“Stuff expands to fill the space available .”
That’s Newton’s lessor known fourth law of physics.
This. It’s one of the reasons I chose to downsize my living space from a 3-brm house with lots of living space to a condo with about half the square footage. And I’m still not completely out of boxes to sort through. But it did feel good to get rid of so much that I really didn’t need. Now, I need to face that reality on all my kitchen implements. I love to bake, cook, and can but I no longer need the huge volume of canning supplies or special devices that can only perform one or two tasks. I’ve started the winnowing again. Goodwill, here I come.
There’s just me in this 3 bedroom, 2.5 bath house, and I did a massive purge last fall. There’s still a fair bit of stuff, but it’s mostly furniture and books. You will never, ever, get the books out of my hands, and the furniture is useful on the rare occasions I have guests.
Yes, I’ll admit the books were very hard to let go of, but I did decide to let 2/3 of them go and now, after Covid, I’m desperately craving more, but I still don’t have the space or the budget so I decided it was time to reacquaint myself with the library. So far, okay. I have found a few that I needed to own after reading them once via the library.
Less doesn’t work for me. Marie Kondo says you should only keep the things that give you joy. Alas, all my books give me joy.
I’m screwed.
Oh indeed.
Shortly after we moved, I made a big trip to the Container Store. As I put it at the time “We need more crap to hold our crap”.
When we were looking to move to this house, we were madly decluttering to get the old place ready to sell.
There was a book coming out that I knew my husband wanted to read - so I borrowed it from the library and gift-wrapped it. Win-win. We didn’t spend money, and we didn’t have to worry about donating it if I purchased it - we just returned it to the library.
I’m still rather proud of that one!
For those looking to minimize: an e-reader saves a LOT of bookshelf space. But it does have its disadvantages - there’s no longer the same joy of wandering around a bookstore and picking stuff up at random, or grabbing a book at random from your own shelves.
Where you came from, where you are, where you want to be. Who you are inside.
These all frame what your concept of frugality might be. Concept often being the key word. Reality something else entirely.
Where I came from put a low bar for what I feel is the good life. I too worry about winning too much in the lottery. The more I might win, the more others will win rippling ever further out from me. Don’t need a big wave in my little pond. Don’t want so much that it becomes a responsibility to make a big accomplishment. But stirring the pot might be some fun.
I can understand how a multi billionaire might consider it frugal to have but three homes. Especially when they might have come from billionaire stock.
At different points in my life, the goals were in different monetary levels. Where I had grown to be, left the next step quite a big one. A nice car, then a better apartment, then a house. To solidify my comfort zone. Now I can take steps back down with comfort.
I think now frugality is taking on a less self centred goal for a lot of folks. Maybe more common goals. To a reasonable point. We need to be happy and secure. But a lot of things we strive for are not really way points on that path.
I have one. But I also have several thousand books, many of which are out of print, and I do reread.
Each year when my in-laws anniversary time came around, they’d go to a card store, each pick out a card for the other, let them read it, and then returned the card to the rack.
They were married for about 60 years.
Oh, absolutely, Rereading a book you enjoy is like having a visit with a good friend. It’s fun to catch things you miss the first time around, also. I have a number of books that are such escapist comfort reading for me, that I’ve read them literally dozens of times.
And I find it very frustrating that books are either not available electronically (like your out-of-print books; I once seriously considered getting a pirate ebook version of a dead-tree book that I’d loved), or libraries have limited availability - some of that is due to the publishers being asses about it.
Sneaky! I love it!!
I told my older brother about our “gift wrap the library book” scheme and he did not get it AT ALL. He accused me of being a cheapskate. I had to remind him about how if you really think you’ll only read it once, it’s better to borrow from the library. And I think it showed a fair bit of thought and planning to make it happen. My husband and I once put holds on the same title for each other :).
I agree with this, which is why I kept back a third of my books. Mind you, that’s still a good 300. But some books I truly have read all to death and wasn’t picking them up again. I basically had them memorized. At this point, they become dust catchers. Some went to friends I knew would enjoy them and others went to Half-Price Books, which allowed me to pick up a few more.
This. We bought a second house and it’s already filling up with crap. And it’s 100% my wife. I don’t even know what all this shit is or why we have it. She clutters up every countertop with garbage because she has the object permeance of a 3 year old and the spatial skills of…I don’t know…something that doesn’t know how to stack objects efficiently.