Just wait till you get a wife ;-)
and kids!
And decide to settle and buy a house...
About Not Owning Sh*t
31–40 of 113 posts
Re: About Not Owning Sh*t
#32The link to devo.ps on your sidebar is broken (missing the 'p' in 'http')
Re: About Not Owning Sh*t
#33My best friend is an international student from China. His philosophy is he'll get rid of anything that he can't pack up in 1/2 an hour. I complain that his walls are bare, but he says the excitement and adventure is to be had outside of the room. It's incentive to get into those woods or onto that mountain.
Re: About Not Owning Sh*t
#34Steve Job's, at age of 27 did not have much more stuff than this guy, and he was worthed already 100's of millions of dollars at that time. I was worth about over a million dollars when I was twenty-three and over ten million dollars when I was twenty-four, and over a hundred million dollars when I was twenty-five and it wasn’t that important because I never did it for the money. This was a very typical time. I was s…
Didn't Steve Jobs own that house?
Re: About Not Owning Sh*t
#35I'm perpetually amused by all the people acutely aware of their privilege, and how they rarely mention any of the things they're doing to try to right the injustice. It strikes me as the same making racist remarks and then insisting you have black friends, (the corollary being that my unchecked privilege probably makes me an unapologetic racist in this analogy but at least that's honest, I guess)
It isn't "injustice" that he's born into privilege. That affluence is the result of sacrifice and decisions made by his family and his larger community/nation.
The injustice is that other families and nations are various degrees of corrupt and ignorant. That's not necessarily his burden. In fact, the main reason that life is getting better around the globe is because advanced, "priviledged" societies invented agriculture, science, computers, refrigeration, vaccines, and so on.
Re: About Not Owning Sh*t
#36Problem is not owning stuff per se but getting attached to it
Re: About Not Owning Sh*t
#37I'd like to cut down on all of the junk I hold on to. What are some helpful tips to go from hoarder to not owning shit?
Also, quit having hobbies
Re: About Not Owning Sh*t
#38I posted something similar a few weeks ago when there was a link to a blog post talking about how getting rid of your smartphone will free you from the shackles. Again, I never understand the extremes. I own a fair amount of stuff. I use a fair amount of stuff. Must I either own nothing or own a ton of "shit"? I'm 31, married, and am planning on children in the very near future. Packing up a suitcase and fleeing town isn't something I aspire to.
I have a working room in my house where I have my desk, a computer, two guitars, and a keyboard. All "shit", but all shit I need to write and record music, which I find highly fulfilling. I also have some bookcases with books I've either read and want to keep or use fairly regularly for reference. They're not fitting in my suitcase but I'm better off with them than without them. I'm not missing out on life because I own things that I like.
I have a garage full of tools that I use to work on the house, as well as the cars that get my wife and I to work. Again, it's "shit". It "prevents" me from packing a suitcase and leaving town, but again, I enjoy the tinkering. I also have a little corner in my garage where I keep my homebrewing equipment and kegerator. While these things may shackle my existence in the world, guess what? I enjoy homebrewing.
The rest of my house is filled with functional devices as well. It's more comfortable sitting on a couch than it is the floor, so we have a couch. I, too, eat paleo and find that I need a few things in the kitchen to help accomodate that diet.
Must every hobby of ours exist within a laptop in order to achieve this weird bohemian self-actualization? If money is not an issue, is it terrible to own a few items you can't pack away in a moments notice? If I seriously wanted to skip town and go live in a foreign country for a year, it wouldn't exactly be hard to go rent a storage unit for less than $100 a month to house some of the stuff I can't take with me but wish to keep.
Re: About Not Owning Sh*t
#39> I am painfully aware I am a highly privileged educated white male and most of the world population don’t have the luxury of living like I do.
I have a somewhat similar lifestyle despite being unprivileged (I am black and from one of the poorest countries in the World). I think it's just a way of life that one builds over time. I know plenty of people here who worry too much about things like latest clothes, furnitures, owning a house and other commodities which clutter their life and make them spend more money than they can possibly make. I have always tried to live only on the minimum, I started my programming carrier without even owning a computer and now I make a pretty decent living (even by western standards). I would have never done it if I accumulated sh*t. I think things would be so much better around the World (in the developing as well as the developed World) if people just removed the clutter.
Re: About Not Owning Sh*t
#40I'd like to cut down on all of the junk I hold on to. What are some helpful tips to go from hoarder to not owning shit?
Whenever you think "I shouldn't throw that away, I might need/want it one day", dispose of it instantly - sell it or dump it.
That's some great advice, I'll start doing that!