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Today we will talk about how to ask friends and family to embrace change. Change isn’t easy. More often than not, we don’t change because we get in our own way. Other times we don’t make a change because we’re afraid of what people will think about us, afraid of what they will say about us, afraid they will treat us differently. Ultimately, we are afraid of rejection. When you approach minimalism, you will realize many of your closest friends and family members will be supportive of the changes you want to make; and in other cases, many of them will be neutral bystanders, ambivalent to the simplification going on around us. In some instances, some of the people closest to us will not approve of your new paths: some of these people will mistake the journey on which you are embarking as a direct attack on their way of life, as if by questioning your lives they were also questioning their lives. Here’s something you can say to the naysayers :

It’s not you, it’s me. We’ve all heard this line before. It has been parodied a thousand times, but there is a profound truth to be discovered here. We weren’t questioning anyone else’s lifestyle but our own. Many people weren’t happy with their own situations, and they aspired to be like us because they thought we “had it figured out.” We didn’t have it figured out, though, and that frustrated some people because we were who they wanted to emulate: we had the material possessions, the salaries, the awards, the facade of power, the fast-track to corporate success. We looked around us, though, and realized most of the people above us, people several rungs higher on the corporate ladder, weren’t happy, either—they were far less happy than we were. What were we supposed to do—keep working exceptionally hard and aspire to continue to be unhappy? It’s all right to tell naysayers you’re making changes in your life so you can be happy. Better yet, you can do what we did and ask those naysayers a question: “You want me to be happy, don’t you?”

Come back tomorrow for more inspiration.

Reference : https://www.theminimalists.com/friends/