Clutter

If last year was the year of cleaning up my life financially as a part of the brief pro-bono stint to the non profit world of NGOs, the theme of this year has undoubtedly bean expanding that exercise to the realm of physical possessions. The housing co-op I've been living in from 2004 has finally pulled its act together and managed to begin the renovation of all the pipes and whatnot in the apartments. For me this in practice means vacating the premises for a good three months at least and packing my entire apartment up for the duration of the renovations.

The opportunity afforded by this change has naturally been to make a radical cleanup of most things. This, for me, has basically consisted mainly of getting rid of a ton of stuff. My wardrobe has, more or less, been reduced to a half of what it was. Most of the older electronic gizmos, laptops, etc. are out, along with a bulk of whatever happened to be in drawers and closets. The more stuff I've thrown out or given away, the better all of this is starting to feel. The counterpoint that some older people have raised has been that they would've in retrospect wanted to preserve some artefacts from their earlier lives. Sure, a nostalgic memorabilia are nice and everything, but more often than not it just adds to all the clutter. At least now for me preserving certain digital artefacts is more than enough; hard drive space is cheap, square meters are not.

Overall I think that this exercise has also highlighted what is important and what is not. In practice I've kept my books, some of my clothes, basic stuff needed for cooking and eating, sports gear (boxing stuff, clothes, kettlebell, ...), laptop (and phone, tablet, ...), hygiene gear, and that's more or less it. Now the real challenge will be to make the appropriate routines to try to preserve this type of lean approach, similar to the way how I've been keeping my financial footprint relatively small after getting things sorted out earlier. We'll see how this exercise will go.