If it does not add value to my life I remove it. With this in mind I recently began decluttering my room and started moving towards a more minimalist life. Advantages soon became apparent.
It started with me reading a really awesome post made by Pieter Levels, a digital nomad and founder of multiple successful websites like Nomadlist. Throughout the post he describes a spontaneous panic attack he had back in 2012. This in turn led him to give up nearly all of his possessions and his apartment in Amsterdam. After that he traveled to Thailand and began his journey as a digital nomad.
While I'm certainly nowhere close to his past state of mind, his post did get me to think about my own situation. I already felt as if there were just too many things around me to properly focus. So much stuff I don't have a need for.
And so it began. After reading a book by Marie Kondo on the topic of tidying up and probably still very much hooked by my initial motivation, I started the same day. The decision to just act and take small steps was what allowed me to get through it.
The process of getting rid of things is not too hard: Examine each object and ask yourself what role it plays in your life. Is it possible to get by without it? And more importantly, does it fill you with a good feeling? Especially the second criteria plays a major role.
Believe me - cleaning my room was no quick process. I managed to get rid of some things rather quickly, like old clothes, my carpet and of course trash. There were also things too good to throw away though.
This included my collection of Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh trading cards. Most of them were worthless, but not all of them. However, compared to my Pokémon card investment, it was a disappointment.
Since GPU prices were kind of insane at the time due to COVID-19 and production bottlenecks, I decided to get rid of it too. The only reason I had an NVIDIA GTX 1070 Ti inside my PC was to play video games. And along with my GPU, I was able to finally remove video games from my life. After all, the best video game is life itself.
It took me multiple weeks of taking photos and writing product descriptions to sell those things online for an "okay" price. In the end, however, the following is certain: Someone else on this planet gets to enjoy my past possessions and I can finally sit at my desk with a clear head and no distractions.
