It should be mandatory for every urban city-dweller to go through the process of object abdication. I’m not talking about your run-of-the-mill spring cleaning or annual wardrobe tidy; I’m referring to that brutal, confronting, all-encompassing few weeks before moving house where the viability of every single thing you own is up for debate.
It’s a strange period where you find yourself forced to make difficult decisions like ‘How many wine glasses is too many?’ or ‘Do we really need Grandma’s ashes?’. Truth be told; I don’t have the answer to either (although my gut feeling is four and what you do with Grandma is up to you), but there is something profoundly calming about ridding yourself of material possessions. The more you can condense life down into the smallest of packages, the more room there is to marvel at its wonder.
Or at least, that’s how it should be.
In reality, cleaning your house and getting rid of stuff before a move feels like an all-out military operation. There are Blitzkrieg-level plans of attack, daily skirmishes, strategies for mitigating escalation and, if things get too out of hand, the much-needed intervention of an impartial third-party peace-keeping neighbour.
It’s something that I have come to know well. Over the past decade, I have moved house six times, once interstate and always with as few things as possible. An old colleague used to consistently make fun of me because when I first moved to Sydney, I had only one plate and one cup. That seemed crazy to him, but it worked for me at the time and I guess I understand his perspective.
A few years back, I watched my parents ‘downsize’ their family home of 20 years into a unit that is still three times the size of any apartment I’ve ever lived in. It was…eye-opening. The way objects were judged by their propensity to function as directed and not by whether they were ever going to be used was utterly engrossing to me. I don’t know why you would ever need seven 24-piece cutlery sets between two people, but they weren’t broken so therefore, they went in the ‘Keep’ pile.
There is nothing wrong with that decision, it’s just not for me. And that’s the fascinating thing about this whole clearing out situation; just how differently everyone approaches it. We all have our own unique ways of tackling the problem of overconsumption in our everyday. How someone decides what to keep and what to throw away can tell you a lot about that person; their values, interests and what they deem as being worthy of memory.
Marie Kondo famously has her ‘Does this spark joy?’ approach to objects, while Margareta Magnusson is all about decluttering to reduce the burden on loved ones after you die. I don’t really prescribe to either philosophy, and perhaps that’s because I find no joy in life and I’m not having kids, so I’ve learned to clear out things in my own way.
And it’s kind of changed my life.
You see, six months ago, my wife and I had a crazy idea to quit our jobs and travel the world for a whole year. Neither of us had ever taken a gap year and for a good chunk of time, we’d been either working multiple jobs, interning, studying, doing short courses or finding unique and creative ways to otherwise occupy the modicum of spare time left in our days. That’s not to say we hadn’t had holidays or done great things (we definitely have), but I would have been disappointed in us if we had gotten to age 80 before we decided to really make a go at seeing this remarkable planet that we call home.
I quit my full-time job in November and (perhaps foolishly) started this publication immediately, but in between meetings, interviews and writing, I’ve been slowly chipping away at the mountain of stuff that you inevitably accumulate over the years.
My days have revolved around responding to Facebook Marketplace messages and dealing with virtual tyre kickers who seemingly get a kick out of making me do increasingly humiliating things like get on the floor and take photos of the inside of the coffee table wheelbase. But it’s been necessary. Our goal was to fit everything that we wanted to take with us over the next year into one backpack each. Everything else would go into the smallest storage unit we could find. Sounds simple enough, right?
Wrong.
The process of trying to decipher what to keep and what to throw out has been a painstaking journey into the Badlands of my psyche. I started by doing, as we all do, separating our things into three piles; ‘Keep’, ‘Donate’ and ‘Discard’. Pretty quickly, I realised that the ‘Keep’ pile was rapidly mounting, while the ‘Donate’ and ‘Discards’ were suspiciously stagnant. So I started again. And again. And probably did this another three or four times, before I realised that I might have some issue with letting things go.
That’s when I knew I had to think about things differently. If I wanted to make this leap, step into the unknown and truly see the world, I was going to have to do it without a lot of the comforts I had become accustomed to. My ‘Keep’ pile quickly turned into the ‘What would I die without’ pile, while the ‘Discard’ bucket grew as I realised how decrepit and derelict some of the things I was holding onto really were. But I think the most transcendent change came with the ‘Donate’ group.
Like my parents, I had been keeping so many things because of the potential they had for use. So many cords and cables, brand new shoes, clothes that were three sizes too small but that I was hopeful of one day fitting into. All of it was just unnecessary and taking up space, when it really could have been used by someone who needed it. Or someone whose joy was sparked when they saw it.
In fact, this process of bucketing my possessions into ‘Keep’, ‘Donate’ and ‘Discard’ has unexpectedly seeped into my everyday life. When something grabs me, like really grabs me, I make it part of my life, but it must come at the expense of something else; a trade proposal between what I have now and what I’d like to have. If it doesn’t serve me more than whatever I’ve already got, it doesn’t get purchased.
I’m not trying to make some grandstanding statement about overconsumption or validate my feelings of superiority; I’d still like to have a nice house and my Amazon wishlist is still growing every day, but the process of forced minimalism has ever-so-slightly moved the needle for me. We’re about two days away from being out of this house and fully in backpacks, and there is still a lot to be done, but I feel much calmer about it. Whatever goes will go and whatever I can’t take, I won’t.
Now, does anyone need a couch?
