How to Live with Just 100 Things
Walsh isn't surprised that decluttering is so popular these days. Between worrying about gas prices and the faltering economy, people's first reaction, he says, "is often, 'I need to get some control over my life, even if it is just a tidy kitchen counter.'"
Time's decluttering section: http://time.com/declutter which redirects to a longer URL. Nice decluttering there, webmaster.
Want to get re-inspired for letting go of things around your home? Take a break from it.
I just spent 5 nights staying at my boyfriend's place and came home tonight ready for major purging of stuff that I don't require anymore.
The trick is to go somewhere else that you can relax. Before you come home think about what you actually missed. That's the definite "keeper" stuff. The junk you walk in and say "jeez, I forgot I even had that" about is a good place to start the discarding.
Even without that dichotomy, though, I found the time away left me in a clearer mental space to distinguish between that which I keep more as the museum of me and less as something I actually use & enjoy now.
I'm enjoying saying some farewells this evening, and the ability to save the story or favorite details from things in pictures on Flickr is helping a lot!
Haven't quite got the stomach for just throwing something away?
Consider these alternatives:
Selling
- There's a tradeoff here between time spent and money gained. (Read more about this in past posts Do The Math and What's Your Time Worth?).
- One way to offset that is to add some to gain side of the equation when where it goes makes you happy. Selling something very cheap to or bartering for it with a worthy person can feel great. For example, you might provide a nice older camera to a new photography student.
Giving It Away
- Or you could just give something to that worthy person.
- Charitable organizations are another obvious destination for things of value or utility which no longer fit in your life. How about donating it to the library, a school, or just good old Goodwill?
- You can also have a good deal of fun getting a crowd together for a Pirate Gift Exchange of wonderfully weird stuff. Here's how it works: Wrap everything. Draw numbers. Person number one picks something and unwraps it. Person number two can either steal it or unwrap something else. When what you have gets stolen, you can steal anything but that from another player or unwrap something new. When you don't have what you want you can extol its virtues to other players in the hope that they will steal it from you. Popular items will go racing round the room in repeated thefts. Hilarity ensues!
It's time for a big letting go. The rich nations have got to say farewell to the strange notion which has gripped us for the last half century and recognize that the suburban life style - with its 2 car garage, its lawns in the desert, its strip malls - is completely unsustainable. More than that though, it isn't even really "the good life".
There's never going to be more oil readily available than there is now. Nor more natural gas, either. Suburbia relies on these, not only for its residents to be able to get to shops or work and to heat their homes, but also to build the homes and the accoutrements associated with this lifestyle.
And it isn't even that great a lifestyle. Do people really form tighter bonds with their neighbors in a suburb than they do in a mixed-use city block or the countryside? Do people in the suburbs feel connected to the communities surrounding their neighborhood? If you have to drive to get to anything, do you feel anything but distanced from the places you move through?
Dorothy J. Gaiter and John Brecher of the Wall Street Journal recommend you quit waiting for some occasion special enough for that most special bottle you've been holding onto for years.
We invented OTBN for a simple reason: All of us, no matter how big or small our wine collections, have that single bottle of wine we simply can never bear to open. Maybe it's from Grandpa's cellar or a trip to Italy or a wedding. We're always going to open it on a special occasion, but no occasion is ever special enough. So it sits. And sits. Then, at some point, we decide we should have opened it years ago and now it's bad anyway, so there's no reason to open it, which gives us an excuse to hang onto it for a few more decades. So OTBN -- which is now always the last Saturday in February -- offers a great opportunity to prepare a special meal, open the bottle and savor the memories.
You can wait until February if you like, but wouldn't tonight be a good enough for a special meal with those closest to you and a farewell to the close of the year over a glass of something fine?
I talk a lot about cleaning up clutter along the way of making my main point about freeing your life of stuff that you don't actually want in it. I find it relaxing now, after steadily whittling away at my Discardian efforts for a few years, to be able to have my house ready for company with less than an hour of tidying up.
