I Practiced Getting Rid of Things

I have a confession to make: I hate owning things.

Don’t get me wrong – I love having things and using them. I just don’t like to own them.

In my ideal world, everything would be rentable. There’s just something about objects being my responsibility that scares the shit out of me. It makes me feel like they own me.

What if, one day, I no longer want something? What do I do? I spent years cleaning and nurturing it. I can’t just dump it in the trash or donate it to others.

Or can I?

What if giving things away was a skill I could master through sheer repetition? That would cure my fears, right? If I knew I could give something away easily, I’d never be afraid of owning it in the first place.

This week, I set out to try just that. But, I added a caveat.

Roughly speaking, anything you own can be split neatly into three categories:

1. Things you use regularly
2. Things you don’t use regularly but are sentimental
3. Things you don’t use regularly and aren’t even sentimental

If I was Marie Kondo’ing my way through this skill, I would get rid of everything in the last category and call it a day. The caveat – the real challenge – was to get rid of things from the other two cateogries.

I spent about 2 hours picking out items across all 3 categories. And I ended up with a rather ecletic collection, ranging all the way from clothes to thermometers:

Most things were in great condition. Some things were tiny, and some things were light. Some I was gifted, and others I bought at steep prices.

"So why not keep them?" my brain whispered. But, I didn't budge.

I started with the most difficult ones: sentimental objects. I knew I couldn't rely on emotion to make decisions, so I used a simple heuristic: I asked myself, "which 20% of these objects held 80% of my best memories?" It came down to 3 objects.

Then, I allowed myself to "save" one of them, reframing my perspective to look at what I'm gaining instead of losing.

My second challenge: ignoring money. Each object had a ‘fair market value’, so giving it away for free wasn’t easy.

What helped me here was remembering the endowment effect: a cognitive bias that makes us value something more highly just because we own it.

My brain was clearly a poor judge of 'fair market value', so I couldn't defer to it.

"Fine, I'll give it away for free."

And then came the final challenge. That little monkey in your brain that says, "if you already own it, why not hold on to it for now and give it away next week?"

Perhaps, but what stops me from doing that again next week, and then the following? Better to just give it away now.

It took me an entire evening to resolve my own hesitations, before I could box up the items and donate them.

I've reflected on this decision many times and come to two big (and personal) conclusions:

1. Giving away something you own can feel painful in the moment
2. But, it's remarkable how quickly our brain forgets about it once it's out of the picture

And now, looking back, I sometimes even wonder, "why did I ever own most of these things?"

I now plan on using this blog post as a "cemetery" for whatever I donate. A nice little place that I can visit whenever I want, to pay my respects to all the "things" that once owned me.

Written by Aryan Bhasin