3 ms·
My experience is kind of opposite. I decide one day to discard everything I own and live out of a suitcase for a while (had plenty of savings so was not living
by tokyodude 8y ago
My experience is kind of opposite. I decide one day to discard everything I own and live out of a suitcase for a while (had plenty of savings so was not living poor).
I had bookshelves full of books I never read, architecture books, art books, children's books, clothing I never wore, toys and figures I didn't play with, stuffed animals, framed posters, and entire household of stuff.
5 years later I miss some of that stuff. For lack of a better word I think it was part of my identity. Of course not all of it but lots of little things, even if I didn't use them they served as anchors for memories. Even if the only anchor was when I bought them that would remind me of other things that happened around the time I acquired the item etc..
I'm still mixed on if it was the right thing to do.
- abathur 8y agoThanks for posting this. I am the kind of person to whom many forms of minimalism are seductive, and yet, the books, tchotchkies, and ephemera pile up.
- stencil25 8y agoWhat an extremely insightful experience - thank you for sharing this!
- iamwpj 8y agoI think you went too far. The mindset is never about minimalism -- or what you can do without. It's about ensuring that what you have is good. You should have stuff. Books, toys that are memorable, clothes of different kinds. What you have needs to be important though!
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- fsloth 8y ago"I decide one day to discard everything I own" That's not the Marie Kondo thingy. Ms. Kondo's recipe is that you go through your stuff category at a time (books, shirts etc) and per each item figure out if that thing "brings you joy" or not. My wife was into it. We went through our stuff and ended discarding lots of crap. So, it's rather "go through all of your stuff once in a while and throw all crap away" than "ultra minimalism at all cost".
- DerekQ 8y agoYou're not James Altucher are you? Cause he talks about how he did that all the time.
- bemmu 8y agoI moved to Japan 8 years ago, and brought basically nothing with me. I don't miss, or actually even really remember, anything I had before.