It's important to note, though, that your comfort level may be more or less messy than mine. I'm more of a neatnik than the folks in Thursday's New York Times article "Saying Yes To Mess", but much less so than some folks I know with pristine homes and perfectly ordered closets.
What matters in all cases is that there aren't things you don't want, blocking your enjoyment of what you do.
Think of the cottage style garden with flowers spilling out in clumps; embrace your particular mess and ruthlessly prune away any junk that detracts from your happiness.
Are you still holding on to too many old holiday cards and little tiny figurines, toys & knickknacks? Turn them into decorations!
Photograph the ones you want to remember, but don't need to keep, and just put the picture up on Flickr with the story that goes with it.
Then cut out the pretty part of the cards (as Katie describes here), add a little twisted wire loop around the small objects, and thread a bright ribbon to hang them on your mantelpiece, in your windows, on a Christmas tree or from your picture rails.
Put some in your car or purse or backpack to give as a little gift when you visit people or attach them to presents instead of a bow.
At the end of the holidays, box away any you still love to use next year, save the ones you aren't quite ready to toss in a give-to-friends bag, and go hang the rest from parking meters or mailboxes!
How about digging in drawers & closets & toy boxes and pulling out all those old games that have been mouldering away?
Start a Battle of the Games* with family and friends to decide on a few favorites to keep. Then donate the rest to a local homeless shelters to keep people, especially the kids, making the best of a sucky situation.
*Battle of the Games pits two games against each other. You play two random or similarly themed ones back to back. Then everyone votes on which was their favorite. That one gets set aside to be played again. The other gets voted on for a second chance or to be put in the donate box right away.
Good bonus rule: play for a few rounds, until everyone has the hang of a game, then have a quick thumbs up or down to decide if you should keep playing. Don't waste time on stuff no one likes; there are TONS of great games out there, so don't suffer with duds.
Please put your recommendations and warnings in the comments!
Are you dreading the approach of the holidays? Does the frenzy bring you down? Do you dread a pile of unchosen stuff entering your home? Give yourself a break from it and change the focus of your holidays to the things that feed your soul and your energy levels rather than draining them.
[Read more in The season of giving? Maybe, but not necessarily of shopping.]
Do you have more than one personal email account or more than one email program with a pile of saved and/or unread mail in it? Think about each of them.
What if it suddenly went away?
Would you be sad or would you shrug?
If the former, find a way to make a backup of the contents. If the latter, decide why you still have it or get rid of it.
(Inspired by the sudden discovery that, not having logged into it in 4 months, my Yahoo Mail account was completely deleted. Presumably they tried to notify me, um, through my Yahoo mail account. First reaction: "Aaaah!" This was followed a moment later by: "Oh. Now I'll never have to sort out those last 50 messages or so that were in there. *shrug*")
A man is rich in proportion to the things he can afford to let alone.
--Henry David Thoreau
How are you making your life richer? What expenses of time and energy are you cutting out?
Not sure where to start? Just look for any big cluster of negative emotions and you'll find something very worthy of letting go.
All Soul's Day is a good time to remember that your body will serve you no purpose after you die.
Identify yourself as an organ donor and let your family know you want to have your body parts distributed to someone who needs them after you've passed on.
Learn more at organdonor.gov or search for a similar resource in your country if you're outside the United States.
This very funny "free if you come get it" offer came through on my company's community email list and reminded me to remind everyone that even the special item sometimes reaches the end of its life with you:
15 years ago, my wife came home with this giant earth-mover tire on top of our Toyota. It's about 3 feet across (maybe a little more), and weighs a whole lot. We stood it up next to our kids' play structure, buried it about one-quarter of the way into the dirt, and it provided years of climbing and sliding fun. Now, the kids are teenagers, and seem to have lost interest in it. Fickle!
Even the good stuff can move on to make room for the life you're living now (or want to be living!)
