September 18th, 2005
I talk a lot about minimalism and streamlining and uncluttering. I often say that I want to reduce my debt to gravity and by that I mean that I want to get rid of unessential physical things that comprise my posessions. Often these things are the source of much distraction and frustration, not to mention their burden and physical weight.
But now my inner cheap-skate pack-rat who has carried with him a drawer full of miscellaneous audio cable connectors for six moves over more than a decade must battle my inner zen minimalist and the battle is much tougher than I expected.
I suppose that if a meteor suddenly obliterated the house and everything it contained (excepting people and pets), this would be much easier. The items in these drawers in the back of the basement closet would hardly be missed. I never expect to say, “Oh gee, I wish I had that drawer full of tangled cables and odd wall plates that was in the basement of the Yancey house. I know I had a couple of 1/8″ mono to RCA adaptors in there and that’s exactly what I need right now.” Why? Because I don’t know what I have in these drawers, I don’t have a good enough inventory of what I own to be able to make a statement like that. Sure, if I needed such things at some odd hour when Radio Shack was closed I would probably rummage through these drawers eventually and discover them, but is that a relistic probibility? No. Has that happened even once in three and a half years since I moved these things into this room? No. I seriously doubt that I will ever need to build an XLR cable ever again, so these end-pices aren’t really useful to me. Furthermore, when I do need an XLR cable I will want one of higher quality than I trust my soldering skills to be able to construct and I hope that I am working on a project with enough budget to be able to afford the apropriate pieces (or at the very least I hope to be working with someone who has better skills at building such things than I). If that isn’t enough, the $4 these things probably cost are not likely to be worth the effort required to maintain ownership of them. I would have to pack them, lift them, move them, store them, move them again, unpack them, store them some more, and within the next, say, five decades actually use them.
But alas, there is no meteor. There is no insurance pay-out for simply having the odd chance of nature to melt all of this plastic and wire into a blob of uselesness. Instead I have to do it myself. I have a stack of boxes, a roll of garbage bags and a room full of stuff. Everything I really, really want out of this room could probably be burned onto a DVD .. that is to say a few gigabytes of digital photo files, a couple of databases, and some text files that illustrate the configuration of these ancient-ass computers I’ve got down here. Sure, I will continue to make use of the 14 port 10/100 ethernet switch and the 2511 console server as long as I own it, but once I get into the mode of throwing away useless stuff — or at least stuff that hasn’t been used in a decade — the minimalist makes gains and wants to call it all unnecessary and throw it all away.
Sometimes I find that high-level decisions can more easily be made arbitrarily. So perhaps I should take two empty boxes and say that whatever can fit in these boxes goes with me and whatever doesn’t fit must go away. With that method I am almost guaranteed to lose some things I would not choose to dispose of but would be unlikely to miss, With such parameters this chore would likely be faster and perhaps somewhat easier to accomplish.
One of the conclusions I can draw from this examination is that to achieve benefit from having more stuff you must have more order and organization. Without a good way to know what you have and access it easily, you not only cannot benefit from posessing it, posession of it becomes a burden and a distraction.
So at the end of all this I will have fewer dot-matrix printers, fewer four watt eight ohm amplifiers, fewer installation CDs for versions of linux that I didn’t care to install when it was current two years ago and more flexability to spend my time and effort on things that are more likely to matter.
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