By Keith C. Milne
I recently began to seriously contemplate living and making do with less, and have taken baby steps in that direction over the last year or so. Currently, I’m mentally in a place where I want my life to be quieter, simpler, and far less cluttered than it currently is. Seems simple enough, right? I mean, what is going to be hard about not buying new stuff or imposing a waiting period before buying new stuff, getting rid of some stuff I already own that rarely or never get used, and enjoying the extra room and overall renewed organization and orderliness that doing this will mean to the quality of my life?
We work and earn money, and we like to spend as much of our money as we can pursuing fun activities which usually require a bunch of specialized gear. We also have birthdays and celebrate holidays, which are often gift giving and receiving occasions, so we gradually collect things that we think we want or that hold our interest at that particular time in our lives.
For me, the more money I made, the more I began to buy things I thought I always wanted and I began quickly accumulating lots of stuff. Nothing too big though, due to the small houses I’ve been living in most of my life, but the overall result is that I now have LOTS OF LITTLE THINGS AND THINGS TUCKED AWAY EVERYWHERE.
Yes, we’ve had tag sales or garage sales numerous times and have already unloaded an unbelievable amount of merchandise over the decades that, sadly, represented much sweat equity by both my wife and myself.
We are Americans living in America, and are bombarded with advertising everywhere, all of the time. of course some of that is going to translate into perceived needs for things we don’t actually need. Things being lots of silly things like a bread making machine, a food dehydrator, some marginal electronics and computer equipment, and all kinds of sports equipment used a handful of times and then . . . lost interest or too expensive to keep pursuing the sport.
It’s been coming to a head for me for quite some time now. It started when I went to file a copy of our taxes away after filing this year with the IRS, and I saw just how jam packed my file drawers all were. Then I noticed how much of what was in the files were ancient and no longer needed to be kept. Manuals for stuff I no longer even owned or possessed or that I had thrown out. Taxes from twenty years ago. Old pay stubs, and old bank statements. It just went on and on, and it left me wondering why we are still continually taught that we need to hang onto all this paper!
So the paperwork and copies of stuff that I no longer owned remained in the back of my mind and I kept intending to shred it all and get going through it all, but like most people with lives we can only devote so much time to this kind of thing before some other obligation, interest, or distraction takes its place, and by the time we get back to it, it’s like starting all over again or even worse.
Meanwhile, both my wife and I have been having trouble finding things beginning when we moved into our current home. Somehow, during that move, things got really mixed up and boxes ended up in wrong places everywhere, a lot ended up down in the basement. Seven years and two garage sales later, we still have trouble finding things because we still have too much. Many things are shared in our household, so sometimes material things get used and put back in new places that the other person is unaware of, making a search for the needed object pretty frustrating. But the real problem lies in the true scope of just how much stuff there is EVERYWHERE. Open a cabinet and it’s stuffed.
Sometimes, I’ve tried to find something I needed while cooking and almost panicked when I had to move the front half of the stuff on one of the cabinet shelves while something on the stove needed stirring or had to rummage around in the fridge seemingly forever in order to find a leftover or a jar of something.
Lately, it seems like every time I pull something off of a shelf ANYWHERE in the house one or more objects will fall out and hit the floor or will hit me in the foot. The shelves are so full that it’s becoming increasingly difficult to move a single thing without causing a cascade event. It’s ridiculous! It’s too much and over the top.
I’m very grateful that I can afford whatever I need or pretty much want to have or own, but I’m seeing the other side now. I’m seeing the damage to the planet that is a direct result of people just like me. I/we are the problem! Buying what ever we want or need with a tap or two in our Amazon apps and having it show up within a day or two. Talk about immediate gratification!
So when it came time this year to open our pool, I drained it and had my wife put it on Facebook Marketplace for free. A family from a close-by state came and disassembled the whole thing, packed it all up, along with all the accessories and chemicals that I had into a van and took it all home. No more wasting of water, no more wasting of my time cleaning it, checking the chemistry, filling the chlorine tablet feeder. LESS! Ahhh. Nice!
Not so fast. Now I was left with this old, odd shaped deck with no pool and that was right next to a brick patio that had really begun deteriorating over the last several years. So deteriorating brick patio, next to deteriorating wooden stairs to a deck in the same condition and a huge sand circle where the pool used to be, along with several pads of concrete, one of which was used to support a hot tub/jet spa.
It’s now been a couple of weeks since giving the pool away, and I was able to break up some of the concrete myself, but to do so I had to buy another tool, a rotary hammer!! I also realized while removing the concrete, which just about killed me, that to continue doing so was insane, and that I was in way over my head with the amount of work it was going to take me alone to remove the deck, remove the bricks, remove the rest of the concrete, tear down the stairs and rebuild them and a new deck, and then do all of the landscaping!
