I hadn't looked at the comments on the story about the girl who died till now. I am so embarrassed for this community. I feel like this is the worst I've ever seen people behave on this site.

Here's some general advice: if you find yourself beginning a comment on a thread about someone who has just died with a disclaimer of the form "I hate to be that guy" or "I hate to write this," just don't say it.

This isn't minimalism in any sense of the word, it's just a consumerist vanity.

OP's 'minimalism' is sustained by a reliance upon huge amounts of infrastructure, most of it environmentally unsustainable. He doesn't carry stuff with him, but uses money to access what he needs. It's like claiming to be a minimalist because you own a second house where you keep all your stuff. OP outsources the burden of sustaining his lifestyle to people poorer and browner than himself.

He eats without pans and plates because he relies on an army of immigrant workers to cook for him and wash his dishes. He doesn't own bedsheets or a sweeping brush because an immigrant maid cleans his hotel rooms. I don't believe that such an economic relationship is necessarily immoral or exploitative, but it certainly isn't minimalist.

OP flew more miles in the summer of 2010 than most people fly in a lifetime. That's hundreds of kilos of Jet-A fuel, a substantial share of the fleet and fixed infrastructure, plus untold amounts of carbon (magnified manifold by being emitted at altitude). He eats meat, which has a vast footprint in terms of land, water and energy use. How minimal is a lifestyle that leads to irrevocable climate change? How minimal is a lifestyle that wastes good soy protein to raise beef cattle?

Real minimalists take less than their fair share, not more.

I can tell that this was written by an outsider, because it focuses on the perks and rehashes several cliches that have made their way into the popular media but aren't all that accurate.

Most Googlers will tell you that the best thing about working there is having the ability to work on really hard problems, with really smart coworkers, and lots of resources at your disposal. I remember asking my interviewer whether I could use things like Google's index if I had a cool 20% idea, and he was like "Sure. That's encouraged. Oftentimes I'll just grab 4000 or so machines and run a MapReduce to test out some hypothesis." My phone screener, when I asked him what it was like to work there, said "It's a place where really smart people go to be average," which has turned out to be both true and honestly one of the best things that I've gained from working there.

A lot of the observations in the article fall out of this, but in ways that are less sound-bitey. Google doesn't enforce set working hours - you can get in as late as you want (the latest I've been in is around 4:15 PM, but that was because I had a DMV appointment, the latest from just not waking up was about 2:00), stay as late as you want (my latest was about 1:00 AM, though I worked from home until 6:00 AM last Thursday), duck out during the day if you're meeting a friend or have a date or need to pick a sick kid up from school, or work from home as necessary. You also don't have a set workload: you do as much work as you think is appropriate and then go home.

The thing is - you are surrounded by incredibly intelligent & fiercely hard-working people. Many of them were used to being top-dog at whatever institution they came from before - hell, many were top dog (we have a lot of ex-startup-founders; there's a good chance that you're working with someone that's founded a company or originated a successful open-source project). And that can be a big adjustment, and the types of folks that Google typically hire usually react to not being on top by working harder. It's up to you to set limits on the amount of time you're willing to spend working, and most new hires at Google are used to being limited by "the amount of work my boss/professor/thesis advisor throws at me", not by the number of hours in the day.