Joshua Fields Millburn - Everything That Remains: A Memoir by The Minimalists

A Brief Note for the Reader

This book is a work of nonfiction. Sort of. You see, all characters and entities herein really are real, and all the events actually did happen, but sometimes we had to make stuff up (e.g., specific dialogue, precise dates, the various colors of the sky).

Structured as a book-length, five-year conversation between its two authors, Everything That Remains is written as a first-person narrative by me (Joshua Fields Millburn) with intentional interruptionscomments, interjections, and smart-alecky remarksfrom Ryan Nicodemus. This structure is somewhat mimetic of our in-person interactions (i.e., we like to interrupt each othera lot). In the book, however, Ryans interruptions take place in the form of endnotes. These endnotes can be read when each interruption occurs or at the end of the book. As with everything in life, you get to choose.

Its worth noting that a handful of namespersons and corporationswere changed to avoid pissing off certain folks. We also took occasional creative liberties to aid the flow and continuity of the book, which was attenuated (necessarily) from more than a thousand pages at its bloated nadir to its current slender tome. And its almost certain that Ryan and I misremembered or couldnt agree on some people/events, and yet these misremembrances are, in a weird way, still true. After all, truth is perspectival, isnt it?

For want of a better descriptor, we decided to call this book a memoir. Trust me, I realize how pretentious it sounds tove written a memoir at thirty-two. But its not really a memoirmore like a bunch of life lessons explored in a narrative format, which allowed Ryan and me to flesh out many of the topics we touch upon at our website, TheMinimalists.com, expanding on those topics by way of storytelling and conversation. Besides, autobiography sounded too stiff and stilted, a title reserved for more important folk: presidents and tycoons and child actors with drug problems. If you hate the whole idea of calling this thing a memoir, then please feel free to call it something else. Call it a prescriptive-nonfiction novel. Call it a personal history. Call it a recipe book for a more meaningful life. Call it whatever you want. I wont mind.

JFM

PART ONE || Everything

1 || Fluorescent Ghosts

December 2008

Our identities are shaped by the costumes we wear. I am seated in a cramped conference room, surrounded by ghosts in shirtsleeves and pleated trousers. There are thirty-five, maybe forty, people here. Middle managers, the lot of us. Mostly Caucasian, mostly male, all oozing apathy. The groups median complexion is that of an agoraphobe.

A Microsoft Excel spreadsheet is projected onto an oversized canvas pulled from the ceiling at the front of the room. The canvas is flimsy and cracked and is a shade of off-white that suggests its a relic from a time when employees were allowed to smoke indoors. The rest of the room is aggressively white: the walls are white, the ceiling is white, the people are white, as if all cut from the same materials. Well, everyone except Stan, seated at the back of the room. Cincinnatis population is forty-five percent black, but Stan is part of our companys single-digit percentage. His comments, rarely solicited by executives, are oft-dismissed with a nod and a pained smile. Although hes the size of an NFL linebacker, Stan is a paragon of kindness. But that doesnt stop me from secretly hoping that one day hell get fed up with the patronizing grins and make it his duty to reformat one of the bosses fish-eyed faces.

You cant miss the enormous Broadspan logo on the wall behind us, a rapacious-looking line-drawn eagle, soaring, its wings outstretched, clutching the companys side-by-side vowels in its talons. Right Here, Right Now, our occult tag line, is typeset below the logo in Helvetica Bold. If you say Right Here, Right Now repeatedly, it begins to take on a sort of metaphysical edge, a profound truism the skinny-tie guys in marketing didnt intend.

We are currently landlocked in the middle of the eleventh floor. This is the final Monday Sales Meeting of the year. Not a single beam of natural light can be seen from my vantage point, seated between my boss and my bosss boss, both of whom have Irish surnames and are nearly indistinguishable from one another. The air stinks of industrial-strength cleaning supplies and years of resentment. Every seat at the large Formica conference table is full, so a handful of latecomers are forced to stand, congregating toward the back of the room as if waiting to give confession. The table is littered with printed spreadsheets and half-empty Starbucks cups. Someone behind me yawns, which triggers several more yawns among the crowd. Boredom is contagious.

The projected spreadsheet is out of focus, so were all staring forward, squinting, attempting to find something meaningful in the blur. The projector emits a drone of white noise that everyone pretends to ignore. But I cant ignore it. How could you? That incessant hum controls the atmosphere around us, holding hostage all other sounds.

The overhead lights are partially switched off. Everyone is baptized in half-light, a hideous fluorescent glow that makes us all appear vaguely ill. Theres another yawn across the table. And then another. A man with pudgy red cheeks sniffs twice and then wipes his nose on his cuff.

Ryan Nicodemus, my best friend of twenty years, the only man not wearing a tie, walks into the meeting wielding a massive coffee cup and a jutting jawline that carries an apologetic grin and a couple days worth of dark stubble. Hes swarthy and confident and very late.

My boss (or is it his boss?) asks a question I dont realize is directed at me until I hear my name, so how do you explain the decline in attach rates this week, Millie? Half my coworkers call me Millie, which seems endearing half the time, and patronizing the other half, depending on the person and their cadence. I look to my right and then my left. Both men are fixed on the glowing grid at the front of the room, their faces red with early-onset rosacea, a condition that makes them appear perpetually angry or embarrassed or somehow both at the same time. The spreadsheet, dull and cloudy, is color-coded green and red, apropos since its three days till Christmas. The color scheme is inadvertent, though; its always the same, every meeting, no matter the time of year: green is good, red is bad. Red dominates the blur today.

I look at the numbers and try to affect what I hope is a sufficiently displeased look, followed by one of my dozen or so standard laconic answers, some jargon about marketing-spend and GRPs and TPRs and a few other acronyms that are supposed to make me look like I have a well-informed grasp on the situation. Half the room nods sympathetically to the rhythm of my gnomic reasoning. The bosses seem pleased with my explanation. I pretend to jot a couple notes on my yellow legal pad, something actionable. Ryan, now standing at the side of the room, just shakes his head at my line of bullshit. The projector is still thrumming, becoming more and more pronounced with each passing moment. HHHMMMMM. The bosses move on to the next excuse baron.

At age twenty-seven, Im the youngest director in our companys hundred and forty year history. For a while I thought this was impressive. You know, an admirable title to throw around when someone asks, as we invariably do, that most pernicious of questions: What do you do? To which I could respond with an air of accomplished pride: Im the director of operations for a hundred and fifty retail stores.

Fancy, right? Well, not exactly. You see, this is all pretty much one big accident. In more ways than one, my entire life has been an accident, so its difficult to figure out exactly how I got Right Here, Right Now.