523 | Time to Let Go

Every little thing you think that you need Every little thing you think that you need Every little thing that's just feeding your greed Oh, I bet that you'd be fine without it Yes, welcome to the Minimalist Podcast where we discuss what it means to live a meaningful life with the less. My name is Joshua Fields Milburn. Joining me here at our studio in beautiful West Hollywood, California is my good friend T.K. Coleman. Yes, sir. And guess what? Uh-oh. We have the mayor of Oakwood himself here today. I'm back, baby. Yes, Ryan Nicodemus is here. Yeah. It's good to be back. Good to see y'all. His wife's here. We have an audience of one. Of course, Savvy D is here. Professor Sean is here as well. Ryan, we just did an event with you here in Southern California. We wrapped up our Sunday symposiums for a while. We're taking a bit of a break, and you've been in town. You picked the worst week to be in town. Oh, my gosh. This has been raining the whole time. I was telling my friends how that's how it was when you and I would come to L.A. before we lived here. Every time we showed up, it rained. The first 12 times we were in Los Angeles, it rained. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, I'm just repeating, you know, history. Bringing the rain to California. Sorry, Californians. You've been in Montana for a couple of years now, and we're in a new year at this point. You've got some exciting news coming down the pike. We won't spoil it yet, but we'll be announcing it, I guess, in the next few months, hopefully. Yeah. Yeah, definitely, man. Yeah, I'm excited to announce it. Me too. So we'll be talking about that. But today we got a lot to talk about. We're talking about why you have trouble getting the clutter out of the house after you've organized. I'm not talking about you specifically, Ryan. Right. Yeah. Although you did have trouble when we first did that. That's true. Letting go right away was super difficult. Also, we're going to talk about how you know when it's time to let go. We're going to talk about the wouldn't replace it rule, which is sort of like this younger sibling to the spontaneous combustion rule. So we'll talk about that a bit as well and much, much more. Plus, coming up on page three, we carry this one forward for you, Ryan. We're talking about all the boomer junk, how to let go of the boomer junk that you have inherited. We've got this article for you. We're going to talk about that. Let's start with our callers. If you have a question or a comment for our show, we would love to hear from you. Our phone number is 406-219-7839, or you can email a voice recording right from your phone to podcast at theminimalists.com. Let us know if you are a Patreon subscriber so we can prioritize your message. By the way, big thanks to our patrons. Your support keeps our podcast 100% advertisement-free because sing along at home, y'all. Advertisements suck. Yes, our first question today is from Vanessa. Hi, Minimalists. This is Vanessa from Vancouver, Canada. Two years ago, I moved from France, as maybe you can hear in my accent, to Canada here in Vancouver. And when I moved, I had to declutter and sort out like 10 years of positions that I had in my apartment. And it was a lot. I was impressed, but not in a good way, by how much I had accumulated throughout the years. And since I'm here in Vancouver, I decided to declutter on a regular basis because I do not want to have another experience like this in my life. This November, I'm doing the minimalist game. And I have a question. How can I make it effectively? I know that you're supposed to get rid of the stuff right away, but you know, life happens. And for example, when I'm working on my clothes, I will not go to the Salvation Army spot every day. So I keep them in a bin that I want to give away later. Same things for some books or even my electronics. And the thing is, I know from experience, because it's not my first minimalist game, that I tend to declutter. In a way, I put things in bins or in bags to give away or recycle later. But then it just stays here. Like my bins, my bags just is somewhere in my house. So, yeah, I'd like some advice on it. Now, Ryan, you remember when we were kids and like if you didn't want to eat a particular type of food, like you've got peas and carrots on your plate, you try to make it look like you ate them by moving them around to the other side of the plate. That's kind of what's happening here with Vanessa. First off, Vanessa, can my wife borrow your accent for a few days? That'd be great. It's funny. Her accent just sounds like a French Canadian accent. Yes. Yeah. That's all I'm looking for. And so when we would move things around, we do that in our homes as well. And so what she's talking about here is I've decluttered, but I haven't minimized as maybe a way to think about it. I've I've selected the things I think