Discardia_ More Life, Less Stuff - Dinah Sanders [35]
Present the right calling card. Your email signature file identifies you and your context. People will use it to reach you and to form an opinion of you. Take a minute to be sure that it is without errors, is up to date including only the contact methods by which you want to be contacted, emphasizes what you want to emphasize, is succinct, and is text-only. Good email manners go a long way to set you apart from the crowd.
Email can be a huge source of stress, so time spent learning how to manage it better and putting systems and settings in place to reduce its annoyances will yield big rewards.
Symptom #12: The Museum of Me
Solution #12: Preserve the Context, Not the Object
Being organized does not mean buying more plastic boxes; being organized means you kind of only need this one box ’cause you only save cool stuff.
—Merlin Mann
The Museum of Me
Now that your digital ducks are in a row and you can breathe a little easier, it’s time to tackle some emotionally tougher stuff. It often isn’t easy to decide the fate of the things our past selves have acquired. We change. We all know that’s true but, when it comes to our belongings, it can be difficult to let go of our old ideas about ourselves and the accessories that supported that personality.
Psychologist and hoarding expert Dr. Randy Frost identifies this worry as being at the core of holding onto things we don’t need anymore. “What am I without my stuff? What's happened over the years is the stuff has somehow invaded your sense of self, your identity, because without it you feel like you don't know who you are.”
Over time, our homes (and closets and storage units) become museums to who we’ve been. Instead of sliding our fresh selves into the world and leaving our old snakeskins behind, we retain every one, acting as both collector and specimen. We run our own fan clubs. The San Francisco haulage program RecycleMyJunk.com tweaked this sentiment delightfully with signs on their trucks reading, “The Smithsonian already has one.”
Our attachment to physical objects is tightly related to what behavioral scientists call the “endowment effect”; in other words, just owning something makes us less inclined to consider getting rid of it. However, recent studies by Stanford University and University of Pennsylvania psychologists, as cited by Katharine Sanderson in Nature News, have shown that the pain of parting does not derive from overvaluing the item but is pure aversion to losing something regardless of its current utility to us. Our brains get hooked on having things.
When those things are associated with memories that we don’t want to lose, it becomes even harder to overcome this physical barrier to letting go of an object. Being conscious of this fact can make it easier for us to separate the thing from the memory and preserve only what truly still adds value to our lives. As reported in Science Daily, social psychologists at the University of New Hampshire have demonstrated that those who feel more accepted and loved by others place a lower monetary value on their possessions. As we mature and derive less of our sense of personal security from objects and more from our selves and our relationships, we gain both resilience and freedom.
As we conquer habits of acquisition and hoarding, there is no reason that we can’t preserve our sense of self—and of a self that is changing over time—while also making our day-to-day lives happier and more convenient. In this digital age you can make the playlist representing the autobiographical history of music in your life instead of keeping your old vinyl records long after the last turntable has left your home. You don’t have to keep the thing; you can keep the pointer to the thing, the memory, the context.
What matters is what matters. Always consider whether you need to keep the thing or just the emotion or attention that you bring to it. When it no longer matters, let it go.
You can capture context, stories,