One important thing to remember is that virtual clutter - for example old emails and bookmarked websites - doesn't interfere with your life quite the same way physical stuff does. In fact, it can often just sit there quietly waiting until you have time to dig it up again (or else it gets lost in the electronic equivalent of a house burning down and y'know you can recover from that too).
Last year, Mark Morford wrote a really great column called Why Do You Have So Much Junk? Oh yes you do. And there are TV shows to prove it. Question is, what are you gonna do about it?
You have way too much crap.
I'm just guessing. Guessing that right now, in your life, in your closets and in your garage and in your car trunk and in your brain and even in your desk drawer you have way, way too much stuff, far more than any one person or single family needs and, oh my God, have you even seen your closet lately?
Have you seen that riot of old towels and curtain rods and board games you haven't looked at in three years? The old guitar and five pairs of mangy boots and a pile of old T-shirts and two disposable Epson printers and a teetering stack of empty Amazon boxes and four dumbbells and ancient college papers and a power drill and a bunch of old coats and classic porn VHS tapes and an underused Mesa Boogie guitar amp and assorted wrapping paper collected since the Clinton administration? Oh wait, maybe that's my closet.
and one more taste of a bit I particularly liked:
It is one of the healthiest things you can do. Honest psychologists and good spiritual healers often advise patients with overactive minds and squirrel-like attention spans and problems focusing and problems sleeping, they will tell them not to pop some Ritalin or merely take an herbal tincture and eat more leafy greens, but to go home right now and, yes, clean out your closets. Clear out your clutter. Strip it all to the beautiful essentials and then keep it that way.
Okay, gang, you know what to do! Read that fun column and then ride that inspiration into getting rid of more dumb stuff you have around for no good reason.
Hello you Netflix & Tivo subscribers and chronic movie renters and library DVD checker-outers and movie buyers. How many unwatched shows do you have sitting around? And how long have they been waiting for your attention?
If they don't linger for long, then good for you. Carry on, just be sure that anything in your home at the start of the weekend, gets some action by the end of it.
However, for the rest of us, with, oh for example, two unwatched movies bought months ago and two Netflix discs that only arrived a few days ago but only because I sent back the two that had sat there for weeks I tell you weeks, here's the plan:
- cancel the Netflix account
- don't buy any new movies until you've watched the ones you already bought
and
- only check out things you'll definitely watch tonight or tomorrow.
Take that subscription money and those saved late fees and foolish expenditure funds and put 80% of it into savings and invest the rest in really good chocolate. Now THAT I bet you'll take care of tonight.
Sundays are really good days to kick back and let go of your usual obligations. Sleep in, read the big newspaper, putter around, work on projects, or just sit in a café with a book.
Hmm? Discardian tip?
Oh yeah, uh, well, turns out you can remove common warts with duct tape. Who knew? Do note in the comments the citation of a clinical study supporting the folk wisdom and giving a clearer description of the method to be used.
When you aren't sure you're really ready to get rid of some things, seal them up in a box and write on the top, side and end of the box (so you can read it in a stack of boxes)
Re-evaluate on [the date 6 months from today]
Don't write what's in the box. When you go to open it, you may find it useful to discover things you'd totally put from your mind.
Maybe they just needed time off from use, but often you'll find that now you're really ready to send them on to a new home.
This can be a great thing to do with kids. Either the toy is now forgotten and boring or it's almost like a new toy. Either way is a win!
No one should expect to keep the exact same tastes their entire life. Times change, people grow and get exposed to new ideas and cultures and sub-cultures. Change is actually pretty fun when you roll with it.
Take a look at the things you've had in front of you so long you've stopped seeing them. Do they still match who you are?
Is the artwork on your walls - when you look at it with fresh eyes - still what you want to see every day? How about that stuff on the front of your fridge and next to the phoone? And those knick-knacks there on the shelf?
If it isn't you anymore, send it on to a new home.
If you aren't quite sure you're ready for that, set it aside for a while. (More about that tomorrow).
