Discardia_ More Life, Less Stuff - Dinah Sanders [52]
Deciding shouldn’t be as hard as it seems to be. Fifteen percent of self-storage customers described themselves as using their units to store items they “no longer need or want.” Even knowing this, they found it to be a better decision to pay money every month not to have to make choices about that stuff. Dishearteningly, Mooallem reported that storing the unwanted “was the third-most-popular use for a unit and was projected to grow to 25 percent of renters the following year.”
Can you picture me with my mouth open, blinking at the article as I read that? Are we crazy? Maybe not crazy but in profound denial. TV critic and author Heather Havrilesky said, “We all want to feel that our lives are filled with endless possibilities, that we have all the time in the world. Hoarding can be a way of denying that there's an end point to your timeline or boundaries around your opportunities.”
Limits don’t prevent fulfillment; they’re merely the edges of the canvas. Make your life a masterpiece in the space and time you have.
I can see viewing a storage unit as a temporary workspace for the project of weeding through a backlog of possessions while gaining the immediate benefit of a less-crowded home, but I am dubious about taking on both the cost and the risk of depending on that extra slack to hoard things that aren’t of real value to you.
One member of the online community MetaFilter bearing the enigmatic handle “Pastabagel,” summarized the danger like this: “Don’t just accumulate stuff in a warehouse. You’ll turn your junk into a utility bill.”
Uncover your comfort level
Clutter is both the low-hanging fruit and the pernicious beast in the process of freeing your life of stuff that you don't actually want in it. Discardia has made me—who has never been a neatnik—able to have my house ready for company with a couple minutes of tidying up. It turns out living with clutter is far more work than maintaining a cleaner place. Your comfort level may be more or less messy than mine. I'm tidier than mess-loving folks, but less so than some I know with pristine homes and perfectly ordered closets.
Regardless of where you position yourself on the spectrum, it matters that your home isn’t full of 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.
It's uncanny how much our feelings of personal freedom are connected to the amount of wiggle room our stuff has. Ask yourself, “What could I remove that would make this space (or time) work better?” We radically improved the intimacy and spaciousness of our living room by rearranging everything and, most importantly, by removing three pieces of furniture. It’s now more supportive of really living in it, doing what we most value: conversation and relaxed contemplation.
Here are a few more little laps to keep cutting away what you don’t need:
Why do you have more than one of those? You only need one of certain things, so why clutter up your life with multiples? Are you actually the kind of person who ever uses a multihead screwdriver in each hand? While I understand the existence of an extra can opener in the emergency kit, do you really need three in the kitchen drawer? There's a store (or a relative’s overstocked drawer) nearby where you can get another if this one breaks. Keep the best one and get rid of the inferiors. For some things—corkscrews, for example—it's worth having one spare so a broken tool doesn’t ruin an evening. (However, if there's a corkscrew on your Swiss army knife—as there is on mine—you’ve got your emergency backup, so get rid of the big extras.)
Some tools and steps aren’t required at all. Examine the order in which you do things. Are you needlessly