How few possessions is it possible to get by on? That depends on what your living situation requires you to provide. If you stay in a hotel, most things will be provided for. It also depends on what is available as consumables and convenient on-demand services in one's society. Before industrial dairy production and distribution, households needed a special device for separating cream from milk. Today, such a machine is seen as redundant. Likewise, for a young urban citizen, it is redundant to own a sandwich grill as he/she can easily buy fresh toast for most hours of the day. But the sandwich grill is still popular among their parents in the suburbs.
Most of all, the amount of possessions one needs depends on what considers part of an acceptable comfortable life. An acceptable comfortable life is one where one doesn't have recurring minor unmet material needs. It can also not include blatant sporadic unmet material needs. Such conditions leads to internal revolt, and the lifestyle to be abandoned. The challenge of Efemeralism is not about getting by on a small income, when one doesn't have a choice. It is about being able to persistently live like a poor person, while being rich. It is about living way below one's means, and feeling happy about it.
But that isn't the whole truth, that Efemeralism is about living cheaper. Sometimes, owning more stuff is more economical than renting on-demand. That is true. However, the resource that is being rationed is not money. It is attention and mental energy. Getting rid of Stuff and living smaller is just one way for affluent people to save mental energy. Affluence depends on the expenses that one's brain requires to retain its place on the hedonic treadmill. That is the connection between money and mental energy. Since the exchange rate is very subjective, we should expect there to be a lot of possible arbitrage. And the weirder one's taste, the more arbitrage one can make.
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