Stuff Sucks!
I might be moving for the first time in ten years from Raleigh, NC to Boulder, CO. This is actually the first time I have moved since I came to North Carolina for graduate school. Boy have times changed. When I moved here, I really didn’t have a lot of stuff to move. I rented a small U-Haul trailer and towed everything I owned down here. All of my possessions easily fit into a studio apartment with room to spare. Since then, I’ve graduated, gotten married, and worked full-time for several years. I’ve also gone from being a poor student to living quite comfortably while buying everything I’ve ever dreamed of over the years.
I guess this might just be a natural progression for someone who grew up living a fairly simple life on a farm, to making a good living in the tech sector. While I was always prone to spending when I was a kid, I didn’t have any money to buy anything with. With a decent income, it became too easy to divulge in the consumer lifestyle and fill my home with everything from home theater equipment and computers to furniture and clothes to collectibles and chatzkies. The plain fact of the matter is that the stuff accumulates.
I’ve been spending the past couple of years simplifying my life and weaning down my possessions. I used to have a home office with several computers, networking throughout the house, X10 home automation, PDAs, and everything on uninterruptible power supplies. While it was fun for a while, it was just too much complexity. I spent so much time maintaining everything that I wasn’t able to just relax and enjoy life. So I removed all of the X10 home automation, sold the PDA and UPSs, got down to a laptop and a desktop computer and switched to a simple WiFi setup. I also switched to using Apple computers in the process instead of a mishmash of Linux, Windows, and SGI UNIX machines.
In the process of simplification, I also got rid of tons of books, furniture, useless collections, and lots of other stuff that was just cluttering up the house. I have to say that the more I get rid of the better I feel. It really just boils down to the fact that
the more stuff you have, the more stuff you have to worry about.
I’m really looking forward to my move to Colorado so that I can force myself to eliminate all of the remaining junk around the house and make a clean start.
