Whenever I don't have a place to put something, I think "I have too much stuff". This has been a particular challenge in this house. While the square footage is just right, it's divided up for a different era, with different use patterns. I tried reading about "simplicity", hoping that there was some magic I could apply that would make all my stuff fall into place.
Most articles I found on simplicity focused on stuff: how to organize it, how to get rid of it, how to prevent it from becoming your stuff. But, as one excellent article I read pointed out, the price of "stuff" is one of time as well as space.
The hours you waste stumbling over your piled debris, picking, washing, storing, re-storing, those are hours and spaces that you will never get back in a mortal lifetime. ... [Your stuff] may belong to you, but it does not belong with you. You weren't born with it. You won't be buried with it. It needs to be out of the space-time vicinity. You are not its archivist or quartermaster. Stop serving that unpaid role.Another article pointed out that there's a mental toll when you have too much stuff.
And unless you're extremely organized, a house full of stuff can be very depressing. A cluttered room saps one's spirits. One reason, obviously, is that there's less room for people in a room full of stuff.
Sometimes, the articles on simplicity try to romanticize the past, directing us to "the good old days" as evidence that we don't need so much stuff. You can argue whether cable TV and Internet access are necessities ("we only had broadcast TV and the library back in my day, and it was just fine"). You could argue whether electricity and running water necessities ("people survived for thousands of years without electricity"). I'm not interested in those arguments for simplicity, because I think they're flawed. No, we don't need running water, but fewer people die of cholera today than they did 200 years ago, too. And, semantic arguments aside, I sure am happier that I have running water and Internet access.
If simplicity is more than just covering necessities, then what is it? One of the articles I read suggested that simplicity is also sustainability and that sustainability is about how objects serve you in day-to-day life. Is it simpler to have crappy tools that only sort-of work, or good tools that will last a long time. (Bruce Sterling does a much better job of explaining this topic; see the first link I quoted above.)
For me, I want to evaluate the simplicity of things in terms of my actions. What do I do? What things support that action? For example, I cook. Things that support cooking are: the stove, pots and pans, utensils, dishes, dishwashing soap, etc. For another example, I sew. Things that support sewing are: the machine, thread, an iron, fabric, scissors, etc.
A while back, I made a fairly exhaustive list of what I needed. My preconditions were that I lived in this house and had the same job. The list of needs was quite short, as you'd expect, but it did require limiting my actions in one way or another. For example, I don't need to cook. I need to eat, and if I never prepared food at home, I could get rid of a lot of stuff. The tradeoff there was that I could not prepare food at home, even if I wanted to. I tried to imagine how my life, my actions would change without some set of stuff.
What I really wanted, was a simple formula that I could use to evaluate whether some activity and its accompanying stuff was worth keeping. Here's an example of the formula I was hoping for:
worth = ( (joy from activity) - (stress from stuff) ) * (frequency of activity)Things that I use a lot that give me a lot of joy are worth having. Things that stress me out without providing much joy are not worth having. Things that provide a little joy frequently are as worthy as things that provide a lot of joy infrequently.
Sadly, I don't think that formula works for me. The "stuff" that breaks the equation: cleaning supplies. I don't want dish soap and don't particularly enjoy washing dishes, but I want clean dishes. So, by extension, I do want dish soap, and I do enjoy doing dishes, but this is not what I had in mind when trying to find a way to evaluate my actions.
In the book Your Money or Your Life, the authors want you to put a price on your time. One of the goals behind that is to be able to compare a job requiring an hour-long commute with a higher salary to a job closer to home with a lower salary. I have a much looser definition of how much my time is worth, but I think the idea is sound.
After the fiasco with replacing the toilet in our house, I was willing to pay a trained plumber to come in and replace the faucets for the sink and tub. It's easy to go too far afield with the idea that your time is so gosh-darn valuable that you pay for everything to be done for you. How does this relate to simplicity? It's far simpler to pay someone to fix the plumbing than it is to learn to do plumbing yourself.
Likewise, there's an energy cost to most actions. Being introverts, Willie and I feel the energy cost more acutely than most. It may be simpler to call your bank on the phone to ask a question than it is find the answer on their website, but interacting with people on the phone requires far more energy than reading does. Simple things that require energy are less likely to get done around here, so they are effectively less simple for us.
Sometimes, making your life simpler requires money. For example, replacing three frustrating utensils with one good one usually isn't free. Similar math applies to replacing clothing, shoes, technology, and so forth. Even though reducing the number of items will probably simplify things, there's a price.
Beyond the price, there's the cost of the purchase in terms of stress. It is probably simpler to lease a car. It is certainly less stressful to drive a newer car. But leasing a car would add two stresses: the cost of a car payment, and shame about the environmental impact of changing cars every three years. Again, part of me longs for a formula to quantify the relative costs and simplicity.
Who knew that trying to make life simple would be so complicated?