For me, the issue of clutter is not about money (either too much or too little). It’s about decluttering my mind. The mental energy it takes to look at piles of stuff, try to keep track of it, insure it, move it, clean it, store it, sort it, wade through it, and whatever else I do with it is killing me. It kills my psyche. When I have less stuff, I can concentrate better. I can focus on what is truly important.

My guitar is not clutter. I enjoy that nearly every day. But anything I haven’t used in months? Ugh. It just has to go.

When priorities are unclear, decisions are difficult because you don’t know what your life is about, therefore you don’t know what “stuff” you’ll actually need to support your life’s endeavors. Therefore, you end up keeping everything out of fear and indecision.

Great post Mike Elgan!
~Monica

When you don’t have much money, you are always wishing you’d found a way of *keeping* the thingy you threw out last year – because you could improvise it into something useful now. The best way to recycle something is to reuse it yourself; the less money you have, the less choice you have about this.

If there is such a thing as genuine decluttering, it involves making the distinction between things that are genuinely useless and things that will be useful later – a very difficult task. If you are tripping over junk, then the article is very useful. I keep to the rule that everything must have somewhere to live, even if it’s the attic; if there’s no room for a new thing in the place that it should live, then it’s time to throw stuff out.

Then my wife asked me, with great ardor, would I please throw them away?

I knew that if I did I would earn major points. So I did. It felt great. We both engaged in frenzied junk ejection.

One rule of thumb that works for me: Every time I bring in a non-food, possession -type item, I try and find one, about the same size, and donate it, chuck it, give it away, sell it — get rid of it.

Have to be tough I guess.