But I am still happy to read it again. I think we need to constantly remind ourselves with advice like this. I am going to print this essay now and give copies to my wife and kids.
Sure - my comment was not a negative. The date should be in the post title though, when it's something so old (hah, 3 years old? that's ancient! What the internet does to us, eh...)
I re-read it a few days ago and thought I'd see what discussion the essay had. Was surprised to find no mention on searchyc.com. Was very surprised to see it posted today :)
"I think humans constantly scan their environment to build a mental model of what's around them. And the harder a scene is to parse, the less energy you have left for conscious thoughts. A cluttered room is literally exhausting."
Have you ever interviewed a politician? With jobs et all its probably the same. He will always be using that perfect entrepreneur mask and wont waste a single word not to sell you that image.
It's like reading a piece about a politician honesty and his worries about the people.
Only that with the business people the interviewer is not even trying to expose him. And if it's wired, then it's even the other way around. They will try hard to godfy ...is that a word?
This is great. I came to the same conclusion some time ago. Of course, I never articulated it so elequently.
Anyway, anytime I bring new stuff into my house I take the same amount of stuff and put it in a box. About four times a year I call the Salvation Army and they pick up the box.
Before buying something new, I have to think about what old stuff is going in the box. Normally it isn't hard. On Christmas, when I get a lot of new stuff, it can be a challange. The worst is when someone gives me something I will never use and I have to put it right in the box, which seems ungrateful. Other than that, the box is liberating and putting stuff in it feels great.
yes I have started doing this kind of thing as well. I have a lot of crappy business casual clothes that don't really fit anymore. I don't want to toss them because I keep thinking I'll lose the weight to be able to fit back in them real soon.
What I have started doing is donating 2 pairs of old pants to Goodwill and buying 1 pair of nice pants that I will want to wash and deal with. This seems to be working well for me so far.
I also wanted to mention that our hard disks can suffer from this same problem. I have also started making an effort to delete old pdf books that I won't read, delete mp3s that I'm tired of hearing etc.
And yet when I got back I didn't discard so much as a box of it. Throw away a perfectly good rotary telephone? I might need that one day.
Sounds like INTP tendency:
Because the present is inextricably linked to a sense of the past, INTPs tend to hoard items which help solidify the connection to the past. They find it very difficult to let go of anything they have collected (or indeed created) and which may have a nostalgic meaning.
I suspect most people have their own personal caveat to this essay. Mine isn't books (I usually give good books to friends after reading them, and bad books to ebay). My own caveat would be raw materials for building or repairing things (electrical components, nuts and bolts, tools, etc).
so true, they take up a good amount of space and there's not a heck of a lot of air accumulating in that space, just paper and a lot of it.
When I moved from home to college, I really only had 2 or 3 medium boxes of things i wanted/could take with me. Then from college to my first apartment I also had really accumulated nothing of value, and threw away a lot. When I moved from my first apartment to my second, an unbelievable thing happened. My first job brought with it a mountain of stuff. I really didn't realize it as I always kept that place spotlessly tidy (When I start to think through a piece of code I tend to walk around cleaning, its like a mindless activity that helps my mind work) The big mistake I made was using server boxes i swiped from work to move. Next time (which should be in a few months) I plan on using more smaller boxes.
I have thousands of books and would love to get rid of them. I would need a future-proof platform that allows annotations, and that lets me migrate between devices (so I can keep my books for at least my lifetime). I guess I would also need a convenient book scanner, for those books that are no longer in print.
I think that it's fairly clear why they don't do this --would they do it only for books purchased from amazon.com? If not, would they require some sort of proof of purchase? What about used books? What about books not currently available on the Kindle? If you send them an old edition of a book, then what edition do you get on the Kindle?-- but it's such a gorgeous idea. This has been one of the biggest roadblocks in my attempts to decide whether to buy a Kindle: I have a huge library, and the idea of spending thousands of dollars in format-shifting doesn't appeal to me. If I could even just get a discount for books that I already own, it would make me much, much more likely to take the plunge.
JPGs in PDF form? Both of those formats will be around forever.
I recently scanned a bunch of books using gscan2pdf; it makes it relatively easy, and integrates some decent utilities like Tesseract for OCR. (Some fiddling with controls meant that I could start playing a movie and mechanically flip pages and punch the scan button.)
