Life Laundry 2009
I’m a big fan of what is usually referred to as “life laundry” which essentially means “get rid of all the junk you don’t want/need/have any further use for”. Which when done correctly means I end up with a tidier house/mind, a happier spouse and a feeling of inner goodness for donating a load of stuff to charity.
Typically for me my own personal life laundry revolves around discs of movies, videogames, software, etc. The photo above is of my disc storage flight case. I’ve had this for a few years now and this beast can store 2000 discs. At one stage this thing was almost full! I even had way too much time on my hands one year and created a spreadsheet listing the entire contents. Movies alone ran at over 1,000 discs (and yes they are all legit) and trying to shift this thing required a professional weightlifter to help me drag it across the carpet.
For the last two or three years just after Christmas I have had a life laundry day of sorting all of these discs out, and in previous years I have been pretty ruthless in what I get rid of. But this year I’ve been the most heartless of all. While watching one of my unwatched DVDs (Look Around You – Series 2) I have removed pretty much everything I own that I have watched but will never watch again. I’m almost ashamed to think of how much money I’ve spent on digital media over the last fifteen years but the time had come to get things sorted out.
The net result is I now have less than ten unwatched DVDs that I actually want to view. The British Heart Foundation will have plenty to pick up tomorrow when they collect their charity bag, and I have one less thing to think about. It also reminds me of how little I actually use physical disc media any more for day to day watching. I’ve had a review Blu-ray to watch this week, and it is the first time in quite a while I have actually switched on the Blu-ray player to watch a disc. So much of my media viewing is now via the HTPC (Home Theatre PC) either on local storage or streamed across the network that I barely ever have to dig a disc out.
The only readily accessible DVD or Blu-ray media that are easily accessible now are either TV box sets or my favourite movies that are frequently watched. But a post about the death of the disc is for another time.
I find something immensely liberating about lightening the load of at least one aspect of my life. I’ve gotten to the point now where I don’t need “stuff” to make me happy. The rampant consumerism I enjoyed so much in my twenties and very early thirties now seems completely immaterial to me.
This doesn’t mean I’m going to abandon my tech loving lifestyle and go and live in the mountains, far from it. But every once in a while we need to get a little perspective on things, and for me this is as good a place to start as any.
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Filed Under: General • Personal • Tech Stuff
Yah, around December and January I do the same thing at home and at work.
About 5 years ago now I had a house fire (on Jan 1st) and lost 95% of everything I had . . . and the 5% I saved, most of it was stuff I didn’t care about (it just happened not to burn).
I did manage to save the dog, the TV, and the original x-box . . . well the dog escaped early and part of the ceiling fell on the TV and x-box and actually saved them (I didn’t run back in to get them or anything). I, and the rest of my family, just had a lot of stuff in the house (this was the house I grew up in, I took over the mortgage payments from my parents when they moved out). We weren’t hoarders or anything, we just saved a lot of stuff over the years.
At first the fire seamed like the worst thing that ever happened to me . . . I lost everything. But looking back, the fire was one of the best things that ever happened. I didn’t loose everything . . . I lost stuff. No one was hurt in the fire, which a lot of people cant say. It’s sad that it took a fire to make me come to the same conclusion you have and do some Life Laundry, to see that stuff doesn’t make me happy . . . but at least I got there.
Even now my apartment is sparsely furnished and decorated . . . partly due to the fact that I’m a bachelor and spend most of my extra money on games, but I also have a renewed sense of ‘do I need this or do I just want a new thing ?’ But it’s freeing to realize that if my place burned down again, and I lost ‘everything’ again, I’m really not loosing anything important.
I did not know that happened to you! Well there are certainly few things more cleansing than losing everything in a fire!
That’s the thing about stuff, you can always replace it if needs be. The most important things in life are irreplacable.