I want to get rid of. I've put them in some sort of bin box, donation bag, whatever it is. And I think that's a great first step. Having some sort of box, a boundary to say, hey, I'm no longer willing to accept holding on to these things. That's all a boundary is. It's a highlighter that emphasizes what is no longer acceptable. However, she hasn't done the second part by getting it out of the house. And it seems to me that another boundary is required here that I need to do this once a week. I need to go to the donation place once a week or I need to have a specific deadline that these things are going to be out of my home regularly. So I get them out so they're no longer stored in the back of my mind. I'd love to hear from either one of you on that. Yeah. I mean, that's exactly it. It's like you sign up for the minimalism game, which is great. Like that's an awesome first step. But if you're just organizing your stuff in the piles to get rid of, I think that apes the form of like, I've done something and you feel really accomplished. And that's amazing. But there is that second step. I know for me, like I got the donation box, Mariah, I have the donation box and we'll throw stuff in there and it'll get full and it'll sit there for a little bit and I'll have one thing where I got to like, oh man, kind of put it on. So I'll pull the stapler out and I'll staple it to the box. I'm just kidding. I don't do that. But, but, but it's almost like that where I kind of fill it as much as I can. And then when I, and finally like, okay, this thing's on my mind, I got to get rid of it. It's like, you got to schedule it. You pull out your calendar and you find an hour. Cause that's sometimes what it takes to go to the donate here in LA. You got to take an hour. It's going to take you 20 minutes to drive to the donation place. A lot of times there's lines. You got to wait in line to give it away. But yeah, you have to schedule it. So just like you scheduled the men's game, Vanessa, schedule getting rid of your stuff. It's the same thing that you've done with the men's game, which is great. You set that boundary. Like you said, Josh, set the other boundary of here's when I'm going to take it. Here's when I have the time. It's going to be out of the house. I'm wondering if the other problem is there are too many boundaries in the house in the sense that like I have a donation box, but then I also have a bag and I have this pile of things I want to declutter. And then this becomes a different type of clutter, TK, instead of saying, okay, here's my donation box. As soon as it is halfway full, that's when I'm going to put it on my calendar, that I am going to take it to wherever I want to donate it. We also recognize that there are things you can sell, there are things you can donate, and there are some things you have to trash. If it's something you have to trash because you can't sell it, you can't donate it, you can't recycle it, then of course you can get it out of the house pretty expediently, right? It's the things where you actually have to schedule and plan the time. But what are your thoughts around the, I have just too many piles of things I want to let go of? Yeah. So this makes me think about a concept you've talked about a lot, which is strategic friction. How can I leverage the tension I naturally feel under certain conditions to my advantage? What motivates us to declutter? It's because we feel the tension of our things being disorganized or in our way. And so when you do something like you get a bunch of boxes or bags that you can put them in, you make the clutter look very pretty. And that relieves the tension because it's kind of out of the way. You still don't need it. So you know, you should get rid of it, but it's sort of like out of the way. And so you don't feel that tension anymore. And so I would be asking a question like, what's a way we can recreate that tension in a manner that motivates me. And so maybe what we could do is have a practice like every time I fill a box or a bag, instead of just let it being a pretty area that, you know, symbolizes my efforts to declutter, Or maybe I take it and put it in the backseat of my car because I don't like that. Right. I need to do something about that. And every time I get in that car, I look at my backseat and I see I've got a box and a bag. I look at my front seat. I've got another box. I'm highly motivated to do something about that. And it's more likely that I'll actually get to the donation center because I've taken one small step that makes it not only easier to do it, but makes me more motivated. Up in Ojai, there's a goodwill there, Ryan, on the way into Ojai. And the sign that lights up at night when I'm driving past it, only the first three letters are illuminated. So it's the goo store. That's kind of how I think of the clutter. It's like, get this goo out of my house. These