Relatively high-resolution scans like 3-500 DPI mean you can get big PDFs (~200MB for a big anthology was normal), but this isn't much of a concern to me: I can clean them up later if I really need space, and in an era where 1.5tb is 100$, 200MB is nothing (1 or 2 cents of space?).
It's really not that bad. The things that are time consuming about moving are packing, disassembling, organizing, reassembling and so on. I own over 1000 books and live on the 5th floor of a building without an elevator, and even so, with 4 people it took us about 5-10 minutes to move the books in. Packing them into boxes took maybe 20 minutes.
Even though by weight it's much lighter the book shelves are a real pain in the ass.
i'm moving to another country in the next weeks. plan was to leave everything behind but the (academic) wife's some thousand books.
I was going to spend some little money on the shipping. Then i found out that the company would pay a ship container and give me hardly any financial support to settle there. So now i'm on full pack rat mode!
...and i can't tell you how nice and easy it was to ship only the some thousand books. Everything else by comparisson is hell. You have to fill some isurance forms on everything. Packaging is a pain. You can't separate a bed into smaller boxes like a shelf of books. Etc
"I suspect most people have their own personal caveat to this essay."
I believe anything is OK (even in large numbers) as long as it is easy for one's mind to treat it as one "item". Books (and probably your raw materials) are uniform. You put the next one with all the others and forget it, so it creates little additional drag on you. Yeah, up to a point when you need to expand storage, but the general rule remains.
I used to collect books, and then I donated them to the library. Now, I have more space, they keep track of them for me, and I can check them out whenever I want.
I tried to donate a stack of books to my local library. They weren't "new or as new" so they wouldn't accept them :( They weren't damaged. They just didn't look new.
Them not taking them wasn't so bad. I was more annoyed by the attitude of the staff who made a big song and dance as if they were doing me a favour by even considering taking free books.
A library accepting free books in good condition seemed like a no brainer to me :|
I can relate to the point about how traveling realigns your ideas about stuff. I've been traveling around South America for the last 5 months with exactly one change of clothes. The general rule for long trips like this is that if you haven't used one of your possessions in 3 days, then you shouldn't have it along.
I find that I take this concept with me back to civilization. I'll get back to my storage locker and not find anything that I want to take out. "This isn't the shirt that I wear.", and "I already have enough socks" (meaning 4).
Back home in England, I can think of exactly two possessions that I've accumulated in the 3 years since I've been living there with my girlfriend: a 22" monitor to connect to the laptop, and a really nice Italian espresso machine. Both get used every day, so evidently they meet my criteria for "stuff you're allowed to have along."
I relocated from Austin to San Francisco to Japan and with each move, I drastically reduced my lifestlye. It's just as PG said: you don't really miss anything.
And I dealt with books by getting an e-reader so I could carry my library in my backpack.
Books: for a long time I thought that I had done something when I acquired one. Yet clearly there's a difference between the book once dipped into and on the shelf for years, and the Indian cookbook with turmeric stains all over or the tech reference with its spine worn out. I have tried lately to be more discriminating in my book buying, and not to buy another book of some type (tech, history, fiction) before I've finished the last purchased book of that type.
Books^2: When I buy a paperback novel to read on a plane (or while waiting to get on a plane :-) I often finish it in some distant city and leave it someplace where somebody else can find it. Just too much work to sell for a pittance, and too valuable to simply toss out. So I leave its fate to Fate.
This reminds me of fight club (or at least one of the core themes), in fact one of the lines in the essay reads like it was plucked out of the movie.
Anyway, Fight Club definitely struck a cord with me and since then I have been living with incredibly little stuff. I have a computer, my iphone, my car, a desk and a bed and just enough clothes to get by for 2 weeks (do laundry once a week) and of course minor other things that you need, but basically bare essentials.
While I cant say for sure how much of an impact its had on my life, I can say without a doubt that coming home always feels very relaxing and definitely helps me prepare for a new day.
My wife and I came to the same conclusion when we wanted to start our own thing. We needed to be flexible enough to live from anywhere a frugal life style would demand and our stuff was just weighing us down. Even storing it was going to cost alot of money - in the end we got rid of must of it.
