How much STUFF do you own?
Do you prefer more or less?
What is your relation to your stuff?
What do you think is a “healthy” attitude to have towards stuff?
Will you get rid of the stuff you don’t need or do you allow it to accumulate?
What stuff can you not be without?
I know there’s some faddish “own a 100 things” movement which I’m not a part of but the figure is nice and round, could you get your stuff to 100?
I’ve just counted my stuff, I probably don’t own as much as most anyway but I’m at 165. I own 169 things including clothing. For some reason I have a large amount of socks in relation to everything else 29, more than double the amount of boxers I own, and then I own 42 books. The item I would probably struggle most with without is my laptop. I intend to get my figure down to 100 asap…
i am at a point in my life where mobility is a virtue. as such, i have minimal stuff. i have kinda a lot of stuff in storage, but i don’t find myself missing most of it…
I’ve had years to try to figure out what to do with stuff. Hang around on this ball of mud long enough, and most people are finally confronted with the issue. I finally came to the conclusion tha there are only two kinds of stuff: tools, and the rest of that shit. Now anything can be a tool. your computer is a tool (part of the time) and a painting can be a tool if it inspires you. But it finally comes down to a simple sorting scheme. If I have something that helps me do something, then it’s a tool and a keeper. But if I have something and the only thing I can say is that I have that something, then get it the hell gone.
There is an old saying that a person shouldn’t have more than they can carry in both hands at a dead run. That may be a little bit of hyperbole, but the closer one can get to that, the healthier that person is likely to be.
So dump that damned chia pet in the nearest garbage can…
My home itself is minimal but I have many books and hand-carved holiday souvenirs on shelves, many kitchen items and gadgets, and 100s of items of clothes shoes and underwear in my bedroom… but they are all on shelves, in cupboards and in drawers, thus maintaining my homes ultra-minimal facade
A sorting scheme is good. RE: the tool thing, possibly, but I’ve often felt that I shouldn’t have any kind of sentiment invested into “things,” so that I now have the majority of my books, many of which gave me pleasure, packed into bags to be taken to the charity shop. I’d be a lot more reluctant to do this with paintings though, I actually have some on my wall and I didn’t even count them as things I own, they’re pretty untouchable. But the books can burn!
A house isn’t one of those either so I don’t own any kitchen utensils or all that other crap that decorates houses. Yet.
I’m aiming for a duffel bag’s worth of luggage to be my be all and end all.
maintaining a minimalist lifestyle often involves just throwing a lot of stuff away, which is as bad as owning a whole lot of extraneous shit you have no use for.
the problem of stuff starts with a system that entitles everyone to own as much as they can accumulate, and then protects all that stuff for them. any system that makes it a natural right to pursue happiness through individual ownership of goods is going to result in a whole lot of clutter.
How’s the minimalist/throwing stuff away “lifestyle” just as bad?
Natural right? Feels like it’s more than that, like its our sole purpose in life, to buy and accumulate shiny things to decorate our nests with like fucking magpies. And what’s worst is that it’s not merely an ugly deformed limb of this “system” but its standing leg!
169? is that all…