I very much enjoyed this paragraph of a Keith Robinson Life Hacker piece on overcoming the piling habit:
Don't forget the trash can
A trash can or recycle bin is a reformed piler's best friend. Anything you put in it will be out of your way forever. It's really amazing how great it can feel to throw something away for-ev-er. For some people it can be hard, so start slow. Go through your newly contained stuff, or your existing piles and trash those things you'll never need or use again.
Check it out, man! I just put stuff in this box and it will never bother me again! Amazing!
I bet you have one of those magic boxes too. Maybe you should fill it up today and put it out where the magicians will transform it into an empty one. Abracadabra!!
Not quit, but cut out, snip away at, remove bit by bit.
Two things to focus on changing:
1) A mental habit or worry that is eating too much of your energy or time.
2) A project or routine that isn't going anywhere or which distracts you from things you really wish you'd do more on.
Some examples:
- When you start to fret about whether you can get a date or what went wrong with a past one, use this as your reminder to do something else. "Oh, I that's right, I don't get to spend 30 minutes worrying about whether Pat likes me until after I do my stretching routine." Do that other thing and then - if you still remember - decide if spending the next 30 minutes on fretting is really what you want to have lined up next in your day.
Force spending time fretting to be a conscious decision about how to spend time; it will almost always lose out to other options since it makes you feel so silly to be choosing it.
- Want to stop spending hours watching TV and finding the evening gone? First, make sure you watch on your own schedule. Use a PVR like Tivo or even an old VCR to record shows so you aren't chained to the broadcasters' clocks like that guy in Metropolis. Second, always "buy" your TV watching time with equivalent time spent on one of your top two projects. I recommend having a creative thinking project such as writing and one that's more physical which doesn't require much mental energy so that you can make progress in different moods.
Over time, swap time that doesn't reward you for time that does.
One of the benefits of growing older and having experienced more things is you get better at estimating how things will work out. This skill is worth improving and making use of whenever you're deciding if something is worth doing.
Here's an example. Let's say you have a bunch of stuff you want to get rid of. You do, yes? Yes.
It can be tough to make the call between sell and give away. We often lean toward sell because we feel guilty about just giving away something we spent money on or which was a gift. However, it's not always the best path.
Look over what you have and roughly decide what you would price it at if you were going to have a yard sale or sell it on Ebay or Craig's List.
I don't think you can sell something without spending a minimum of one hour dealing with selling it. For a lot of things - e.g. a yard sale or a trip to the flea market - assume at least 5 or 6 hours spent trying to sell the lot of it and that you might only sell half of it. (Don't forget to include the time spent sprawling around or taking a nap afterwards because you're too tired and sunbaked to do anything else).
Now look at what you'd get paid per hour for that time.
On Sunday morning I had a yard sale and made $61. (Yay! Sushi dinner at Sebo with Joe!) But, hmmm, even though it wasn't hard (I was mostly reading a book), I did only get paid at best $10/hour for the work it took to do the sale and that's not counting the recovery time after. Worth it? Could I have just done something else to save the same amount of money and had my Sunday free? And $50 of that came from one customer whose taste, apparently, matches very well my own, or at least my old taste. What if he hadn't happened by? (I would have knocked off an hour or two earlier, probably).
So, in my case, most stuff didn't sell, but it's now all sorted out by price and it would be easy to take it to the flea market to reach a much larger audience. Here's the decision process I just went through:
What I could probably get for the remaining stuff: $250
Amount of that represented by 3 more expensive items: $125
"Best possible case" return for selling at flea market = $250/6 = around $40 an hour
"Optimistic, but more realistic" case return for selling at flea market = half that = $20 an hour
"Entirely possible" case of return for selling at flea market = only a quarter of the stuff = about $60 = $10 an hour
Now, suppose I sold those 3 expensive items on Ebay or Craig's List. Two of them could be put in a lot together, so that's $125/2 = about $60 an hour. Much better.