Our books were the biggest culprits. Through bargains, we accumulated tons of novels that we've never read. Those were the first to go. The only books left were mostly references.
When kids have a birthday or holiday with gifts, we tell them that they have to throw away or give away an equal amount of stuff. It works surprisingly well.
I've been thinning out my media stuff (books, videos, old records, etc.) in batches during moves, but recently began selling what I could on amazon. It's mostly CDs and books, but in the past two months it's totaled about $800. One problem, however, is many titles are worth too little for me to go through the trouble of listing, selling, packing, and shipping them. This is especially true of older books. No matter how good or important they were, about 90% sell for <$2 used on Amazon.
I took all my CDs to Amoeba Records for store credit that I used to buy vinyl. Any CD I owned can just as easily be purchased/downloaded online, and I realized that my emotional connection is with the music -- not the CD that I haven't physically used in 5 years. CDs are only going to lose value as time goes on, so why not get the most out of them while some people are still willing to buy them? I plan to start doing the same with my DVDs. And anything that they won't take as trade in, I'm going to give away: giving away stuff on Craigslist is easier than THROWING things away.
I wrote something very similar in the same exact month: http://chir.ag/20070725 - Buy Less Stuff. I honestly don't remember if I was inspired by PG's essay or it was just a coincidence. Like 'bcowcher', I even mentioned Fight-Club.
So where am I today 3 years later? I still haven't bought a lot of stuff. But I got married in 2008 and now my house is full of my wife's stuff. However, she started to get rid of a lot of her stuff. I don't need stuff to make myself feel at home but she does, as that is her only connection with her past life. I bought some clothes for myself last year (12 single-color t-shirts @ $3/each online) and a lot of running gear for my ultramarathon but other than that, barely anything.
I think the lesson here for me is that it is indeed possible to reduce your acquisition of "stuff" and maintain it. However, it depends very much on your personality. My wife likes to dress nicely and decorate the house. So we'll be stuff every night and then, hopefully not too much.
I've recently started to reduce my spending on "stuff" so I can start saving for the things I've decided actually matter (a startup, a trip to Europe with my girlfriend, as well as a ring for her for whenever that moment is right) One of the key concepts of the essay is happiness will not be reduced, and possibly increased with this change in living. To this I will attest is very true, I haven't gone on the trip yet, but I already get more pleasure out of knowing I actually WILL be going on it, then if I bought a faster laptop etc.
I have a 90-day rule. If I have something and I haven't used it in 90 days, I probably don't need it and get rid of it (sell it, give it away, throw it out). This tends to keep my life de-cluttered and "focused". It also keeps me from waisting money on stuff I don't need. "Am I really going to be still excited about, and benefit from, using this widget I want to buy in 90 days or not?" I've lived like this for about a decade and I highly recommend trying it.
There are exceptions of course. Seasonal items like clothing, mountain bike, etc... Books too as mentioned in the essay. Having a library of coding books on-hand is not only reassuring, but has helped me save significant time solving a problem, even if I only rarely use the book. And I don't think it's a good idea throwing out your old money either. ;)
I recently decided to give away all my coding books. They were great, and I learned a lot -- but I never reference them. I remember most of the core concepts, and the details are a quick Google away. My other coworkers decided to follow suit, and our work library has grown to 4x what it was a week ago. And my apartment is slightly less cluttered.
Even as a child, I was pretty indifferent to stuff (A 9th grade essay wanted us to write about our most prized possession and I couldn't come up with anything except my computer). But I think the final break for me happened when inadequate backup procedures caused me to lose several years worth of digital photos.
I was initially heartbroken but then I started thinking how many times I had actually looked at any of those photos since I took them and, for the majority of then, the answer was zero. After that, my relationship with stuff shifted radically.
A few years later, I lost a wooden spoon which was pretty much the only thing I held an emotional attachment to anymore. That thing was older than I was and had been the one constant in cooking which is a huge part of my life. I moped for a year, shrugged and got a new one.
I'm starting to seriously consider that, once a year, I will find the thing currently most precious to me and get rid of it.
It sounds to me like you might be taking the wrong lesson away from this. Try finding the five things most precious to you and throwing away everything else.
