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Living without "stuff"
Is it possible?
Starting a few years ago, I started thinking about this more and more. First, it was mostly vague ideas. Then those ideas became increasingly concrete. Eventually I came to realize that owning things was a significant source of stress for me, and that ultimately, it made me unhappy.
I'm not just talking about having piles of junk and old boxes gathering dust in every corner of every room, but just owning things in general - even furniture and hardware. The stress came mostly from feeling bound to those things; needing a space to store them, having to maintain that space and protect it, wondering if I would ever come to need them if I threw them away, feeling a sense of economic responsibility due to having paid money for them, etc.
I recently started downsizing everything, throwing tons of stuff away, selling whatever I could, giving away the rest. It's been hard at times due to some pretty irrational emotional attachements I'd formed, but overall it feels incredibly satisfying and even liberating to some extent.
An ideal situation would be one where I could go about my life carring everything I own in my pants pockets. Of course, that's not realisticly attainable (unless I were filthy rich), so I aim to get as close to that as possible. I only have one pair of shoes, a few sets of clothes that I wear out quickly and then replace, a computer and miscellaneous things. I don't own a cellphone or a car. So far, everything I own (not counting furniture) could potentially be stored in a few carton boxes. I aim to reduce the ammount and size of those boxes as much as possible.
Short term goals:
-Finish filtering out those "miscelaneous" things. Old CDs, random objects, stuff I don't use.
-Focus on purchasing next to nothing other than consumable goods (food, toothpaste, meds, etc)
Mid-long term goals:
-Get rid of most of my furniture (save the bed of course, and for the moment my computer desk). Clothes can be stored in baskets - one for clean, one for dirty. My music collection can reside in a box that takes up less space.
-Eventually get rid of the desktop PC in favor of a more portable laptop (it's bound to become obsolete eventually, and when that happends, I'll just refrain from buying another desktop). This will probably be the biggest and most difficult step, but I've already been steering in that direction. I barely have any interest in video games anymore (mostly because they're all shit), and most of my PC use has been reduced to browsing, text processing and listening to music (all things I can do just as well on a decent laptop).
So, what do you think - crazy? 
... or crazy cool! 
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When bread becomes toast, it can never go back to being bread again.
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