My conclusion: try placing those 3 big items up for sale online and donate all the rest to charity.
Sometimes, maybe often, the best choice is to cut your losses and get the non-monetary benefit of having the crap out of your way.
Find the three most valuable things that you own that you don't want to own anymore and sell them.
Ebay, Craig's List, going to an appraiser, yard sale, whatever works best.
Just turn them into some money and then take 10-20% of that money to use for something fun, like dinner out, and use the rest to discard some debt.
It can be quite easy for those who are out with friends, feeling smart & witty, to turn up the volume as they speak to enlighten and impress anyone nearby with their exemplary charms.
This does not actually work.
If you really want to be intriguing, try a little subtlety.
Reminder: 90% of everything really isn't that important. Don't shout or make bitter snarky remarks at the poor retail or service staff. Let it slide & smile.
Yes, optimize where it matters, but when it doesn't, let it go by and move on sweetly.
Having a really hard time letting go of something? Know some friends in the same boat? Get together for a low-key show-and-tell brunch and share the stories of your things. Then everyone hop in the car and head for the local Goodwill or other charity to donate all the these items you've honored.
Thanks to Discardian Melissa Simonson for this idea!
"Why did you keep THAT thing?"
Sometimes you have a good answer, but when you don't, it's time for that thing to move on.
Greg Knauss is blogging again. This is good news because sometimes he makes me laugh hysterically enough to frighten passers by and sometimes he cuts right to the bone about what's really going on that I've been sweeping under my mental rug.
I've been under a lot of stress and it seems like even though I'm doing the right things to reduce it, I'm only able to make so much progress before I get that drowning feeling again. Well, like the old Boomtown Rats song says "maybe it's because I'm sinking".
Greg pins it down in "The Back-Logged Life":
My entire life has devolved into an endless, grinding slog through my back-log. Everything I do is about catching up, doing the stuff I didn't get done the day before, plowing through some other goddamned thing that needs my attention. Ending the day without actually adding to the total aggregate is a victory. There are times when it piles up faster than I can shovel it away.
And the computers are at fault, of course. Always the computers.
The tools I use to manage information have evolved to the point where I can abdicate the tedious process of gathering it all together to them, and they now do a very diligent job of making sure that it's all brought to my attention. Endlessly. Maddeningly.
Years ago, someone phoned you and you weren't home, you missed the call and they had to try back -- now, the messages queue up in voice-mail. TV shows used to slip unwatched by unless you were there to suck them up them in real-time -- today, my TiVo has hours of mindless crap that it's faithfully holding for me. The Web originally required me to actually go out and do something as quaint as visit sites to read them -- these days, my feed reader pulls down megabytes of data -- a large portion of it, of course, cat pictures -- and piles it up, forever. Each of these swollen reservoirs of data silently mocks me with my inadequacy.
Go read the whole thing, it's very good. Greg's solution is different than mine - probably more effective - but I'm not quite ready to take the radical move-it-or-lose-it approach and discard everything older than a certain date.
What I am doing is increasing the efforts I've already started - reduce the incoming stream and process that stream more quickly - while adding a new element, completion by deletion.
In Getting Things Done terms, I'm going to start dropping a lot of things which would go on my Someday/Maybe list.
Here's the rationale: that magic day when I'm all caught up on the things higher up on the list - either in priority or urgency or both - and get to this stuff will never come. I am never going to get down to the Someday/Maybe folder. What makes those things get done is they have to climb up out of that low level and catch my attention again. If they become important or urgent, they will.
Pare down. Then, later, if you're all caught up, you can add back on (or not).