are things that I used to like. I don't like them anymore. They're not serving me anymore. But if I let it go, the other thing that I need to empower myself is realizing that by me selfishly clinging to it, it's not adding value to anyone's life. In fact, it's extracting value from my life. It's goo at this point. but by letting it go and letting someone else deal with it but then also letting someone else get value from it it actually can serve a purpose again it's no longer serving a purpose for me yeah i love that idea about putting it in your car it's like the whole idea of the men's game is to get the item out of the house it isn't to just like pile up stuff and then at the end of the month you get rid of it all because the longer it sits there the more likely we are to hold on to it so to get it out of the house go and just put it in your car that first item two items the third day, three items, so forth and so on. Eventually, like you said, TK, like you're going to be into a forced commitment to getting rid of those stuff. Yeah. For me, the minimalism game, which folks who are listening to this, you can download the free calendar over at theminimalists.com slash game. You can see exactly how to play. It's completely free to play. And you partner up with someone, a friend, a family member. It makes it more fun, but you also want to have a little bit of that friction. And so one of the rules of the minimalism game is it has to be out of the house by the end of the day. By midnight, the item has to be out of the house. That could be in your car. It could be in a donation bin in the garage. But wherever you're going to put it, it's important to identify that one place that these items go. Because right now with Vanessa, she has several piles of goo throughout her house. And as TK illuminated, she feels better because I did something. But I haven't, it's like running half the marathon, right? You didn't complete the marathon. At this point, you wonder like, okay, why do I feel kind of exhausted or worn out? I didn't get where I wanted to go. I didn't do what I wanted to do. And so having a boundary there around, hey, all right, here's my one box. Here's where I keep it. I keep it in the garage or I keep it in the entryway. I keep it somewhere where it does add a little bit of friction to my life. And as soon as it reaches a certain point of fullness, halfway there, all the way full, whatever you want to decide, put it on the calendar. You're going to take it to the goo store, to tomorrow, on Saturday, whenever it is, so you know that I have set aside time to let go. Vanessa, I would love to give you a copy of a new audio book that we just created. Hopefully, it's out by now, by the time this episode comes out on January 19th. It's called Very, Very Simple. It's sort of an appendix, Ryan, to the minimalist rule book that you and I did, 16 Rules for Living with Less. Over the last five years since we published that, we've come up with a bunch of other rules, And so there are 12 other rules. I call them tools in this new audio book. And you can download it for free over at VeryVerySimple.com. Yes, the name is ironic. What's simpler than simple? Very simple. What's simpler than that? Very, very simple. And so you can go to veryverysimple.com. It's 12 tools for living with less, 12 tools for a simpler life. In fact, there's really 13. There's a bonus one in there as well. And then we recap five of the rules from the minimalist rule book, five of my favorites, the spontaneous combustion rule, the just-in-case rule, the seasonality rule, and several others. Now, before we get back to our callers, it's time for the Patreon community chats question of the week. You answer this question with a short, shareable minimal maxim. You can find this episode's maxims in the show notes over at theminimalists.com slash podcast and every minimal maxim ever at minimalmaxims.com. We'll also deliver our weekly show notes directly to your inbox, including several new minimal maxims every Monday for free if you sign up for our email newsletter over at theminimalists.com. And we changed the format recently. I've been sharing a lot more essays. Recently, the one that we just shared was about other people's clutter. And then this week, I'm sharing something about, well, think again, rethink giving your kid a smartphone If it that time of their life where you thinking about giving them an iPad or a smartphone there an essay that I wrote about that And so I doing that every week in the Simple Newsletter You can subscribe for free over at theminimalists Just enter your email address over there at the top We never send you spam or junk or advertisements but we will start your week off with a dose of simplicity. All right, Ryan, the question of the week this week, how do you know when it's time to let go of a thing? Now, before we get to our pithy answers, I wanted