You likely have a bunch of stuff you don’t really need. It’s lying around your house taking up space, being air conditioned and heated for no reason, slowly losing value while not really being used by you and making you like your space less.
More importantly, letting your excess stuff go will unlock a greater variety of possible creative options for crowbaring your life.
What to ditch:
- Clothes and shoes that you don’t wear, or that don’t look good on you, or that are uncomfortable, or that are expensive that you don’t wear often for whatever reason.
- Tools you don’t often use.
- Kitchen gadgets that you use less than once a month, or that are single-purpose and whose function can be met with another multipurpose tool. (An example is that I don’t own an electric egg beater device. I own an egg beater/whisk attachment, and I own a cordless drill. )
- Outdoor gear you don’t use. Seriously, you went kayaking twice, seven years ago. Let someone else play with the kayak.
- Art that isn’t hung.
- Art that is hung but that you never even notice because it’s been on your wall for seven years and your brain just tunes it out.
- Extra or redundant furniture. (Look up Katy Bowman for a radical option.)
- Vehicles you don’t really need (we’ll discuss this in more depth soon).
- Electronics you don’t use or decide to stop using (TVs, gaming consoles, audio equipment, etc).
- Books you don’t or won’t read, or that you simply no longer need to own since libraries exist.
- Your box of trophies from Little League. They gave everyone those trophies. Nobody cares. Everybody has the same trophy in their attic. Let it go.
List things on facebook marketplace or ebay and sell as much of it as you can. Have a garage sale. What you can’t sell, take to a donation place or the curb with a “free” sign on it. What you can’t give away, throw away or recycle or compost. If throwing stuff away makes you feel guilty, use that psychological pain as motivation to think really hard before you buy stuff again.
You don’t have to be a capital M Minimalist to be a post-consumer, but it doesn’t hurt. And the minimalist community has a lot of tips, information, strategies, mindset, and inspiration for decluttering and downsizing your material possessions.[1] So I recommend checking that community out – they will help with seeing the practice of decluttering and maintaining a low-stuff lifestyle as a worthwhile and attractive endeavor in and of itself.
By the way, don’t get too worked up over the “I only own 43 things” videos. It can be another form of status anxiety to consume keeping-up-with-the-minimalist-Joneses content. Get the information you need and get out if you find it anxiogenic.
The best way to approach this is to start with a big push where you make a big dent in a short amount of time. Spend a weekend or a week dedicated to getting rid of your stuff. Tackle one room or category of thing (“clothes” or “kitchen stuff” or “outdoor gear”) at a time. Start with whichever room you think is easiest/funnest/will make the biggest impact on your attitude. For some this will be your bedroom/clothes closet, because it’s really nice to sleep in an uncluttered space. For other people this might be the kitchen because you spend a lot of time cooking (at least now you do!) and having only what you need and use makes cooking more pleasant. It doesn’t matter where you start as long as you actually start.
My Preferred Approach:
- Designate a temporary staging location or box for processing and storing “to sell” stuff.
- Designate a space or box for “to donate” stuff. If you have a car, this can be bags or boxes that live in your trunk, so whenever you are out you can just drop it off.
- Take everything out of the storage spaces/closets/nooks/drawers/etc, and put them in a pile in the middle of the room.
- Sort the “everything” pile into the “to sell”, “to donate”, “to trash/recycle”, and “to keep” piles.
- Put the stuff you’re going to keep back.
- Take the to donate stuff to the donation place.
- Sell the to sell stuff.
- Trash/recycle the rest.
Making these decisions can be mentally and emotionally draining. You might need to do one push per category per weekend for a period of time until you’ve gone through all of your things.
Another approach that I really like is the Packing Party. This is where you pack all of your stuff in boxes as if you were moving, and then only take things out of the boxes as you need them. After a certain amount of time, you have proven what you actually do and do not use in your life. Ditch everything still in a box.
Once you’ve gotten your stuff pared down to a level you’re happy with, you’ll want a system that maintains your amount of stuff at or below that level. This could be a one in, one out system. This could be a “no more things than fit in these defined spaces” system. This could simply be a NBY/lifestyle, which we’ll talk about later.
As your mind flips from consumer habits to post-consumer habits, you won’t really need a defined system. You simply just won’t tolerate a bunch of consumer clutter, you won’t be buying a bunch of dumb stuff all the time, and you’ll like the clean and streamlined way your space is set up and you’ll keep it that way.
Letting go of your surplus stuff is a prerequisite for crowbaring your Shelter situation, so be sure to make some progress on this front before exploring all the Shelter options we’ll get to soon.
[1] I can’t find it now, but my favorite tip from a minimalist blogger from years ago was the following: “How to become a minimalist in three steps. 1) Rent a dumpster. 2) Put your stuff in the dumpster. 3) Congratulations, you’re now a minimalist!”
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