Death by stuff

First, the obligatory PG link you're probably thinking of: http://www.paulgraham.com/stuff.html.

Now my comment - I recently spent 3 months with my gf backpacking Europe and when I say backpacking I mean I had a satchel (http://www.rushfaster.com.au/product.php?pProductID=BOQ-MSD-...) and my gf had a backpack and both were small & light enough to meet carry-on restrictions for even budget airlines (e.g. Ryanair). I'm not going to tell people to abandon their possessions, but there was a certain power to having to keep your "stuff" to this limit each day and it's something that has inspired me to "focus" my possessions back home. What I mean by focusing includes:

* Donating anything (old clothes, PC hardware, not books although I would donate children's books if I had close friends with children) that might be better used by others (donation bypasses my "don't want to waste this stuff" filter).

* Actually buying/planning to buy new stuff if it means I'm not spending all day worrying about "that monitor that has to have the cable positioned so-and-so" or "that car that is always breaking down" or "those clothes that don't fit so great but I don't have a replacement for".

* Finding out-of-the-way storage locations (parents/grandparents etc. might be a good place for this, otherwise your attic/shed) for sentimental stuff that I don't want to see everyday but don't want to part with yet.

The whole idea is to streamline the role of "stuff" in my life, and avoid that "attrition" cost from stuff whose cost now outweights its benefits. In some ways it is about treating stuff in a more "liquid" fasion - it is better to throw something overboard when it starts to weigh too much than try to move with a thousand different anchors.

I'm going out on a limb here and saying this poster doesn't have children. Because we don't collect much stuff, and we don't have a mortgage, but we do have children, and expenses like health care and college planning don't just go away because you wish you had more flexibility to do what you love.

I'll be a lot more flexible in about ten or eleven more years. That's when the younger of the two can be expected to be done with undergraduate studies. They're on their own for graduate work, at least until I get the chance to finish mine.