of getting rid of one item per day. With 100 items, you know what you have. You can see it. You can probably even list it mentally without too many errors. You can contrast and compare fairly quickly to select one. It would take you 3 months before you were down to nothing. With 2200 items, you'd have much less of an idea of what these things are (hence the tendency to buy yet another one because they forgot they already had one). Contrasting and comparing is a much much harder problem and once decided, finding the item might be impossible. And, this process would take six years to complete instead of three months.