Review: “The Longing For Less” is a bait & switch in its loveliest form

So I spent the last week reading Kyle Chayka’s The Longing For Less, which is out today (in case you’ve somehow missed the promotional hurricane it’s been whipping up, of which Deez Links has also been a part of, oop), and let me just say this book was not at all what I expected. 

As a casual reader of Chayka’s work, including his famous Welcome to Airspace, this recent piece wrestling with overtourism and authenticity in Iceland, and examinations of algorithm-age monoculture, I kiiiiinda figured that a whole book in that vein on contemporary aesthetics would be either a huge downer, or at least read as a little pretentious…….because like come on, do we really need 200-some bound pages reminding us of how a lil innocent Marie Kondo-ing is actually some sad, existential cry for help? 

But that’s not what The Longing For Less is. The first few chapters do talk about Kondo-ing and lower-case “m” minimalism as a current trend, but then it pulls this rather amazing bait-and-switch dive into a whole meandering meditation on how different movements in architecture, art, music, design, and philosophy got us to this point.

Most importantly, it emphasizes how the original capital “M” Donald-Judd-esque Minimalism as well as a generally “messier minimalism” that Chayka describes actually signified something entirely different, a way of living and perceiving that required “a new definition of beauty, one centers on the fundamental miracle of our moment-to-moment encounter with reality.” i.e., it was never just about the sleek lines and glass walls.

The best way I can describe the experience of reading this book is that it all reminded me a lot of the blue sweater scene from  The Devil Wears Prada, where Meryl Streep is explaining to Anne Hathaway that maybe she thinks she’s being all original picking out that sweater for herself, but in the longer arc of how taste and style and trends work, it was actually an all-but-inevitable choice for Anne, the modern-day end user. But Meryl, of course, untangles all this context in a very snotty way, which gets me to my other point — The Longing For Less is decidedly not. If anything, it feels like reading a dense but decidedly accessible text from your favorite college class.

And the writing is beautiful, too — for example, the way Chayka writes about a piece of avant-garde music where “notes accrued like torrents of rain” or “a last storm of piano … gradually withdraws, the tide going out and leaving us listeners beached, gasping” is a delight to read. 

All in all, it’s no surprise that the lead blurb for this book comes from Jenny Odell, writer of How To Do Nothing, a huge favorite from last year that I think also pulls off this sleight of hand in being a book that seems like it’ll make make you feel bad about being on your phone, but is actually so much more. Whatever name we’re giving to this genre of books that first diagnose our mostly depressing modern condition, then deliver the medicine that make us us feel more fully alive, count The Longing For Less in as a brilliant new addition.