to hear what some of our audience members had to say. Whitney said, practically speaking, it's time to let go when a thing no longer serves its original purpose and it cannot be repurposed. Metaphorically speaking, it's time to let go when more damage is done by its presence than its absence. You could tweet that, Professor Sean. All right, TK, can we talk about the damage that is caused by clinging? Because I love this metaphorically. It's doing damage when I hold on to it. Its presence is doing damage and the absence would sort of set me free. Yeah, I mean, the damage happens at two levels. On one hand, we cling not only to the perceived benefits of this thing, but we also cling to all of the hidden costs that it involves. Things have to be managed, maintained, protected, and so on. And that's sort of like this silent cost. We usually just think about how much I paid for it. I can't let this go. I paid $300 for it back in 1980. Well, no one's paying that now. But more importantly, you've got to prioritize that by finding space for it, moving other things around it, spending money on it, letting it eat up, mindshare that would be useful towards other things. And then the other way it affects you is that it keeps you separate from all of the possibilities that will be opened up from the space you create when you let it go. I love that old quote from Michael Card. It's hard to imagine the freedom we find from the things we leave behind. It's not until we actually let things go that we say, man, I wish I had done that so much earlier because I could have played with that space in a different way. I could have used that money, that time, that energy, those thoughts in a different way. And so it just holds you back in those two ways. Yeah. Yeah. Ryan, I was with my wife. We went to this vintage store recently. We were just looking around at all these shirts from the nineties and the oddies. They're like $200. Yeah. And they're kind of like, they're cheap shirts. They're like Hanes shirts, but it's a Metallica shirt. And so it's $120, $150. And you realize two things. One is sometimes the things we're holding onto might have some value, but I have to be willing to sell it, put in the effort to let it go and to try to sell it. But also I realized that even the cheap things from the past seem to be higher quality than the new things that we're making today. Like all of the clothes that are made, the vast majority of them are made of plastic now. And, and, and so I go back, I go to this vintage shop and these shirts that were probably a dollar or $2 to, to create back then. And they're selling for a hundred bucks. Like, yeah, they're cheap shirts, but they're so much nicer than our current shirts to at least to a great extent. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it is. It blows my mind how, yeah, a Metallica shirt from $19.90 can go for $150, but usually those things are 100% cotton, a lot healthier. I'll tell you, hanging on to things, and for me, and thinking about selling them, that's always a pitfall for me. I have this expensive thing. Mariah and I, we got our scuba licenses, and we got these dive computers. And so I helped. We went scuba diving a few times, and we might do it again, but it's like we kind of got we're past it like it's not a hobby that we absolutely loved but i'm holding on to these dive computers because we paid for them and they're worth hundreds of dollars and so you know what ended up happening when we moved from la to montana i just put them up on craigslist for like half of what they were worth and sold them right away and i could have done that from the first time i had that thought but it's like no i want to make sure i get maximum dollar for it i want to make sure that like you know i get as much money and recoup as much as possible but like it wasn't until i was forced to like get rid of stuff that i'm like okay i'm gonna take as little money as possible for these and actually turned out to be awesome because like this dude who bought them he was like do you have any idea what these are worth i'm like i do i don't know he there was two of them and he's like i only need one of them i'm like dude sell another one and like make your money back he's like i think i'm gonna pass it on man like it's really cool that you let these go so cheap wow so it was like it was a beautiful experience man but yeah holding on to stuff to sell it is I just don't like doing that. Some people love eBay and they really love getting on there and the process of like, you know, putting people on a bidding war for an item, packaging it up and, and, you know, driving it and they get that satisfaction from like every step of the process. I get no satisfaction from it. I'm just always wondering like, how much money did I leave on the table? So it's easier for me when I don't have that looming over me, but that seems to be