So, today do some thinking about what comes into your life, creating a backlog, and decide what you can live (happier) without:
- consider cancelling your Netflix subscription and not using Tivo's recommendation feature;
- consider cancelling or reducing magazine and newspaper subscriptions - at least abandon any feeling of obligation that you have to read the whole thing;
- live with only one voicemail (I use the one on my mobile phone, so there's no blinking little light when I come home);
- consider unsubscribing from all, or most, or at least many of your email lists and feeds;
- get yourself off catalog and junk mail lists;
- don't buy books unless you're going to start reading them within the next 48 hours;
- eliminate all but 2 of the "read next" stack of books - loan 'em to someone, donate 'em to the library, sell 'em, whatever, but eliminate the nagging;
- recycle all the half-read magazines and newspapers lying around - or put them in on 48 hour warning and then recycle them;
- figure out which mail aliases and listservs you are on at work that you never have opportunity to read and then see about getting off them;
- review your to-do lists and cross off anything that is unimportant, non-urgent, and will remind you of itself later if you wind up really needing/wanting to do it.
That last one is really important:
As of today, redefine your to-do list as Things I Need To Think About This Week. If you can ignore it for a week, it either belongs on your calendar or you can just let it slip. If it matters, it will come back.
My mother lives in a remote area and is a member of a book group in her old college town many hours away. In a recent letter, along with news of car repairs for one of the family vehicles, she described this moment of internal debate:
On the drive home, I suddenly realized that it made every kind of sense to skip the book group this time. The van is not comfortable for me to drive for long distances, and also if I took it, Paul would be without transportation for two days. And I really feel like going to sleep fairly early, not staying up late to finish the book. By the time I got home I was convinced, and I've continued to feel very good about that decision --- in fact every little while a wave of elation sweeps over me, with the realization that I'll have two days mostly at home instead of two days of hurrying on the road.
When letting go is an incredibly invigorating choice, don't be silly: let go!
Matt Haughey wrote a great piece about how the little changes we make to smooth our experience of travel are often worth making all the time. Read on in I Lose Something Every Time I Travel.
What have you figured out you can do without?
Imagine that all those saved mailing list posts, downloaded articles, and feed subscriptions were printed on paper.
How big a stack would you have?
Don't make your computer the digital version of one of those crazy people's houses where you have to scoot around between teetering piles of mouldering news.
Be realistic about the amount of time you spend "keeping up with sites". Pick a reasonable number based on your available time and how much of it you want to spend online. Visit the others when they come to mind.
I am a big web geek. I know many many other web geeks. I know many wonderful sites. I have chosen not to use a feed reader to keep track because I have pared myself down to a handful of sites I look at every day. I like to see them in context, with the style the authors chose. Somehow it makes me hear their voices more.
Deciding not to chase around trying to keep up with everyone else's every posting or 50 hot sites was the right choice for me. My work overloads me enough; I don't need an impossible-to-keep-up with to-do list at home.
Find your balance and let go of the rest.
You know that trick we do with the physical stuff in our lives? You should do it on the computer too.
Take a while today to look around on your harddrive and find those things you never use and don't want.
Things to watch for that can often be deleted or backed up for your archives:
- all the other pictures from that digital photo session that didn't come out as good as your favorites
- programs you never use
- old email archives you never search in
- really old backups that are all data that has changed since
- saved chats with that guy/gal things never actually worked out with
Follow the appropriate instructions for your kind of computer for uninstalling programs - and do be careful about system files; if you don't know what they do, get help before deleting.
Bonus tip: Here's a clever technique for "sentencing programs to death row" (found on Lifehacker)
One more from the wise folks in the 43 Folders Google group, here's Vicki Brown:
Ask yourself -
if I lost this, how would I feel?
do I remember having this?
does this item give me any good (or bad) feelings?
do I know someone who could use this?Sometimes I put things in a box or a file folder for a while. If I don't go back and retrieve them, I know I can get rid of them. My Dad used to clean the house like this. He'd toss things into boxes and take the boxes to the basement. If no one said "Has anyone seen my _______" after a month or two, he'd toss the boxes.
Do you have a chapter of Freecycle where you are? If you feel that someone else will get use out of your "stuff" you may feel better about getting rid of it. Or, Salvation Army, Goodwill, other charitable thrift shops will often come get things. No extra work for you, nothing in the landfills, and maybe a tax deduction.
