Have you gone through several iterations of de-cluttering, only to feel like you really didn’t make much progress? The likely reason for this is that our lives are filled with clutter, rather than us just having a few areas of clutter.
I realized this as I began reading Your Money or Your Life: 9 Steps to Transforming Your Relationship with Money
We start out in life unfulfilled, with nothing, and we start acquiring stuff. At some point, we peak (the top of the curve) when we have enough. That’s the magic thing that we’re always looking for: enough.
But, of course we don’t stop acquiring. We enter the zone when we begin having more than enough, and therefore begin accumulating clutter. And most of us accumulate it all of our lives. The sad thing is, we don’t just have more stuff than we need, we now have stuff we don’t need that demands our attention in some way: we have to maintain it, fix it, continue to make payments on it, store it, …
So we start becoming less fulfilled instead of more so.
Take a simple example of my guitars. I have four of them, all very nice guitars, including two that I inherited from my Dad, one that was autographed by the legendary Buster B Jones a few weeks before he died (the last thing he autographed), and one that has been with me for over 30 years. And I have not played any of them in three months. I now have to restring every one of them, and the one that is 30 years old needs new frets. And then I’ll play with them for a few days, then three of them will just set around for months.
It actually gives me anxiety thinking about how those guitars are being wasted, three of them anyway. I don’t need all four. But, I keep them nonetheless.
Then there are the 100′s of books, some going back to my college days of over 30 years ago. And my late wife’s jewelry: enough to start a store. Closets full of clothes I haven’t worn in a long while, and so on.
I bet you have similar examples.
And, when you stop and think about, the clutter goes beyond purchases: we also clutter our lives with activities that are of no real value to us.
So, what do we do? We can do some de-cluttering. It seems to me, though, that what we most need to work on is our constant desire to fill our lives with more “stuff,” be that unnecessary purchases or activities that are of no value. I don’t have any advice for you on how to do that, at least not at this time. For now I can only present it as something we should be aware of and work on to the extent that we can.
[Picture Source: New Road Map to Financial Integrity]