Being affected by the loss of a spoon shouldn't make you want to never love a spoon again (that way lies crappy romantic comedies). The idea here is to concentrate our attachment to objects, not eliminate it.
(For those of you who don't want to click the second link, here's the money shot:
List the ten most expensive things (products, services, or experiences) that you have ever paid for (including houses, cars, university degrees, marriage ceremonies, divorce settlements, and taxes). Then, list the ten items that you have ever bought that gave you the most happiness. Count how many items appear on both lists. )
Geoffry Miller, nice! If I owed a house, it would be on both lists. Other than that, my computer, education and guitar are shared on both lists. Below those, my most expensive purchases have been necessities (think bed mattress, rent, etc). Honestly, it feels wrong to regret spending money on these. I may not love them, but they're part of the cost of living.
The list exercise might make more sense to non-students.
One problem I've found with it is that people buy me worthless gifts (gifts I don't derive value from because I don't use them).
I've created an online list of things I want at kaboodle.com, or more exactly, a list of things I wouldn't mind possessing, but my family refuses buying anything on the list because that's "spoiling the surprise". I would prefer they stop giving me gifts altogether, but they won't no matter what.
My favorite quote from PG's article:
What I didn't understand was that the value of some new acquisition wasn't the difference between its retail price and what I paid for it. It was the value I derived from it.
Being a middle-middle-class American in the Midwest, I can and do pretty much just buy what it is I want or need that is on the scale of a Christmas gift my family could or would get. That, combined with geeky tastes (y'all know what I mean) virtually guarantees things-I-value-as-garbage as presents.
Next year I'm going to try picking a charity and asking for nothing but donations in my name. I'm going to pick a popular one, too, not a obscure and ignorable "geek" charity or something, but one that may actually induce guilt if they ignore the request. Maybe that will at least cut things down.
(Come to think of it, maybe I'll pick a Celiac Disease foundation or something, since I have that. A bit more self-serving, perhaps, but even more likely to induce guilt if ignored. I hate a swing "guilt" at the issue, but I've tried mere protest for a couple of years now to no effect.)
I make plenty of money, and I have very little interest in most stuff. The only stuff that does interest me is books, video games, and computer/electronics equipment. When I want one of those things, I buy it.
I've also been involved with an animal rights organization I co-founded for 11 years or so, so every birthday I simply ask everyone to make a donation to that organization.
One of my good friends told me that this year, he gave donations to charity in the names of his family members. Great idea! My parents have been packrats, the last thing they need is more stuff. But a donation to a charity for a disease a loved one died of? Probably the best gift they could receive.
My solution was telling my family that if they wanted to get me a gift, it should be consumable. A nice bottle of wine, cheeses, beer, spices, etc. all make great gifts that you can enjoy, but don't have to deal with and store for years. They also don't feel bad about not getting you anything.
This is exactly the kind of presents I like to give and to receive. Good chocolate, a pack of good tea, a bottle of very good olive oil, nice bottle of wine.
When I moved into my first apartment after college, I brought a laptop, a sleeping bag, a folding chair, and a clip-lamp. It was great. I felt I could go anywhere and do anything.
Of course, with a new job, 650 square feet, and an an IKEA nearby, I couldn't turn down a few basics. So I picked up a spartan bed, a minimalist sofa, a function-oriented desk.
Then time began to pass. Though I'd resolved never to subscribe to cable, where was the harm in a TV to watch Netflix in comfort? Off to Best Buy to pick up a 20" on sale. Then IKEA to put something under it. Now I needed shelves. Accessories. Electronics.
Time passes. Books. Papers. Storage. A couple raises? Bigger TV! No need to sell the old one; it goes in the bedroom. Office reorganization? Don't throw away that table; it matches my sofa! Now I need chairs...
As I laid the cables for my home theater system last year, I had to confront just how far I had come from my theoretically nomadic self just a few years earlier. I had an apartment full of stuff. Some new opportunities had me contemplating the possibility of picking up and moving a great distance -- something that would have been easy not all that long ago, now made quite the unappealing prospect.
I'd kept pretty fit myself. But I realized that my lifestyle had put on a lot of pounds while I wasn't looking.
The key is to keep your stuff out of your lifestyle. I have an immersion blender that I use about a dozen times a year. I got it as a gift, and it lives at the back of a cabinet underneath my kitchen counter. It's awesome!
