One thing that drives me to continue working on my blog is your constant feedback in comments, it also shows me what topic is more interesting for you and what content should I generate next. One interesting question I received recently was what to do with things you don’t need anymore. In this video, I’ll tell you how I let things go and some hints on how to make that process emotionally easier.
Video Transcript
Hey everyone. One thing that really motivates me to do these videos is when you leave feedback in comments. And so today, I want to answer a comment that someone has left on the YouTube version of a previous video recently. The question was: ‘Hey, I really got your journey, I do want to own less as well but I have a really hard time to let go of things. What do you do with stuff that you don’t need anymore? So just quickly, what I do is about every 90 days, I sit down, and I go through my things because I don’t want to make this a daily or a weekly occurrence. It’s not that important to me. But once a quarter, every 90 days, I do sit down. And I quickly think about which things have. I either not used in the last 90 days, or will I not need in the next 90 days, and then. I get rid of them. And so what does get rid of them actually mean Well, for me, there’s usually three options.
Preferred options
Number one, my preferred option is to gift it to someone that I feel will still get value from it. I can either give it to a friend, someone that I personally know, and know they get value from this, or I can donate it. In the past, I’ve also donated it to some families in Ukraine through a personal connection and that’s usually what I like to do with my things that I don’t need anymore, as long as they’re still good. Of course, if they’re not good anymore, I can also throw them away. Often that’s the case for my clothing, because. I tend to wear it until it’s really no good anymore. Once they’ve been washed, my T-shirts, 50 or 100 times after a year, usually have to throw them out and then the third option is, of course, to sell it.
Sometimes I buy something just to try it. And then I realize I don’t need it anymore, or I buy something specifically for an experiment, and then I sell it afterward. This might apply to fitness trackers, certain types of gear, or equipment that I need for a video project, for example, and then I sell it right after that. So those are the three options that I usually consider: to donate or gift it, to throw it away, or to sell it. But what if it’s hard to even get to that point where you say, this is the item that I can now let go of?
Emotionally Tough
Well, for me, I already mentioned the questions are: have I used this? Or will I use this? And if the answer is no, then it has to go. But I understand that it can be emotionally tough to get over that barrier immediately. Even for me at the beginning, when I started to sort things out. Sometimes it was hard to directly let go of an item. And so here’s the trick that I’ve used: at the beginning, I always kept a bag and whatever had to go first went into that bag, and I kept it either in a corner of my apartment when I still had one or later on at my parent’s house. Now what this did was it gave me certainty that if I still needed it, or if I missed it, I could still go back to the bag and pick it out and spend time with the item or I could get it back if I miscalculated if. I thought I was not going to need this in the next 90 days, and now I still do, that has really helped me emotionally because, of course, I didn’t go back a single time, not even once have. I gone back and pick the item out of that bag. And so 90 days later, when I was going through my list again, it usually became very easy for me to completely let go and give these things away.
And there you go. That was my way how I got from 600+ items down to just 64 when I gave up my apartment, I considered the options for who to give this to who could still get value from any item that I was going to give away. And at the beginning when the emotional barrier was just too high. I first temporarily stored my things in a corner, never went back once and so after 90 days, it was much much easier to then fully give these things away.
And with that, I hope you’re having a beautiful day. Stay curious and I’ll talk to you soon.
