The Great “Stuff” Race: A Mid-Life Inventory
From the time you’re a kid, life feels like a high-speed race to acquire stuff. The pace only accelerates as you hit working age; suddenly, you’re chasing everything in sight. Let’s be honest: you can accumulate an alarming amount of junk. Along with acquiring that stuff, you have to work more just to buy the silly stuff that eventually leads to the “debt of stuff”.
Eventually, you reach a point where you start to crest that hill. You look back at your mountain of possessions and ask yourself, “What the hell did I do?”
Take the paintings on my walls, for example. Somebody absolutely had to have them—even though I possess a strictly “Crayola and coloring book” level of artistic appreciation. Then there were the multiple cars, the Harley, and 3,000 square feet of… well, more stuff. Every floor was filled. You never know when you might need that one Beanie Baby at the bottom of a 40-gallon plastic container. Or that one “goal shirt”—you know, the one you keep because “it will fit nicely” once you lose those 20 pounds.
It reached a level of absurdity where I couldn’t actually eat a meal in the dining room or entertain anyone in the living room because they were just showrooms for more stuff. All that “fancy” furniture was reserved strictly for “special occasions”. That is a lot of inventory for a guy who typically prefers the company of animals over people!
The Great Shrinking
Along the way, I managed to unload some “bad humans” and met and married a much better one. She is the master “pruner”. It’s quite possible that if I stop moving for too long, she might mistake me for old clutter and donate me, too!
However, we are in lockstep, living with significantly less clutter. Over the years, we pruned everything down to the essentials. When we moved from the U.S. to Brazil, we consolidated our entire lives into just 20 suitcases. We now live in a small two-bedroom place, and we are genuinely happy because we have exactly what we need.
My closet—minus that shirt that was never going to fit anyway—has gone from a massive walk-in to about three feet of hanging space and four drawers. The best part? I don’t miss a single thing. Life is remarkably easy with a minimalist approach. I could probably condense even further, but that’s a challenge for another day.
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