A collective
I have spent my last three months trying to declutter.
I have changed the way I live at least two dozen times.
Right from the houses I live at, to my work profiles to my collection of books, my games, my documents even my bank accounts, and stock collection.
I have noticed that most of the changes in my personal assets make a rare dent in the lives of people around me.
I consider this to be a lucky effect of being free.
The hardest part of the process was as opposed to my imagination: everything soft aka online.
I moved content to, and from my laptop, phone, and two 1TB SSD drives.
Also, Archinect, Behance, Eyeem, Facebook, Flickr, Freelancer, Instagram, LinkedIn, Medium, Snapchat, Tumblr, Twitter, Vimeo, Vine, and VSCO.
The idea that I began with was to read/see/listen/learn, and delete.
Stuff.
The idea was to not hoard anything.
Soon keeping things in check became harder, especially with the ever increasing hustle of the 8 odd email addresses I need to manage.
As a result, I lost my girlfriend, and a lot of common friends.
I am on a month long break at least that’s what this is.
I have been up nights in a row, trying to keep up with the progress at work from the interns to the architects who work with me.
Until one of them had to see a neurologist for reasons undisclosed.
It is freakish what the team had been going through.
What I found was keeping me insane was this thing I started the decluttering.
A colleague once told me how her native language lacks gender differentiation It hit me.
The thing with doing away with most of what you own tangible, and intangible is just a part of the solution.
What most of us had been missing out on was our belief in segregation.
the kind of organization achieved by sorting systems into criteria.
The first thing I did was to make a page.
Filled in on everything I could in the social media section.
Sometimes being open about the blunders that can cost you heavy does you good.
My social media lady felt this was pathetic.
She believes that apps come with a predefined purpose for example, she says Tinder is for sex.
I disagree.
Tinder is to meet people.
What you do there after is not of Tinder’s concerns.
If a society is branding it as a hookup app, then there is something that should concern you about the said society.
The second thing I did was to dump everything on those 1TB SSD drives.
I was sorting files according to extensions, not projects, not clients, not dates.
After all, what’s that search tool made for! This did free up one SDD That’s progress.
The next thing I did was to dump everything on an inventory account on slack.
I feel sorry that GitHub has that 25MB upload limit.
This has now made all my work cloud based; for free, and for an infinite time.
Now since everything is on the cloud, I can live appliance free.
I travel with just 1 book in my bag.
As far as decluttering goes I have to deal with only one thing the page.
Since I have made a collective out of my everything, every kind of separation has ceased to exist.
Life is simpler maybe something the Americans can learn from.
This is hard to understand for some of us, but soon you will start to get interesting something like Twitter.