Having moved across the world yet again, I was forced to go through my things and decide what was necessary and what was not. Most of my stuff fell in the "unnecessary" category and I summarily gave them away or sold them. It just didn't seem prudent to ship everything back to Canada nor did it seem worth the cost.
There are another group of people who have been thinking about this and a lot of them are taking it to the next level. These group are known as Technomads or Neo-Minimalists and they are trying to use technology to unclutter their lives. Technomads argue that physical stuff is becoming increasingly unnecessary as our technological devices can help take the place of collections of things like books and record collections. Sean Bonner has written an interesting and insightful article as he, his wife, and his newborn son have started a year of travel where they plan to live in different cities around the world.
They're not just randomly choosing places but are moving to a new city each month and working from there like they would any other city. It's an interesting idea but obviously something that you can only do if you're a person who is able to work while on the road. Bonner has written about the experiment as a special feature for BoingBoing.net (my favourite blog) and he will be continuing to blog about it as the project unfolds. I like that I have just enough stuff to fit into two or three suitcases but it's going to be hard for me to cut down more. What about you? Do you think that you could live with less stuff? What about a significant amount of less stuff? Or would it be too heartbreaking for you to let go?
Hm, Dan, this is such an interesting concept. I love the sounds of that project blog you described!
ReplyDeleteAs I, too, have been moving around from place to place for the past several years, I have been trying to minimize the clutter in my life. There's something about the whole moving process that really makes you realize how cumbersome it is to have a lot of "stuff."
On the other hand, while the move toward storing "stuff" using technology helps me clear off my shelves, I find that it's often much more convenient and organized to deal with the heavy, bulky, encroaching stuff than it is to deal with the technology. For example, as any of us do, I like to minimize my paper usage by keeping all my documents digital until I really need that paper copy, but a lot of the time, that paper copy affords you a cumbersome convenience (i.e. lugging around a big, heavy binder everywhere as I have been doing all block, but knowing that everything you need is literally at your side) that a computer can't allow.
Or, perhaps, is it just that I need to invest in some more techy tools than the ones I've acquired thus far? Definitely a possibility.