I have three kettlebells that I use two or three times a week. They live beside my couch. There's a weight belt and a medicine ball beside them that I rarely use, and I swear I keep putting them in the closet, but the kettlebells are like a magnet for exercise-related junk.
The blender is awesome, even though I could easily live without it. The kettlebells are clutter -- until I find a good way to store them. (Any suggestions?)
Bizarre downmod. Its placement as a reply to parent doesn't make sense (it mystifies even me in retrospect) but I think I made a valid point: the classic unnecessary "junk" we rarely use doesn't hurt us when it's out of sight, but valuable possessions that serve an important purpose can drag us down if they're always in sight, altering the look of a space and affecting how we behave in it.
I know this is supposed to be an inspiring "carpe diem" type essay, but everything is susceptible to practical considerations, and with "stuff" it's important to identify the right culprit. Frivolous domestic accessories and the worthless junk in the back of your closet might not be the problem -- something eminently practical that you use regularly might be your burdensome "stuff."
Its worth moving every 12-24 months just to avoid this. Even if you only move 5 minutes down the road. The process of culling Vs packing and shifting tends to help you dispose of junk you've accumulated. The prospect of moving again in the near future also makes you view potential purchases much more critically.
People talk about being broke so they have to hold onto all this stuff. What they neglect to to mention is the money that they paid out acquiring it in the first place. You know what's cheaper than buying that thing on sale? Not buying it at all.
I am moving to San Francisco from Nebraska. I pretty much got rid of all my stuff already except books, clothes, and computers. It felt awesome to get rid of everything, I suggest you try it.
143 comments
[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 187 ms ] threadOn a related note , Steve Jobs has no furniture.
Have you ever interviewed a politician? With jobs et all its probably the same. He will always be using that perfect entrepreneur mask and wont waste a single word not to sell you that image.
It's like reading a piece about a politician honesty and his worries about the people.
Only that with the business people the interviewer is not even trying to expose him. And if it's wired, then it's even the other way around. They will try hard to godfy ...is that a word?
Anyway, anytime I bring new stuff into my house I take the same amount of stuff and put it in a box. About four times a year I call the Salvation Army and they pick up the box.
Before buying something new, I have to think about what old stuff is going in the box. Normally it isn't hard. On Christmas, when I get a lot of new stuff, it can be a challange. The worst is when someone gives me something I will never use and I have to put it right in the box, which seems ungrateful. Other than that, the box is liberating and putting stuff in it feels great.
What I have started doing is donating 2 pairs of old pants to Goodwill and buying 1 pair of nice pants that I will want to wash and deal with. This seems to be working well for me so far.
I also wanted to mention that our hard disks can suffer from this same problem. I have also started making an effort to delete old pdf books that I won't read, delete mp3s that I'm tired of hearing etc.
Sounds like INTP tendency:
Because the present is inextricably linked to a sense of the past, INTPs tend to hoard items which help solidify the connection to the past. They find it very difficult to let go of anything they have collected (or indeed created) and which may have a nostalgic meaning.
above from http://www.intp.org/intprofile.html
I suspect most people have their own personal caveat to this essay. Mine isn't books (I usually give good books to friends after reading them, and bad books to ebay). My own caveat would be raw materials for building or repairing things (electrical components, nuts and bolts, tools, etc).
Until you find yourself having to move.
When I moved from home to college, I really only had 2 or 3 medium boxes of things i wanted/could take with me. Then from college to my first apartment I also had really accumulated nothing of value, and threw away a lot. When I moved from my first apartment to my second, an unbelievable thing happened. My first job brought with it a mountain of stuff. I really didn't realize it as I always kept that place spotlessly tidy (When I start to think through a piece of code I tend to walk around cleaning, its like a mindless activity that helps my mind work) The big mistake I made was using server boxes i swiped from work to move. Next time (which should be in a few months) I plan on using more smaller boxes.
I recently scanned a bunch of books using gscan2pdf; it makes it relatively easy, and integrates some decent utilities like Tesseract for OCR. (Some fiddling with controls meant that I could start playing a movie and mechanically flip pages and punch the scan button.)
