Going Minimalist

Beside my time at school I’ve been out of my parents house for about two and a half years.  I’m independent, I can feed an clothe myself, and I know what essentials I need to live.  I used to gauge success based on what I own, but that is bull, a shelf of DVDs does not indicate success and is not how I want to portray my personality.  I want to go minimalist, I want less stuff.  With this in mind, over Thanksgiving I finally decided to start cleaning out my room at home.

The room is covered in posters and filled with toys and DVDs that I can obviously live without because I haven’t really seen them in 2.5 – 6 years.  I feel like I should give that room back to my parents so my brother can claim it or so my mom can make a guest room out of it since I’m basically a guest when I visit.

I started with my DVD shelfs which have about 200 DVDs that I mostly obtained during high school and college.  These DVDs were ‘must-have’ ‘collectibles’ that I ‘needed’ at the time, what crap, such a waste of money.  I always liked the idea of having a library of things that I like so I can go back to them or lend them out to spread the things I like.  But DVDs are not how I should have been doing this.  Now I feel like DVDs are the modern day library, but for the poor.  Like how last century the educated would have large oak/mahogany rooms filled with books showing their knowledge and status.  But DVDs are for laymen, who buy and buy based on impulse and marketing not need.  Do you really really need that What Happens in Vegas DVD?  Who looks smarter a guy with a room full of books or a guy with a room full of DVDs including The Matrix (obligatory BTW), American Pie, and CSI Season 1.

But I digress…

While there are movies there that I’ve watched over and over, there are others that I haven’t even touched and just bought to have for the future.  Part of me wants to keep these around for future viewings, but everything is going digital and at this point I’d much rather get a movie on demand then have the extra clutter.  I look at my roommate’s sparse room and think ‘I gotta live a little more like that.’

After the DVDs I hit the video games, if I’m never going to play them again why do I need them.  PC, PS2, etc, the majority are all going.  And why the hell did I buy game guides for these things?  It takes out all the fun and all the information is online anyway.

The final target while I was home was my closet, oh dear, what a mess.  It was stuffed to the rafters with old clothes and gadget boxes.  Why did I need to keep the boxes for routers, hard drives, video cards, etc?  All the old clothes went into a bag to be donated and all the boxes went to the recycle bin.  Hopefully, someone in need can get some use from these things that were just going to waste.

The job’s not done yet I have more stuff at home to trash, but it’s a start and I’ll get more done over the coming weeks and at Christmas.

Lastly, if anyone else is planning on cleaning out their old stuff, just know that you don’t have to trash everything.  Like I said, you can donate things and even have a yard sale.  I’m planning a sale on multiple fronts (work, craigslist, half.com, etc) to get a little money back on my DVD ‘investment’ and hopefully I’ll be able to use that money on some reusable purchases.