Due to the the plunging economy of the world, the states and its citizens, a designer in Detroit has chosen to offer everything she owns for sale.

Check it out on www.goodbyewafflemaker.com/

My clothes are cleaned, ironed and folded about once a weak. This means that my wardrobe, which is completely adapted to a lifestyle where you do your laundry perhaps once every six weeks (at most!), becomes somewhat redundant.

I can only assume that I’m not making the most of what I own. What if I cleaned my clothes twice a week? How many pieces of clothing would I need? However, that would probably take a little more time than it would be worth, but it’s a thought!

I’ve realized that the concept of motional connection (perhaps poor naming) between us and our things, might need some further explanation.

It’s definitely not my intention to make the emotional connection out to be something redundant or meaningless, far from it. I actually think it’s important to focus on the subject, in order to make people realize which things they actually cherish and what they would actually be better off without.

Therefore the idea is to find the tipping point when an object is spiritually worthless to us but still takes up emotional space. All this may sound a bit newagey but with some good will I think you’ll understand what I mean.

Let’s take another example for the sake of clarification:
Compare sorting out old magazines, perhaps from your childhood, with going through a box of papers you wrote in school at the same time.
The latter is usually very valuable to you, mainly because they are the only copies in existence, but also because it’s something you’ve created yourself.
The first may also hold a place in your heart, but in a more general way; they give you a feeling of that period instead of a specific moment or experience.

Now I’m not saying that it’s an obvious thing to throw those magazines away, but that’s where the tipping point usually lies.
However, it’s not always just about nostalgia, even though that’s usually where it ends up later. The most difficult choices can actually be figuring out what the future me wish I would have saved, and what is a just a waste of shelf space.

Books
I have decided that I’m not going to save any books, unless there’s a very strong reason for me to do so. They’re a bit spread out in different boxes at the moment, but it shouldn’t be more than ten or fifteen or so. Two of them are Adrian Shaughnessy’s “How to be a graphic designer without loosing your soul” and Jesper Waldersten’s “Tack för senast din jävel”, both of which have had a tremendous impact on me, professionally as well as personally.

The reason for me to be so hard on books, has to dowith the fact that everything that is published will always exist somewhere else. I’m not against collecting useless stuff, but I’m not going to do it, and to me books are actually becoming more and more useless as objects due to the increased digitalization of all things written. A shame though because e-books aren’t by far as good looking as real books.

Photographs
When it has come to photographs I’m actually a bit divided. I’m all for digital photography and I believe it’s an amazing step forward for mankind to be able to record the world to such an extent. In the same time, It’s with my SLR that I taught myself photography, and I really love looking through my photo-albums with those small, witty comments written with my terrible hand writing.

Besides, the time I accidentally deleted half a year of (admittedly half assed, but still) photographs still haunts me, and I can’t stand the idea of exposing myself to the risk of that happening, ever again.

This whole thing is a journey to find out where that exact tipping point lies, and I hope by god that when my kids google this in twenty years, they’re not going to kill me for not keeping the original notes.

I just watched one of those celebrity behind-the doors-show about 90218-star (as well as the writer’s daughter, such a coincidence…) Tori Spelling downsizing her lifestyle since she’s expecting a baby.

Now I’m not sure if it’s really healthy, but I actually enjoy watching somebody being shocked by the thought that she has to part with a tweed suit (“It’s Chanel!”) that her own husband has never seen her wear (“but it’s vintage!”).

Anyhow, she arranges a yard sale which attracts loads of star-hungry parasites, just dying for a chance to get their hands on a pair of Tori’s underpants to keep for special nights. Surprisingly she actually handles the whole thing pretty well, considering that hundreds of strangers roam through her personal stuff as if it was a Wall-Mart-sale.

Go Tori!

For instance I recently bought a new phone, a Nokia 6300 which has mp3-player, radio and camera (I think it’s also possible to somehow use for calling people but I haven’t gotten around to use that feature). It was an incredibly planned purchase and as I see it it’s an item that has a lot of practical value for me, while still being beautiful and “emotionally confirming”. The only drawback is that the music-player isn’t quite as good as I had hoped, but it’s still a good piece of underpaid chinese-built electronics!

However, I bought this while I still was quite short of money and the question remains; will I be able to keep the same level of “buying-awarness” when my personal economy looses it’s straps and limitations?
I hope I can, and to help myself I’ve put together three simple rules so that I won’t fool myself in the spur of the moment:

1. Ignore sales
I don’t buy things on a sale, unless I find something I’d actually be prepared to buy for the full price (actually that happened once when I thought I bought a shirt for 500SEK but ended up paying half the price because there were some kind of “secret sale”!).

2. Don’t buy the ten percent-lie
I never join any customer loyalty programs, at least not until I get kids. Soon consumer-power is the only voice we have left, and I refuse to trade that away for ridiculous discounts.

3. No credit, no instalment-purchasing
I pay the whole price straight away, that way I cannot fool myself about the price and I’ll also get a better relationship with the things I own (after all, it’s easier to love a phone that you don’t have 18 months left to pay).

We’ll just have to wait and see if I can keep the fingers out of the consumer-jar!

Today will be a big day in terms of sorting out and cleaning up since we’re all moving out tomorrow. Of course this is an excellent opportunity to apply my own, very successful formula for obtaining a streamlined lifestyle. It’s based on the theory that your relation to all your belongings carry two values : practical and emotional.
The first is pretty easy, you simply have to figure out whether something is useful to you or not. The second is a little harder to define and apply due to it’s “softer” nature, but basically it’s about your emotional connection to an object.

A novel for instance is often quite useless after you’ve read it, but usually there’s quite a strong emotional connection to it. A hammer on the other hand is rarely kept for it’s spiritual value, but rather for for it’s nail-hammering capabilities.

I managed to get rid of quite a lot, especially clothes-wise but I still have a bit to go before I can carry all my stuff.

Over the last few years I have never lived a whacthamacallit, stable life, rarely spending more than six months at the same place, doing the same thing. It has felt like a constant packing and unpacking, constantly having to evaluate the material side of my life, deciding what to keep, what to throw away, what to sell etc.
Out of the mild chaos of traveling, moving and just living, a process of thought has evolved regarding the relation between our personal identity and material possessions.

When I moved from Sydney to Stockholm I made an experiment; I got rid of all my clothes and bought new ones. This, however turned out to be somewhat of a mistake, partly because Aussies aren’t exactly catwalk-material but also because it turned out my clothes, however worn out and ugly, was still a part of my identity.

What I’ve learned from that experience is that a complete change in possessions and environment may, and probably will put you severely off balance. I agree in Tyler Durdens famous words “Its Not Until You’ve Lost Everything, That Your Free To Do Anything”, but if you want to stay sane you might actually prefer not being completely free.

The idea is to explore my relation to my things and if I can find a balance between owning as little as possible, while still feeling comfortable and content with my situation. My “thesis” if you like is that most people live their lives with way to much stuff, things that they may once have invested emotionally in but don’t actually need (eg. “I can’t throw that pasta-machine away, my brother gave it to me back in ’89″).
This is far from a controversial thought, but what I would like to do is to actually apply it to my own situation, just using money and some common sense (most things, it seems, comes down to these two).

The goal is to live a more flexible, practical and hopefully also environmentally friendly lifestyle without creating a mechanical and static system that has no soul. I like to own things, but I would like to do it better and more effectively.

I’ll call this experiment “personal downsizing” (an expression I stole from MIT professor John Maeda, although I don’t think he’s using it in the same way) because that’s what it is, a reduction of unecessary crap, physical as well as spiritual.

I will document this journey as frequently as I can here on this blog. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a life to sort out.