Discardia_ More Life, Less Stuff - Dinah Sanders [50]
Books are more available now than at any other time in history. Thanks to the Internet, we now have access to the inventories of more new and used bookstores and libraries than any one person could browse in a lifetime, as well as to the collections of individuals who are willing to share or trade. Beyond that, we have more new and old books available in electronic form.
As society goes through this transition to digital abundance, many people have kept up internal expectations of how much on-paper reading we're going to do, even as our on-screen reading—and writing!—have grown tremendously. A good Discardian act is to give ourselves credit for the many ways we're connecting to ideas and to others and start calibrating our expectations more appropriately.
Pop-culture writer Linda Holmes faced this chasm between our expectations of ourselves and reality in her National Public Radio post, “The Sad, Beautiful Fact That We’re All Going to Miss Almost Everything,” saying, “Well-read is not a destination; there is nowhere to get to, and if you assume there is somewhere to get to, you'd have to live a thousand years to even think about getting there, and by the time you got there, there would be a thousand years to catch up on.”
Instead of running a futile race to keep up with the amazing explosion of human creative output, explore thoughtfully and with conscious delight the abundance from which you can choose.
While you’re easing your expectations of the amount of deeply focused reading you’re going to do, give yourself credit for the positive aspects of all the other ways you’re connecting with ideas. As science author Steven Johnson has pointed out, “Quiet contemplation has led to its fair share of important thoughts. But it cannot be denied that good ideas also emerge in networks. … The speed with which we can follow the trail of an idea, or discover new perspectives on a problem, has increased by several orders of magnitude. We are marginally less focused, and exponentially more connected. That’s a bargain all of us should be happy to make.”
So, if you can get pretty much any book you want again later, what guidelines will you use for why you should keep a book in your house?
Here are mine:
I'm going to read or reread it within four years. (This will drop to two years once I catch up with the wave of books I recently swapped for and am ignoring as I spend more time writing than reading.)
I consult it at least once a year.
I periodically reread or consult it, and which contains annotations that remain useful to me.
It is an object of beauty or sentiment, which brings me frequent joy.
I wrote it.
Decide your guidelines and then look to see what you have that doesn't meet any of them. Donate those replaceable (or never again needed) books to the library or charity. Give the stuff you love more room and give yourself less unnecessary weight of stuff in your life.
Someday is now
What do you have that you were saving for later?
It's later.
Do you want it?
If not, get rid of it.
You probably won’t need that exact thing again. In the rare times that you do, the hassle of re-acquiring it is much less trouble than the hassle of working around 90+% of the stuff you never would have needed again anyway. Living lighter makes you much more flexible for dealing with very occasional exceptions.
What about feeling stressed over letting this thing go? If you’re finding it extremely hard to part with something that you don’t use or find beautiful, you may need to give it a time out. Seal those things up in a box and write on the top, side, and end (so you can read it in a stack of boxes), “Re-evaluate on [the date six months from today].”
Don't write what's in the box. Put a reminder in your calendar to look through it. When you open it, you may find it useful to discover things you'd totally erased from your mind. Maybe they just needed time off from use; often, though, you'll find that now you're