It has now officially been one week since my extreme minimalist experiment has begun.
I kept a table with four chairs, a bed with two pillows,
all this kitchen stuff, all this bathroom stuff, and all this bedroom stuff.
I am NOT going to count it all,
because I find that counting your stuff is kind of like weighing yourself -
the lower number doesn't necessarily denote health.
So instead, I'm gonna focus not on the stuff, but on a few insights -
a few things that I picked up over this past week.
Here are three lessons that I learned this week, that I was not expecting.
Lesson number one: I realized on the first day that I kept
a few things in my apartment I wasn't gonna use all week,
namely the four chairs around my kitchen table.
Why did it keep ALL FOUR chairs? It's not as though I use more than one at a time.
I also kept an extra pillow on my bed, but I only use one pillow when sleeping.
I found it funny that I didn't even second-guess these when I was packing up last weekend.
A queen-size bed just "should" have at least two pillows, right?
A table "should" have chairs all around it.
The lesson here is that even with objects that you know you want to keep,
that you utilize daily, maybe there are PARTS of that object that you don't need.
Accessories or extraneous amounts of things that you can totally do away with -
they're not necessities. They're not tied to the object that you actually use.
Lesson number two: there is NO DENYING the needs of your specific living situation.
I myself live in a part of the U.S. that has four distinct seasons,
and right now it is wintertime - snowy, cold wintertime.
For me, that means I need a shovel and a humidifier at my apartment.
Do I enjoy owning them? No.
Would I say that they spark joy? Definitely not.
But I need them - they keep me safe and healthy. There's no way around it,
unless I moved to a place with a more temperate climate or fly south for the winter.
The lesson here might seem obvious: even with extreme minimalism,
there are going to be some objects that you have to keep around,
just because you live in a certain area or a certain building.
Rather than disregard their importance or scorn these objects for taking up a room in my closet,
this week I decided that the best I can do is appreciate
and respect them as tools that I need to use to improve my quality of life.
Sometimes the things you need to keep
are not going to "spark joy," even with extreme minimalism.
Some of the stuff you're gonna own is not gonna be your "favorite stuff," and that's okay.
Lesson number three: I found a few new efficiencies this week that really delighted me.
I know, I'm a nerd...
One of these efficiencies was meal-prepping in one big dish
and then leaving it in that dish to just bring to work on Monday.
All of my lunches for the week were in that one pan, so I didn't have to
worry about bringing a lunch every day or packing separate containers.
Another efficiency was keeping all of my clothes in the trunk of my car.
I've talked before about packing a gym bag at night and putting it in
the trunk of my car to get me to go to the gym the next morning.
Well, this NEW method even eliminates the gym-bag-packing!
Of course, this is made possible by the fact that I wear the same thing every
single day, and I don't have to dress up for work.
All in all, I honestly don't feel THAT different - which is a learning in itself!
If I don't feel different when my stuff's not here,
then do I actually need all of my stuff to be here?
Do I need all this stuff?
I do have the storage unit for another three weeks - I paid for a full month of rental -
so I'm going to continue to use it, and then at the end of that three weeks,
I'll go through and bring things back into my life that I want to
keep and see if there's anything in there that I no longer need.
I actually got a couple of ideas for experiments
to do in the future that are a bit more challenging than this,
so if you're interested in seeing that, check back in in a few weeks,
couple of months, consider subscribing...
uh - but I'm gonna save those for a future video. That'll be fun...
All right - 'til next time!
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