We return here to our many-part series of questions about whether you are ready to become a meandering minimalist. If the answer is no, or not yet, we offered some options. Then, Part 1 asked if you actually like travel. Part 2 encouraged you to think through your obligations. Part 3 talked about your potential travel companions, and Part 4 talked about your health and health insurance options. Here we are in Part 5, about your stuff. (We promise, we aren’t here to judge.) This post is itself in two parts, the first theoretical, the second practical.
“Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.”
William Morris
How Much is Enough?
If you are like most people of a certain age, you have accumulated vast quantities of things. More – let’s be honest – than you actually need. There’s nothing wrong with that; some of those things are deeply meaningful and others are very useful. Also, a whole lot of it just crept in without you really noticing.
When the Marie Kondo craze swept the world, a bunch of people sent us her book. (See? Irony is a lost art…) We put it into practice and loved it (and then gave the book away). Then again, we weren’t the target audience; we haven’t had that much stuff for a long time. Still, in different ways, we each used to be like everyone else, with jammed-full closets of clothes we didn’t like that didn’t fit and piles of things everywhere else. We were even collectors of various things (most spectacularly, books).
What happened? We took a good hard look at all of that stuff, and realised that most of it contributed nothing to our lives. We believe that each thing you own takes a tiny bit of your attention. It needs to be mended or the battery has died or you bump into it every time you maneuver around the desk. That’s not necessarily bad, but multiply it by a million and you can see how ‘stuff’ might be distracting you from your other goals (more on this below and in the next post). Laurel read an article from Real Simple about the emotional nature of stuff several years ago and found it very useful in thinking.
Our Stuff Story
We sold our house in 2014, just before spending a year abroad on sabbatical. Thinking there was a chance we wouldn’t return to the U.S., we got rid of about half of what we owned, mostly the furniture (too heavy to ship, we thought). For part of that time we lived in a very small apartment in Oxford. There we discovered that we didn’t need very much in order to enjoy ourselves. When we returned to our storage area back home, we felt overwhelmed rather than overjoyed to see all of our things again. Then we moved into a two-bedroom apartment. We moved a couple of years later into another. Each time, we cut down the number of things we owned by about half. And each time, lots of people we knew assumed we were about to move, or die, or just thought we were super-weird. (No comment.)
Let’s be clear: we are not monks. In our apartment, we bought a big tv because we like movies, and we bought a sofa instead of sitting on the floor. But we got the sofa from Amazon – it wasn’t the best in the world, but it was good enough. The reduced number of things helped us to see what was indeed useful or beautiful and what was just there taking up space and attention.
What Do You Actually Want?
We are not the people to advise you about what will conduce to your greatest happiness, but we urge you to spend some serious time thinking about it. From our own experience and watching that of others, we know that the goals about ‘having’ (rather than ‘being’ or ‘doing’) are the least satisfying over the long-term. That said, sometimes they get tangled up in each other. For instance, maybe it’s important to you to that your children or grandchildren have a place that feels like home, where they can always return. This is a wonderful and worthy goal, but it’s not actually about having; it’s about the kind of parent/grandparent you want to be. If ‘for the kids’ is the only reason you are holding on to a property you don’t otherwise want, perhaps it’s worth rethinking. A favourite bedspread and beloved rocking chair might do just as well, or even better. Or no stuff at all, but a once-a-year reunion somewhere you love as a family, or somewhere you’ve never been.
Now that we’re settling more comfortably into retirement, we’re thinking about how we want to spend the rest of our lives. Most of what we’re interested in is experiences. A few of them require stuff (which we can rent); most don’t.
How do you want to spend the rest of your life? How does travel fit in, either minimally or maximally?
And here all this time I thought you sold the house because the neighbors were shady and had unruly children.
Which is also true. I hear they have chickens now or something, too.