It’s taken me a while to write this review. Even though I first saw it when it was just released to donors, the message and meaning of the documentary have been floating around in my mind for the past two weeks and it’s been a bit of a challenge for me to sort out my resulting thoughts.

The premise of the documentary is that there is this ‘life script’ in which we’re told by society that we have to go to college and get a degree, get a secure job, get married to the best looking person we can get to agree, buy a big house, buy two cars, have 2.5 children and then work until you’re 65 when you can retire and finally do what you want. Millions of people follow this path each year and while none of these things are bad in and of themselves, it is a convenient template that few take the time to question. Instead they follow the path of least resistance. After all, we’re told that these things are guaranteed to lead you to happiness.

But does this script lead to happiness?

Have you ever been so frustrated, so infuriated, by a task that seems to be absolutely impossible that you want to hurl something heavy through the nearest window and put your fist through the wall?

That was me the first time I tried knitting.

When I mention to people that we’re minimalists the responses tend to fall into one of two categories. The first category involves people giving me looks like I just told them I habitually stomp on kittens and wondering aloud how can I live without item X, usually television.

The second group involves haughty scoffing and being told that we’ll never be True Minimalists ™ until we can fit all our worldly possessions into a single carry-on bag.

Both of these groups suffer from the same problem. They just don’t know what minimalism really is – at least not to us. I’d like to fix that.

I’ve always been a big fan of Couchsurfing as a language learning resource for finding native speakers of your target language without having to leave your own city. A few weeks ago though we finally got to use it for its original intended purpose – travel – and for anyone who hasn’t heard of it yet I wanted to introduce you to it and share a bit about out own experience.

If there’s one thing I hate, it’s feeling like I’ve wasted time.

Now that doesn’t mean I have to be productive 24/7, I consider having fun or relaxing valuable uses of my time in most cases – I just hate working hard toward a goal and feeling like I have nothing to show for it.

When it comes to language learning that trait used to make me a huge perfectionist. If I was going to spend a few hours on Anki trying to learn 30 new words for the day I needed to really know them at the end of it or I would feel like all that time doing SRS reps was a waste. To be fair I understand it wasn’t, but it was still kind of discouraging nonetheless setting out to learn 30 words and only remembering 20 or so the next day.

Then I figured out the trick to learning more effectively and keeping myself motivated – short, targeted study sessions.