Minimalism usually starts with your closet. You donate the jacket you haven’t worn in years, toss the broken pens, promise yourself fewer impulse buys. And it helps, until your brain feels cluttered again, even in a clean space.

Then you check your laptop: 37 tabs open. Some are months old. Others you swear you’ll get to “later.” Every one is a half-finished thought, an unopened possibility. It’s digital noise, and it builds quietly.

Closing tabs feels wrong at first, like losing something important. But slowly, it becomes clear: most were never going to be used. Some belong to versions of you that passed through already. Others only exist because you didn’t want to decide what mattered yet.

Fewer tabs means fewer loose ends. It means letting go of the pressure to do, read, watch, solve everything at once. It means trusting that if something truly matters, you’ll find your way back to it.

Decluttering a space is satisfying. But decluttering a mind? That starts with learning to stop holding on to every little task or idea just in case.

You don’t need to empty your screen completely. Just enough to breathe when you open it.