One reason I’d originally planned to retire this year instead of last summer - besides the obvious one of earning more money - was to have time to declutter our house. I thought it would be great to get rid of decades of stuff we no longer need or like before retirement. That way, I could kick off my next chapter in a peaceful, future-looking environment – one that would fit with a new minimalist stage in my life.
As I’ve mentioned before, that didn’t quite work out.
Next, I thought I might devote some of my first year of retirement to going through and parting with some things. But I ended up wanting more time to decompress and transition from full-time work to retirement than I had expected.
Plus: We’ve been in this house since the Reagan Administration. I have a lot of stuff.
I did some decluttering in fall 2023 through the following spring while I was still working, and there was noticeable improvement. But it’s not close to enough. My goal now isn’t just to get rid of some things I no longer like or use. I want it all gone. I’m yearning to be surrounded only by things that I like, not things that I’ve kept due to inertia. And I’m craving more open space.
Why now? It’s not that I’m “home more.” I was mostly working at home before I retired, so I was home a lot while I was still working. It’s partly that I’m less distracted by work when I’m home. In other words, I’m paying more attention to my surroundings. But it’s also that I’m ready for a new, different environment to match this new stage of my life.
Actually moving to a new place is currently off the table. But I think I could be happier in the home we have now if it wasn’t filled with a lifetime of things that were useful and meaningful to me decades ago, but aren’t anymore. I consider myself a pretty rational person, but my relationship with belongings is anything but logical.
I’ve read a lot of decluttering books the last few years. There was Marie Kondo’s wildly popular Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. And Swedish Death Cleaning, both the book and the TV series. If you’re not familiar with that one, the idea of Swedish Death Cleaning is that when you get to a certain point in your life, it’s time to pare down to things you either actually use or really love. That way, people left behind after you’re gone don’t have to deal with a mountain of crap.
Also, if the time comes that you need to downsize to a smaller house, condo, or apartment, you’ve already done the hard work before you needed to – while you were still physically able.
Plus, you’ll get to live in a delightfully peaceful environment now.
“When there is less chaos on the outside, we’re likely to feel less chaos on the inside,” psychotherapist Amy Morin, lecturer at Northeastern University, told NBC News.
Exactly this!
One of the many great things about going away on vacation is that I walk into a hotel room that’s not filled with stuff. Surfaces aren’t filled with things I don’t need, like, or use. Everything I see that’s mine in a hotel room is something I either like a lot or find useful.
Because I don’t take a lot of clothes with me, I can easily find everything. And since I tend to pack things I like the most, everything I see is something I like. Shouldn’t my closet be like that at home? Shouldn’t everything?
“I’m willing to bet many things in your home, as in mine, are neither useful, beautiful nor sentimental,” Michael J. Coren wrote in the Washington Post.
He’d win with me.
Why so much stuff, and how can I get rid of it?
I feel like I never realized when my stage of life changed from “I need to acquire things for my new household”, to “I can stop acquiring things now. We have what we need, and we’re approaching the limits of what our living space can comfortably hold.”
In addition, for many in my generation, the time when we should have switched off “acquisition mode” coincided with the rise of relatively cheap goods at places like Pier 1 Imports and IKEA. It was hard not to indulge.
Then one day some of us looked around . . . and it was a bit overwhelming.
Another problem is guilt. Someone gave this to me as a gift, it doesn’t feel right to toss or donate it! This belonged to a deceased loved one, how can I part with it? This thing is still perfectly good, surely I might want to use it someday! (even if years pass and that day never comes.)
I watched an AARP decluttering webinar recently where the presenter talked about generational issues. Many in my generation were raised by parents who had lived through the Depression. They tried to teach us not to take having things for granted, and not to be wasteful or frivolous with our possessions. That can add to the guilt of giving away things that “still could be useful.”
But you know what? Open, uncluttered space is useful, too. For my mental health!
There are a lot of different theories on how to tackle clutter. The Marie Kondo method involves going through a category of things at a time. For example, you take every book from every room, put them in a pile, and go through them one by one. That makes logical sense: You see just how many books you have, and whether there are duplicates. However, doing it this way can be a logistical nightmare if you have a lot of stuff in a multi-room house and limited time and/or energy.
Swedish death cleaning, on the other hand, can be done little by little – and in fact author Margareta Magnusson suggests you don’t exhaust yourself in the process. The AARP webinar host said even a daily 10-minute sweep is better than nothing, although an hour or two is better.
There were evenings in my first round of decluttering when I decided I’d only go through one half of a desk drawer’s files. That doesn’t sound like much, but in a couple of weeks (I didn’t do it every day), I’d gotten through a massive amount of papers going back to my newspaper articles from the 1980s.
Now I’m trying to do only one kitchen drawer or shelf in a day (and not every day). I’m also working to re-consider technical books I kept after round one. Am I really going to consult a seven-year-old book about an R package that’s been superseded by a new version? Now that generative AI answers many of my coding questions, how often am I consulting old print tech books at all?
Once I figure out a strategy for what areas to tackle when, the more difficult task is deciding what to keep vs donate/discard. Marie Kondo advises a simple question: Does it spark joy? Sounds great in theory, but items like my stapler don’t necessarily make me joyful. Maybe I should find one someday that does; but meanwhile I don’t want to toss the only stapler I own because it doesn’t make me smile.
A happy question I sometimes ask myself instead: If I was spending a year abroad in a gorgeous but tiny apartment, would I want to have this item with me?
A grimmer question: If this was damaged in a flood or fire, would I be sad or would I be relieved? I’m embarrassed to say that I still own things where the answer is “relieved”. I keep a lot of things because of guilt. As I said, not logical.
One of my favorite moments in the Swedish Death Cleaning TV series was when someone expressed fear that he’d end up wanting or needing an item he was letting go. One of the Swedes responded: “Sh-t happens.”
That’s a motto I need to keep in mind. My world will not end if it turns out I want to bake cupcakes again someday but I got rid of tins I haven’t used in 8 years.
Because the upside is: If I can be ruthless enough, maybe by this time next year our house will look and feel considerably lighter – and I’ll feel emotionally lighter, too.
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