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Comment by jen729w | Hacker News Reader

I don’t want to come off as all holier-than-thou, and probably will, but here goes.

My girlfriend moved in with me about a year ago and, in the process, we cleaned out a lot of ‘stuff’. Personal stuff, kitchen stuff, knick-knack stuff, furniture stuff, memento stuff, clothes stuff ... just all the stuff that you accumulate as you move through life. (We’re both ~40.)

Since then, we’ve been very careful not to accumulate more stuff. I’m not exaggerating when I say that we deliberate over a new kitchen utensil. We don’t buy anything unnecessary.

It’s amazing. Our home is amazing. We live in a mid-sized apartment but it feels spacious because it’s not full of stuff. Life is simpler. There’s less to clean. What there is to clean is easier because—you guessed it—it’s not covered in stuff.

Buy less stuff. Throw most of your stuff away. You almost certainly don’t need it.

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You might be interested in this 10 year old (well, ancient, but rebranded for millennials) trend called "minimalism":

https://www.becomingminimalist.com/what-is-minimalism/

https://www.theminimalists.com/archives/

And relevant vloggers:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrf_dMnatW0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVcwvCL2C2c

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCZ40QwZtFs_7h5MZ0ZTTwg

and so on...

I was wondering whether someone would bring up the Minimalists. They were great for the first 160-170 podcast episodes. After a certain point you will see that the average episode dropped from 2h to 35mins, and most of the 35mins are pushing to their Patreon paid podcast.

They added immense value in my life, but after a certain point they live to advertise their own services. They keep saying that "advertisements suck", well, this has been their game for a few months now.

Back to the topic of minimalism, we tend to ignore some aspects of our lives. Consuming, owning senselessly makes things worse every day even if/when we don't realise it. I would suggest that you pick a random episode of the minmalists (between 1-160) and if you like what you hear download and go through the first 160 episodes.

> They were great for the first 160-170 podcast episodes. After a certain point you will see that the average episode dropped from 2h to 35mins, and most of the 35mins are pushing to their Patreon paid podcast.

For a minimalist podcast, it doesn't seems minimalist at all to have 2h podcast ;).

Sell or give away before throwing away. I have listed a bunch of stuff I don't particularly want on eBay it costs me nothing and often someone near by eventually finds it and wants it. I recently sold something I listed in 2017.

Yep, anything useful goes on Gumtree for $0. Usually disappears within the hour.

Listing anything for free makes the crazies come out of the woodwork though. Usually too much hassle than it is worth imho.

God forbid you have to interact with white trash in order to get rid of a set of 3/4 used tires. /s

Getting rid of something for free is such a quick transaction that IMO complaints about the people you're transacting with aren't really meaningful/valid.

I've found it's actually better to list things for a small price than to try to give it away for free. When you list for free, tons of non-committed people contact you and it's too difficult to hold for someone who ends up falling through. And sometimes you upset the beggers who think they claimed it first. When there's at least a small transaction price, you have a much better chance of getting a serious buyer.

Listing items for a sixpack of their favourite makes for friendly, casual interactions. And you try out new things!

My wife uses local "giveaway" Facebook groups. Whenever we clean, some clothes, books or items go there and get picked up over the next days. We also source things from these groups ourselves occassionally. Overall, we feel great about it; a lot of perfectly good things get a second, third or nth life.

Pawn shops can be useful for this, too. You won't the same price you would on ebay, but you do get to get the stuff out of your house now.

When I tried the ebay route, I found that my place never actually got any cleaner. All the stuff that I had decided to declutter would still sit around the apartment, taking up space all the while, while it spends months or years waiting to be sold.

Yeah, a lot of the stuff I have listed is stuff I don't mind owning but if someone wanted to offer the right price I would let go of them.

There's groups on Facebook for giving away stuff. They all go so fast on there and it help someone that need it.

We live in London, two of us in a tiny flat (~500sqft). For a while we had a lodger in the spare room (yes, two bedrooms in 500sqft). We have very few things we don't need or use, and have pretty frequent clearouts of all the crap that still manages to accumulate somehow.

Even living in this tiny space, there is almost nothing that we need that we can't fit in there. People often wonder how we manage, and partly it's possible because we draw on the public resources around us (e.g. who needs bookshelves of books when you have a library), but also because we have almost no 'stuff' - things we needlessly store and hardly use.

Completely agree, I am the same way. It is well worth it to live a minimalist lifestyle. I also threw out boxes and boxes of worthless junk recently - thousands of baseball cards, beanie babies, old broken items, obsolete gadgets (cd players) etc. Living minimalist is the way to go, here is why: when you need to clean the home, it is easier to clean. You can get a roomba and the roomba is able to clean the entire carpet because there aren't boxes of junk everywhere. Also when you have less stuff, your house can be better organized. Just look at home design magazines - almost all have minimalist design to them.

We went through a similar process after moving country (not worth the shipping costs so we simply sold 99% of our stuff) and felt the same.

A year later we now have just as much stuff as we used to, maybe even more. No matter how hard you try, you will always end up accumulating new things, whether it's through gifts or because you need something in particular for a specific occasion (specialty screwdrivers for example).

I think it's healthy to go through all (and I mean all) of your stuff at least once every two years and sell anything you have not used in a year or more.

You can have a certain amount of stuff but don't let it get excessive. I used to have boxes and boxes full of items that weren't even organized. Like literally....I knew I had that one item...but good luck finding it in the mountain of boxes! If you are at that point then it is time to start reducing your items. The stuff you have needs to be neat and organized and not overly excessive.

A rule we apply at home: if you haven’t use it in the last six months, get rid of it.

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