we're choosing this.

It's one of the most profound and important articles I've read in a long time. It's about minimalism in Poland, which is already interesting. 

You can read the whole article - and probably should - but here's the money quote: 

---

He began to answer, “When I was younger, I had an important mentor. He was a survivor of Auschwitz who would live almost his entire existence in an occupied Poland—first by the Germans and then by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.”

“This man once made an observation to me I have never forgotten. After a trip he had taken to Western Europe, he pulled me aside and said,

‘I have come to realize that materialism holds people captive in many the same ways Communism does. Communism, by force, seeks to destroy personal identity. Materialism does the same. But materialism destroys personal identity by choice.’