One Year Without: What We Gained by Owning Less Stuff.

This is the final post in the blog series One Year Without.  See all of the posts here.

This blog series has been about what we lived without as expats.  We gave up our vehicles, community, and plenty of the smaller comforts of home when we moved to Germany.  Owning less stuff pushed the boundaries of our comfort zones and there were even a few items that were too difficult for us to go without.  But overall, giving up the majority of our belongings was an enormous success and inspiration.

I’m grateful that we had this opportunity to try out living with less stuff for a year – especially since everything that we gave up was actually safely stored in a warehouse back in the USA.  I’m not sure I would have been brave enough to take the plunge without the reassuring knowledge that we didn’t have to fully commit to living this way if we didn’t like it.  We had a whole year to decide if we liked living a more minimalistic lifestyle.

Spoiler: we ended up liking it a whole lot more than we expected.

During our time in Germany we learned how to practice more restraint in our purchases and we reaped surprising benefits from owning less stuff.  Simply having fewer belongs helped us to relax more, travel more, and achieve higher levels of contentment in our personal lives and marriage.  Here are six of the benefits we gained when we gave up 90% of our belongings.

 

What We Gained by Owning Less Stuff:

 

Time and energy.

Since we moved back to the USA we’ve gone a little crazy trying to deal with all of our stuff that was in storage.  We’ve spent an obnoxious amount of time moving stuff, organizing stuff, cleaning stuff, and sorting stuff into different boxes labeled “yard sale”, “eBay” or “trash”.  We’ve dedicated entire weekends to our stuff.  I’ve spent my days looking at our big pile of stuff and trying to figure out how to reduce it.  Mr. Meena has spent several evenings (after a long day of work) sitting down and dealing with all of our stuff.

 

  

 

It’s exhausting.

It takes way too much time and energy to have this much stuff – especially when you move to a new place and have to unpack it.  We both miss the extra time and energy that we had in Germany when we only had a fraction of our belongings.  Since we didn’t have to devote so much time and energy to our stuff we could put those valuable personal resources to better use.

Greater relaxation.

Watching Netflix, playing video games, hanging out with our pet bird, and going for a long walk… what do all of these things have in common?  They are relaxing for us and they are more easily accomplished when we don’t have to spend our time and energy shepherding our stuff.  (Is anyone else starting to feel like “stuff” is a dirty word?)  Being able to fully, deeply relax during evenings and weekends is vital to maintaining our health (and sanity).

Better experiences.

Once we’ve reached our quota of relaxation needed in order to function as normal human beings, we can start using that additional time and energy to have awesome experiences.  Giving up the burden of owning too much stuff meant that we were able to travel Europe together extensively.  We saw beautiful things, ate delicious foods, rode (almost) more roller coasters than I can count, and generally had an amazing time because we had time to have adventures.

 

 

Perspective.

If we could live without almost all of our stuff for a year then why did we need it in the first place?  What value did it bring to our life?

We gained a new mindset by giving up our stuff.  We had a different perspective towards all that stuff in the 50+ boxes delivered from storage.  We started viewing our material items through the lens of what we could gain by giving them up.  If we could live happier lives without them then that is absolutely what we want to do.

We started viewing our material items through the lens of what we could gain by giving them up. Share on X

Happiness.

Once we got past the initial frustration (and occasional inconvenience) of not having access to the various items we’d become accustomed to owning, we were happier overall.

Before moving abroad we had fallen into the familiar, bleak falsehood of thought that tells us buying new things would make us happier.  We’d purchase something new and be happy for a while, but eventually that object wouldn’t make us happy anymore.  So we’d buy something else.

In The Science Of Why You Should Spend Your Money On Experiences, Not Things, Jay Cassano explains that consumers adapt to their possessions over time, feeling less satisfaction with them, while travelers gain experiences that become part of who they are – and then continue to draw happiness from those experiences over time.

It’s counterintuitive that something like a physical object that you can keep for a long time doesn’t keep you as happy as long as a once-and-done experience does. Ironically, the fact that a material thing is ever present works against it, making it easier to adapt to. It fades into the background and becomes part of the new normal. But while the happiness from material purchases diminishes over time, experiences become an ingrained part of our identity.

This is something that Mr. Meena and I experienced firsthand; we traveled instead of buying stuff and were happier because of it.

 

 

Motivation.

It’s easier to travel when you don’t have a lot of stuff in your home.  Owning too many nice things that make us comfortable has the potential to seduce us into staying home (and the idleness that leads to wanting to buy more stuff).  We don’t want to retreat into the rather seductive habit of purchasing things that we think will make us happy.

We aren’t going to become extremely minimalistic and go live in an RV (not that there’s anything wrong with doing so), but we are paying close attention to how much stuff we accumulate and how it could potentially change our lives and reduce our long-term happiness.  Over time, owning too many “nice things” could prevent us from having those awesome experiences that we’ve come to love so much.

We are putting a lot of effort into getting rid of most of our stuff, not buying new stuff to fill the void, and consciously reaping the benefits of owning less stuff.  Our material possessions, in many ways, are something that could hold us back.  We want to release them in favor of better things.

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Owning less stuff isn’t necessarily our goal.  Living better lives because we own less stuff is.  And the good news is that we don’t have to move into a tiny home or drastically downsize to make this happen (and neither do you).  We just have to intentionally evaluate what we own, why we own it, and determine if owning it brings us more benefits than giving it up.

What could you gain by giving up some of your stuff?

Six ways our lives were better when we gave up most of our stuff. #minimalism Share on X

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Photo by Ulf licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.
Modified by My Meena Life.

Featured photo and photo #3 (beer in Bamberg) by Rebekah Jackson Photography.