I regret nothing.

I fantasize about not owning anything.

Coming home to a nearly-empty room, my bed in one corner, a desk against the wall next to it. I would sit at this desk, possibly look out of a window onto the night lights of a city, and write a novel. On paper, with a pen.

Pure, unadulterated zen.

Only, this fantasy never even makes it out of the gate. Because currently, I own about 80,000 things.

Or it feels that way, anyway. I live in a small studio apartment in downtown Philadelphia. Due to my living situation, it is difficult and frustrating to store everything. To keep everything. Sometimes I feel like I’m curating a museum. On display are countless useless items – items that I love and feel attachment to as a result of the symbolic representation they maintain to past events, people, or places. Everything I own is a souvenir.

To some extent, it’s all just a big pile of stuff that highlights all of my previous unfulfilled aspirations – a whole bunch of stuff I thought would be interesting and swore would be different and would finally evolve into a hobby.

I’ve got a radio I swore I would start listening to, because it’s not that I like to listen to NPR as much as it is that I WANT TO BE the TYPE OF GUY who listens to NPR.

But I am terminally afflicted by an awful attention span – my hobbies die before they get off the ground.

This is not, in my mind, a raging diatribe on the US’s rampant materialism. That would be hypocritical, you see. If I had a soap box, I’d be using it to store CDs I haven’t listened to since I ripped them. No, this is more a “rock bottom” kind of thing. This is a realization that I have a studio apartment, for the love of God, and that I have formed unhealthy emotional attachments to stuff that I don’t actually want to have or use.

I’m constantly looking at things to throw away, and then finding a reason to keep them.

“That could be useful, you know, someday.”

“But I paid good money for it!”

“It was a gift! I don’t want to offend anyone.”

I’m willing to bet you’ve said a few of these things to yourself, on occasion, holding on to your flute from 6th grade or some such nonsense. The worst part, the very nucleus of my materialistic self-loathing, is the fact that my desire to throw things away is cyclical. I suddenly snap – say, because I stubbed my toe on a side table that I don’t have room for that was given to me out of a garage by a friend’s well-meaning father, and decide I’m going to become a monk – living in a single bedroom with nothing but a cot, a blanket, and a laptop (in my defense, bytes are a highly-efficient storage medium). Usually this ends up in the formulation of plans and fantasies of ascetic living and my name in the papers for being the guy with the least stuff ever. And then I get lost for 3 hours reading the wikipedia article on minimalism and aesceticism, and I start looking for cots on ebay, and then I forget that I ever wanted to get rid of that end table.

To my credit, I’m taking some steps to reduce my clutter. I’ve hopped on the “living minimally” bandwagon. In my case, “living minimally” (a phrase that requires context) means a few things.

1. Reducing the number of things I own.

You never know how much junk you own until you move into a studio apartment. All the useless stuff that distracts me, worries me, breaks on me – I’m trying to get rid of it. Sometimes this means selling it on eBay. Sometimes it means just setting it out by the curb so that someone else takes it. In every instance it means severing some kind of emotional tie you had to this object. And it is emotional – otherwise, why wouldn’t you have gotten rid of it in the first place, right?

The stupid thing about it is that I find myself hoarding things that aren’t even important. Copies of Wired that I never read. Gag gifts from friends that I don’t really want. Things that I swore I would start using in my daily life, but never did. These things don’t even matter to me. And so I am getting rid of them. A little at a time, sometimes, but nonetheless they are being removed from my life.

2. Requiring the possessions I DO own to be high in quality.

I want the things I decide to own to be the best possible things I can own. Quality objects will last a long time, reducing consumption and greatly increasing your comfort and sanity. I am (again, slowly) attempting to replace the things I own with the best-possible products I can find.

3. Focusing on fewer hobbies.

I find that too many things beckon my attention at once. As a result, I never develop serious skills because I lack the focus to work on them. This is a problem I am attempting to fix. I am giving my attention to fewer hobbies, which allows me to devote more time and attention to the ones I do enjoy. It also means less equipment laying around for all the things I am trying to learn to do, which include: rock climbing, DJing, and bag-making (posts on some of these later, no doubt).

I know this whole “minimalism” thing is a fad. It’s a new trend for 20-something yuppies to hop onto so they can feel justified in checking the “Buddhist” box on the religion section of opinion polls or whatever. But it makes me happy. It’s something that is improving my life.

Or if would if I could figure out a way to get rid of all my crap.