From a discussion on clutter-busting on the 43 Folders Google group comes this pithy advice from David Douthitt:
Don't save clothes because:
a) they may come back into style;
b) you might need them for a formal party some day;
c) you might be able to fit into it if you just lost a few pounds....
Get rid of the clothes you are *not* wearing now.... whatever the reason (except seasonal).
You probably have a lot of two-dimensional physical objects around your home or saved in file drawers or boxes which have sentimental value, but which you don't actually want to have on your walls. Children's drawings, posters or flyers from shows you went to, holiday picture cards from friends, etc. can pile up.
You do not need to keep a physical archive of every significant image that comes into your life.
But you may want to remember things and have the chance to look back at them later, so take a picture, back up the digital copy, and get rid of the stacks of papers.
I find that a lot of these things I keep, have a story that goes with them, so I like to put the picture up in my weblog (I use TypePad) or into Flickr, the photo community site where I can write a bit about it. It's also easy for me to share my stories with friends and family that way.
One other nice feature of Flickr is that it is easy to collect things into sets. You could even get a little book printed of those images. A stack of every drawing your kid made this year might be a bit much to hold onto, but a yearbook of your favorites along with other photos of your kid from that time period might be one of the most wonderful souvenirs you could have.
I'd recommend also digitizing the things you do have on display in your home. If it should ever suffer damage, it's nice to know that you have a backup digital copy as well as one you can easily access on the web.
And by the way, you can do this with little tchotchkes too. Don't really want to keep that big collection of refrigerator magnets, but it'd be nice to remember the glory days when it covered the entire front of your fridge? Take some photos, maybe keep a handful of favorites, and sell the rest at your next yard sale. (Just don't set the bag of 'em next to the hard drive where you've got all those backups, okay?)
What do you have that you were saving for later?
It's later.
Do you want it? If not, get rid of it.
What do you have a whole lot of? Stacks of clipped articles you plan to read? 87 kinds of fancy mustard? Back issues of magazines? Lots of t-shirts with interesting imagery you never wear anymore? Enough coffee mugs to use a different one every day for a month? A collection of little owl figurines that people keep giving you?
What if they went away? (Or 90% of them) Would you replace them or be relieved?
Look around for that category of stuff you've accumulated out of habit, but which you wouldn't replace if you were starting fresh today.
Today, get rid of half of that stuffclot. Charity, recycling, trash. Whatever. More than half if you don't feel the pull to keep them, but at least get them down to an uncrowded level where you might actually use or enjoy the remaining ones.
Here's some good Discardian reading to inspire you:
I’ve got a “collector” mentality. I like my stuff. I like to shop and I don’t mind a little clutter. Makes me feel at home. The problem is that my place is pretty small and “a little clutter” turns into “a lot of crap” pretty quickly. This is when I take the Tao of Delete to my home. I go through almost everything and decide what I want, what I need and what I can get rid of. Last year when I did this I had to call some haulers to come and cart this stuff away. I had two truckloads! Made me wonder where I was keeping it all.
I felt so good…so relieved after those haulers left. My place was clean, and easier to keep clean, for a long time and in general I just felt better about my living arrangements. Sure I could have gone and got a bigger place to keep all my stuff, but I realized what I really needed was less stuff.
[Read more of D. Keith Robinson's "Getting Things Done With Delete"]
Who would really appreciate this?
If the answer is "Me" then keep it, otherwise send it on to a better home with good wishes.
Maybe you have a hard time getting rid of things. Maybe you feel guilty about getting rid of that "perfectly good" toy you don't like anymore. Stop. It may be perfectly good for someone, but that someone isn't you. There's nothing inherently wrong with you getting rid of it. Who are you worried about offending? (As the Ikea ad says "Many of you feel sorry for this lamp. You are crazy. It has no feelings.")
Read more about overcoming entropy and guilt in the Discardia post, "Getting Rid of Stuff".
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