So, after some research and an email and some texting and a couple of phone calls, I found a guy that would remove all of that stuff for me, but it ended up costing me several thousand dollars. Now I still have this blank slate, really unkempt look in the back as all the material has been removed and now the whole former pool and deck area looks pretty awful.
I’ve already had two contractors come out and have pending quotes from them for all new back stairs and deck made with pressure treated wood topped with composite decking.
Next I have to research soil vendors or landscapers that can back fill the former patio area and pool area with good loam soil for grass. The area is way too big to just buy bags or a big pile and move it one cart at a time from the front to the back.
Finally, my wife and will need to decide upon shrubs and plantings and prepare gardens around the new deck and integrate it with the existing small garden that was next to the pool. Trying to do with less has turned out to be a lot more involved and harder to achieve than I formerly thought.
I have really realized how much less energy and resources would need to be used if we all just put the brakes on how much we feel like we need to consume and hold debt to own.
It strains the planet enormously to have these things that we own manufactured in the first place. They are made usually in China and then transported to America and other countries, and eventually are transported to stores or directly to us. We then have to unpack and dispose of the packing materials, and that material now needs to be transported to the landfill, and it all takes gasoline and releases combustive emissions into the atmosphere to bring it to me or that store and then to the landfill. I also realized that we, as consumers, often have to buy and use chemicals to protect the object while we own it, or special tools to maintain it, both taking the same path of resource use and atmospheric pollution to get it to me, and dispose of it. There is no free lunch.
To de-clutter a cabinet, it takes some thought and planning and a good amount of organizational skills. In fact, upon a second glance, it took a good amount of organizational skills to cram that much stuff into the cabinet to begin with. But man! what a daunting task to figure out what should go, and what should stay, and how it all needs to be reorganized!
Where to put things, how to get rid of things, figuring out whether or not they are still wanted or still useful to others, or deciding to put in even more time and work by hosting a garage sale to unload our overloaded house and hopefully get some money for the effort.
Learning how to repurpose things we already own, or how to not buy something in the first place is the ultimate challenge. I’m learning that, just like always, there is no free ride. If you want to live a de-cluttered life, then you must do the heavy lifting and hard work first, then learn how to keep living that way. You must fix the imbalance.
Some other examples of this phenomenon include or encompass often having to buy expensive energy efficient appliances, adding solar panels, upgrading windows and insulation in your house, and more, in order to use less overall energy over time as you add these to your home and enjoy the energy savings.
Learning a new language, especially as an older person is very difficult and requires a lot of time, which is precious to most, and is why “most” are not taking the time to learn one.
Starting a new business: takes more time, takes money that used to be allocated for other things, and those are just the first two items on a very long list of things that represent what MORE will be needed from you in order to make that happen and become a successful business.
Getting into shape and developing an challenging exercise routine that you will enjoy enough that you will stick with requires MORE of your time, energy, thought, planning, and perhaps new exercise gear, so money is also required.
These are just a few random activities where this strange balancing act, often hidden, is always silently at work and play ensuring that the universe remains more or less in balance. Yin-Yang. Light-dark, Good-Evil, Positive-Negative, the physics law that for ever action there is an equal and opposite reaction, Action-Reaction. This is what I’ve been paying attention to a lot lately. I can clearly see how it plays out in my life now. It fits with my own concept about nothing worthwhile ever coming for free or being easy. Now at least I have eyes wider open about it and now realize going into anything that I always have work to do FIRST, and that there will be no free ride for getting any particular goal accomplished.
If, like me, this is where you are on your own personal journey or experiencing something along the same lines in your own life, then congratulate yourself that you have already begun your journey by having the awareness that there is an imbalance, then feeling the desire to change to something better and are now prepared to do what it takes in order to make it happen.
Prepare mentally for your journey. I have already experienced the pain and agony that comes with having to part with what I’ve always considered to be prized possessions. Hell, in my case, it doesn’t even need to be prized, it only needs for me to perceive it as still useful, and I’m going to agonize far more than anyone should have to about whether or not I should get rid of the object.
I have also found it very difficult to spend the time needed to go through and get rid of stuff. It’s a lonely endeavor. I’m having to make all kinds of difficult, and sometimes emotional, and logistical choices. It’s not easy, but nothing worthwhile and good comes easy.
I plan to keep it up. I have more time to devote to activities like this now so I can’t use the lack of time excuse any longer. When I have spent the time and did the work, I’m always glad that I did.
I never dreamed that trying to pare down and make do with less would take so much more effort than I had imagined, and that the whole activity, although somewhat rewarding, does not come with less effort and more joy, rather it requires a lot of effort and even has you buying more at times (think rotary hammer) to attempt to live with less in the end.