Relatively high-resolution scans like 3-500 DPI mean you can get big PDFs (~200MB for a big anthology was normal), but this isn't much of a concern to me: I can clean them up later if I really need space, and in an era where 1.5tb is 100$, 200MB is nothing (1 or 2 cents of space?).
Even though by weight it's much lighter the book shelves are a real pain in the ass.
I was going to spend some little money on the shipping. Then i found out that the company would pay a ship container and give me hardly any financial support to settle there. So now i'm on full pack rat mode!
...and i can't tell you how nice and easy it was to ship only the some thousand books. Everything else by comparisson is hell. You have to fill some isurance forms on everything. Packaging is a pain. You can't separate a bed into smaller boxes like a shelf of books. Etc
I believe anything is OK (even in large numbers) as long as it is easy for one's mind to treat it as one "item". Books (and probably your raw materials) are uniform. You put the next one with all the others and forget it, so it creates little additional drag on you. Yeah, up to a point when you need to expand storage, but the general rule remains.
Them not taking them wasn't so bad. I was more annoyed by the attitude of the staff who made a big song and dance as if they were doing me a favour by even considering taking free books.
A library accepting free books in good condition seemed like a no brainer to me :|
I find that I take this concept with me back to civilization. I'll get back to my storage locker and not find anything that I want to take out. "This isn't the shirt that I wear.", and "I already have enough socks" (meaning 4).
Back home in England, I can think of exactly two possessions that I've accumulated in the 3 years since I've been living there with my girlfriend: a 22" monitor to connect to the laptop, and a really nice Italian espresso machine. Both get used every day, so evidently they meet my criteria for "stuff you're allowed to have along."
I relocated from Austin to San Francisco to Japan and with each move, I drastically reduced my lifestlye. It's just as PG said: you don't really miss anything.
And I dealt with books by getting an e-reader so I could carry my library in my backpack.
Anyway, Fight Club definitely struck a cord with me and since then I have been living with incredibly little stuff. I have a computer, my iphone, my car, a desk and a bed and just enough clothes to get by for 2 weeks (do laundry once a week) and of course minor other things that you need, but basically bare essentials.
While I cant say for sure how much of an impact its had on my life, I can say without a doubt that coming home always feels very relaxing and definitely helps me prepare for a new day.
"byproducts of a lifestyle obsession" "things you own... end up owning you" "working jobs we hate so we can buy ish we don't need"
edit: link fixed
My wife and I came to the same conclusion when we wanted to start our own thing. We needed to be flexible enough to live from anywhere a frugal life style would demand and our stuff was just weighing us down. Even storing it was going to cost alot of money - in the end we got rid of must of it.
Our books were the biggest culprits. Through bargains, we accumulated tons of novels that we've never read. Those were the first to go. The only books left were mostly references.
When kids have a birthday or holiday with gifts, we tell them that they have to throw away or give away an equal amount of stuff. It works surprisingly well.
I've been thinning out my media stuff (books, videos, old records, etc.) in batches during moves, but recently began selling what I could on amazon. It's mostly CDs and books, but in the past two months it's totaled about $800. One problem, however, is many titles are worth too little for me to go through the trouble of listing, selling, packing, and shipping them. This is especially true of older books. No matter how good or important they were, about 90% sell for <$2 used on Amazon.
So where am I today 3 years later? I still haven't bought a lot of stuff. But I got married in 2008 and now my house is full of my wife's stuff. However, she started to get rid of a lot of her stuff. I don't need stuff to make myself feel at home but she does, as that is her only connection with her past life. I bought some clothes for myself last year (12 single-color t-shirts @ $3/each online) and a lot of running gear for my ultramarathon but other than that, barely anything.
I think the lesson here for me is that it is indeed possible to reduce your acquisition of "stuff" and maintain it. However, it depends very much on your personality. My wife likes to dress nicely and decorate the house. So we'll be stuff every night and then, hopefully not too much.
this might be an interesting read: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/198202/diamond
maybe separate the ring from the 'really great mate' part?
There are exceptions of course. Seasonal items like clothing, mountain bike, etc... Books too as mentioned in the essay. Having a library of coding books on-hand is not only reassuring, but has helped me save significant time solving a problem, even if I only rarely use the book. And I don't think it's a good idea throwing out your old money either. ;)
I was initially heartbroken but then I started thinking how many times I had actually looked at any of those photos since I took them and, for the majority of then, the answer was zero. After that, my relationship with stuff shifted radically.
