As a rule I don’t do resolutions for a new year. I know I can never follow up with them anyway and then they just make me look silly.
So one of those resolutions that I don’t have for 2010 is to reduce my earthly belongings1 to until they will fit into two big boxes and a messenger bag. Even though I’d probably not ever do it, I like the idea to just haul all my stuff into my normal-sized car and be able to go somewhere else. That should be pretty doable – when I see which of my stuff I am actually using, it is not that much. Most of it is just… there. Collecting dust. Because I wanted to own it at some point in my life.
I had a time where I just bought stuff because I didn’t want to rent it. A lot of media that I’ve only used once or twice – music on CDs, movies on DVDs, books, I even have two huge boxes full of VHS tapes. Basically stuff that I could just as well have in digitized form somewhere on a hard disc or – OMG buzzword alert – in the cloud. I think this will be my first angle of attack on my stuff: See which content I actually even want, check if there is a way to have it in digital form, get it in this way and get rid of the physical object. That won’t be so hard with DVDs and CDs, some books might be really hard to let go. And they might not go at all. And for some of the others I might need to find some place that might actually like old, obviously used books.
- not including furniture and appliances [↩]