Decluttering

ghost

ghost

Well-known member
Slothrop said:
you just need to have a place to put them away in a neat storage box on some organized-looking shelves in an airy room, at which point your round to having more space and more storage, which is a luxury again.
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Storage boxes, to me, are the biggest sign something's gone wrong. If you need boxes to store things you've got too many of them. And then you have extra boxes, and storage for your storage, and suddenly you need to put your card catalog somewhere. For me it's just, you've always gotta be pruning, you've always gotta know what's important to you. Don't own the things that aren't important.
 
Slothrop

Slothrop

Tight but Polite
ghost of beiser said:
Storage boxes, to me, are the biggest sign something's gone wrong. If you need boxes to store things you've got too many of them. And then you have extra boxes, and storage for your storage, and suddenly you need to put your card catalog somewhere. For me it's just, you've always gotta be pruning, you've always gotta know what's important to you. Don't own the things that aren't important.
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Don't really agree on boxes - there's stuff that I do that's very important to me that needs a relatively large amount of kit that only comes out occasionally. Like various outdoor things - trad climbing, camping, winter hillwalking etc. An axe and crampons and bivi bag and four season sleeping bag and ropes and trad rack and bouldering mat and so on take up quite a bit of physical space but there is no fucking way I'm buying into any idea of decluttering that means getting rid of them, so I'm more interested in ways of having that stuff, not accumulating it unnecessarily (like not buying a new set of crampons every time a new model comes out that's meant to be marginally better in some way) and keeping it somewhere where I can get at it when I need it but where it won't get in the way of the stuff that I need on a daily basis. So decent storage helps.

I think knowing what's important to you is the interesting thing, though. It often seems to be presented as a relatively lightweight question - like, hey, you've got all that tat that you bought years ago and don't care about, if you get rid of it all you'll have loads more space - but in practice (for people I know well, at least) it seems like it involves much harder decisions, either admitting that some good intention that you have is never actually going to come to fruition - you're never going to mend this thing or use that thing that you could in theory use to make yourself a better person - or that you can cut out some thing from your life that you've sunk some amount of money into and actually quite enjoy and have probably integrated into your sense of self to some extent - like giving up a sport or a hobby musical instrument or something - and trust that the long term benefit of having more time and space for other things will make up for the loss.
 
Leo

Leo

Well-known member
ghost of beiser said:
Storage boxes, to me, are the biggest sign something's gone wrong. If you need boxes to store things you've got too many of them. And then you have extra boxes, and storage for your storage, and suddenly you need to put your card catalog somewhere. For me it's just, you've always gotta be pruning, you've always gotta know what's important to you. Don't own the things that aren't important.
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I get your point but this is only an issue if you don't have the space to keep whatever they want. It's a joy to rediscover something you stored away years ago and forgot about. This whole notion of the zen purity of living a minimalist life isn't for everyone.
 
B

blissblogger

Well-known member
love chucking shit out

always amazed how much has amassed, how much can be dispensed with

then once you've cleared all that space - you can go back to filling it up again
 
mixed_biscuits

mixed_biscuits

_________________________
These husks of men posting their 1s; men with neither books on the shelves nor art on the walls nor musical instruments perched against family heirlooms. Sure, they'll point you towards their hypertrophic television with its remote control still in clingfilm and assure you that they have The Wire downloaded to their laptop and membership of a pseudo-intellectual guild called Dissensus but it's too late, I would have already judged them.
 
Clinamenic

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
mixed_biscuits said:
These husks of men posting their 1s; men with neither books on the shelves nor art on the walls nor musical instruments perched against family heirlooms. Sure, they'll point you towards their hypertrophic television with its remote control still in clingfilm and assure you that they have The Wire downloaded to their laptop and membership of a pseudo-intellectual guild called Dissensus but it's too late, I would have already judged them.
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Sounds like you're just a sloppy little guinea pig in denial.
 
version

version

Well-known member
I have lots of books, but they're shelved or in neat stacks. Every picture other than the first has shit all over the floor.
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
my flat got really serious fucked this winter i couldn't bear to live in it i had to be permanantly drunk or exhausted to cope but it never got to a 3 in this scale. but living in it was nightmarish.
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
on the other hand i consider it tidy now but theres quite a lot of shit on the floor, about 8 books scattered
across the floor in the bedroom, and there's always money everywhere
 
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