A few years later, I lost a wooden spoon which was pretty much the only thing I held an emotional attachment to anymore. That thing was older than I was and had been the one constant in cooking which is a huge part of my life. I moped for a year, shrugged and got a new one.
I'm starting to seriously consider that, once a year, I will find the thing currently most precious to me and get rid of it.
Being affected by the loss of a spoon shouldn't make you want to never love a spoon again (that way lies crappy romantic comedies). The idea here is to concentrate our attachment to objects, not eliminate it.
(For those of you who don't want to click the second link, here's the money shot:
List the ten most expensive things (products, services, or experiences) that you have ever paid for (including houses, cars, university degrees, marriage ceremonies, divorce settlements, and taxes). Then, list the ten items that you have ever bought that gave you the most happiness. Count how many items appear on both lists. )
The list exercise might make more sense to non-students.
One problem I've found with it is that people buy me worthless gifts (gifts I don't derive value from because I don't use them).
I've created an online list of things I want at kaboodle.com, or more exactly, a list of things I wouldn't mind possessing, but my family refuses buying anything on the list because that's "spoiling the surprise". I would prefer they stop giving me gifts altogether, but they won't no matter what.
My favorite quote from PG's article:
What I didn't understand was that the value of some new acquisition wasn't the difference between its retail price and what I paid for it. It was the value I derived from it.
Next year I'm going to try picking a charity and asking for nothing but donations in my name. I'm going to pick a popular one, too, not a obscure and ignorable "geek" charity or something, but one that may actually induce guilt if they ignore the request. Maybe that will at least cut things down.
(Come to think of it, maybe I'll pick a Celiac Disease foundation or something, since I have that. A bit more self-serving, perhaps, but even more likely to induce guilt if ignored. I hate a swing "guilt" at the issue, but I've tried mere protest for a couple of years now to no effect.)
I make plenty of money, and I have very little interest in most stuff. The only stuff that does interest me is books, video games, and computer/electronics equipment. When I want one of those things, I buy it.
I've also been involved with an animal rights organization I co-founded for 11 years or so, so every birthday I simply ask everyone to make a donation to that organization.
Of course, with a new job, 650 square feet, and an an IKEA nearby, I couldn't turn down a few basics. So I picked up a spartan bed, a minimalist sofa, a function-oriented desk.
Then time began to pass. Though I'd resolved never to subscribe to cable, where was the harm in a TV to watch Netflix in comfort? Off to Best Buy to pick up a 20" on sale. Then IKEA to put something under it. Now I needed shelves. Accessories. Electronics.
Time passes. Books. Papers. Storage. A couple raises? Bigger TV! No need to sell the old one; it goes in the bedroom. Office reorganization? Don't throw away that table; it matches my sofa! Now I need chairs...
As I laid the cables for my home theater system last year, I had to confront just how far I had come from my theoretically nomadic self just a few years earlier. I had an apartment full of stuff. Some new opportunities had me contemplating the possibility of picking up and moving a great distance -- something that would have been easy not all that long ago, now made quite the unappealing prospect.
I'd kept pretty fit myself. But I realized that my lifestyle had put on a lot of pounds while I wasn't looking.
This is a very good sentence.
I have three kettlebells that I use two or three times a week. They live beside my couch. There's a weight belt and a medicine ball beside them that I rarely use, and I swear I keep putting them in the closet, but the kettlebells are like a magnet for exercise-related junk.
The blender is awesome, even though I could easily live without it. The kettlebells are clutter -- until I find a good way to store them. (Any suggestions?)
I know this is supposed to be an inspiring "carpe diem" type essay, but everything is susceptible to practical considerations, and with "stuff" it's important to identify the right culprit. Frivolous domestic accessories and the worthless junk in the back of your closet might not be the problem -- something eminently practical that you use regularly might be your burdensome "stuff."
I hope I made myself clear this time.
People talk about being broke so they have to hold onto all this stuff. What they neglect to to mention is the money that they paid out acquiring it in the first place. You know what's cheaper than buying that thing on sale? Not buying it at all.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvgN5gCuLac