The Tyranny of Stuff

In 2018, I sold my apartment with a plan to become a digital nomad for a while and work remotely. I parked all of my belongings into storage.

At the time I expected that I’d be gone for a year, return to a new apartment and take my stuff out of storage.

Life had other plans. In the meantime, my stuff has remained in storage. A few years ago I gave most of my furniture to my brother, switched facilities and consolidated what I still had into one unit. Over the years, I’ve gone in to get things I wanted, but I’ve never wholesale got rid of stuff to downsize or consolidate.

Storage spaces make it easy to get in, but not to leave. Even downsizing your unit to a smaller one requires an actual move.

Periodically, I’d go into my unit with the intention of getting rid of things I no longer needed.

But going in alone never accomplished the goal. For a person with ADHD, to be alone with the decisions of what to do with their stuff is a recipe for decision fatigue and cognitive overwhelm. It depletes bandwidth before I even start.

Yesterday, after almost 8 years of having my stuff in storage, I finally cleared out my storage unit. I moved everything into a new apartment.

Now the boxes occupy my living space, forcing me to deal with them.

As I embark on the big “unboxing” marathon, there are a few things I am excited to see again. But to be honest, I don’t want to look at most of it.

Even the thought of sorting through the boxes feels like a heavy weight on my chest.

This is how it’s felt for almost the past 8 years. Even as I roamed freezing in my nomadic sabbatical, a part of me was still encumbered by the weight of my stuff.

That weight has grown increasingly heavy over the past few years as the costs to store my stuff have accumulated. The weight of the shame compounds the weight of having to deal with my stuff.

If you’re considering putting stuff in storage without a specific timeline, consider this first:

For what I’ve paid to store my stuff, I could have replaced everything with brand new and nicer — many times over.

But the cost is not just financial. Stuff also costs time, energy, and emotion.

The more stuff you have, the more time you spend organizing, sorting, and managing it. That effort also requires decisions, which drain bandwidth. It requires physical and mental energy.

But perhaps the biggest toll of our stuff is emotional.

One reason so many people find it hard to get rid of stuff is that the decision isn’t just about whether the thing still has utility.

Everything you own represents a vision you had for yourself — a hope, an expectation, a dream, a way of living.

Our stuff becomes a stand in for our identity: who we believe ourselves to be, how we see our future selves, the past selves we still hold onto.

To let go of stuff is to let go of parts of your self that existed, or dreams you still harbor for the future. Every item you own represents a vision you once had or still hold for yourself. To let go of stuff is to release the dream of what could be, and the regret of what never manifested.

And yet, the more we hold onto that stuff, the more we stay anchored to those old visions and dreams, blocking the way for new versions of ourselves to emerge.