The Lagom Idea

There's a Swedish word for "just the right amount" — not too little, not too much. Lagom describes a whole way of living by that idea: work, rest, food, belongings, all held to a measure that's enough without being excessive. Linnea Dunne, who grew up in Sweden, writes about how this shows up in ordinary things — a capsule wardrobe, a tidy but lived-in home, knowing when you have enough of something rather than always reaching for more.

It's a useful corrective to a very common feeling: that decluttering means deprivation, or that having "enough" is somehow a consolation prize next to having "more." Lagom suggests the opposite — that enough is its own kind of comfort, not a compromise.

Sasaki was, by his own account, an unremarkable single man in his thirties living in a cramped Tokyo apartment stuffed with books, camera gear, and clothes he didn't wear. He wasn't a designer or a monk. That's the point of the book — he writes as someone who backed into minimalism out of frustration, not as someone qualified to preach it.

The Japanese context gives it a slightly different flavour to the Swedish lagom material — less about balance, more about what he calls "facing your things," actually looking at an object and asking why you still have it. He's disarmingly honest about the parts that were hard: getting rid of gifts, photographs, things tied to a version of himself he was letting go of.