Out with the old, in with the nothing.
In 2007, blogger Dave Bruno initiated something called 100 thing challenge. The conceit of which was people had to look around at all their things — everything they possessed in their home or otherwise — and see if they could limit their possessions to a total quantity of 100.
At the time I thought it was the most reductive new thing from the neo-minimalism movement encouraged by people like Leo Babauta and Joshua Becker. I ignored it and didn’t think about it again for years. Even when George Clooney went on about that damn backpack in Up In The Air.
Then in 2011 I had an accident with a taxi or I came very close to being run over. By was injured pretty badly and took a while to recover. I remember sitting in bed the morning after getting home from the emergency room and looking around at all my stuff.
As morbid as it sounds, I thought to myself :
“If died yesterday and some poor bastard had to go through all my stuff and figure out what to do with it, where would it go? And what does any of it really matter to me anyway? I don’t use most of it. It just sits around, pretending to be valuable.”
Over the following months, I went through literally every possession I own and question whether I actually needed it, and through Bay, the good Samaritans or more frequently, a massive garbage bin I shed 60% of everything I owned and just kept I absolutely needed.
It was kind of liberating but didn’t really think about it that way. It just seemed like an efficient way to live in a small space.
I travelled for most of that year. Travel often teaches you how to live with few things, especially when you’re living out of a suitcase for months at a time. You have to do get creative and think about multiple uses for single items, or only buy good-quality things that will last for a long time and not become obsolete within a year.
When it came time to move house, it took about three hours to pack everything into boxes ready to move. Years ago it would’ve taken an entire day. I still own way too many books, but we all have our vices. (And I do actually re-read them.)
Did I get my possessions down to 100 items?
Yes. I got it down to 89 items, but I wasn’t aiming for a number. Everyone’s life is completely different and requires a different number of things to make tick along without friction. People with kids need a lot more stuff than travelling cartoonists with a proclivity for selling possessions on eBay.
I recommend it. I’ve stuck to the 100-items principle ten years later and it stops me from impulse-buying things on Amazon. It helps that I now live in a tiny Manhattan apartment, so I don’t even have room for a lot of things anyway.
My rule is: If something comes in, something has to be thrown out/sold to make way for it. It’s a simple rule, and easy to follow.
Above is a picture of my portable studio, circa 2011. Don’t worry, I punched myself in the head daily for being so insufferably trendy. My housemate at the time, Wyatt, used to joke about how absurdly neat and clean it was. He’d open the pantry and say “Jason, where’s the salt? AND DON’T SAY CRAIGSLIST!”
Originally published at www.jasonchatfield.com on December 5, 2013.