my default of like, I got to make as much money as possible on this thing. That's like a different kind of just in case. I'll hold on to this just in case I can get more money from it. I will hold on to this because letting it go for free would be wasting some sort of hypothetical money that doesn't actually exist. That thing I bought for $300 that is worth maybe $30 now, is it worth it for me to sell it? And for me, the answer, when we were both first embracing minimalism, I would sell anything that I could get more than $20 for because I was trying to pay off debt. At this point, the threshold for me is a hundred bucks. Like I just sold a, a weight bench recently. We had our house that we weren't really using anymore with any regularity. And so Bex put it up on marketplace, sold same day. Someone came to pick it up and he was so excited and, and letting it go. Like, I felt like I would have given it to him for free. How excited he was. Like I'm, I'm finally making this gym in my, in my garage. And like, I really, really needed this. And you're like, oh, why was I holding on to this? Maybe I was holding on to it for him. This is the thing that he really, really needed. Stephanie said, I often realize it's time to let go after I have been traveling for a few weeks in our small trailer and realize how many things I don't actually need. This excess makes my home feel overwhelming. Ryan, feeling overwhelmed is a surefire sign that something has to go, right? Oh, yeah. I mean, that's the mental clutter. That's the pain. That is the, you know, when it becomes more of a, I forget what the pithy answer was, but when it's more of a struggle to hold on to something than it is to let it go. And you know, it's a struggle when every time you look at it, you're like, oh, I got it. You're beating yourself up. I got to get rid of that thing. I got to get rid of that thing. And that is absolutely like, that's the time you got to do something about it. TK, is all emotional clutter rooted somewhere and overwhelmed or does overwhelm blanket all sorts of emotional clutter? Yeah, I think overwhelm is more of a term that we use when our experience of emotional clutter is characterized by this sense of ambiguity. I'm dealing with so much, I can't even find a word or a thought or a narrative by which I can identify it. I don't know exactly what this is or where I can get started. It's analogous to what we experience with physical clutter. Sometimes you need to clean up and you look at your place and you've let it slip a little too far. It's like, man, everything is everywhere. I have no concept or clue where to start. I think overwhelm is something like that. And you have to start small. You have to often start arbitrary and you start easy. No right or wrong about starting. Just pick any random thing that feels like it's not too difficult to work with and begin to unpack there. Right. I think some of the language we use around this is like, this is overwhelming. I remember the first time you and I went to New York City and we're like a Times Square and it's, this is overwhelming. No, it's not. I am overwhelmed. And the same is true when I walk into a cluttered space, right? It's not that this is overwhelming. It's that I am overwhelmed. My reaction to this is some sort of some sort of overwhelming. It could be overwhelmed by anxiety. It could be overwhelmed by stress. It could be overwhelmed by the visual busyness of a space. And someone else might totally thrive in a space like that. Yeah. I mean, you could even soften it, too, to be like, I feel overwhelmed. I am feeling I'm not an overwhelmed person in general. Right. But I'm feeling overwhelmed. But like language is so important. Makes me think about how I was reading a book and it was talking about changing the mindset from ownership to stewardship. and like I really like this because it makes me think about like the dive computers that we sold the bench that you sold it's like to be a good steward of those things it's not keeping it in my house and hoarding it and keeping it for myself but it's like getting rid of it letting go of the mental clutter that's good stewardship number one for myself like to get rid of that mental clutter then number two like giving it to someone else who's actually going to appreciate what that thing is and who's going to use it and they're going to be even a better steward over it and put it to use instead of it just sitting around collecting dust. Yeah, I call that the I feel right now rule. And so if you append anything with I feel at the beginning and right now at the end. So I feel overwhelmed right now. Yeah, I love that. And it's recognizing that like I don't always feel overwhelmed in this space at this time dealing with these events. I feel and that makes it true. It's not that this is overwhelming. That's subjective, right? But this makes it true. Yes, I feel that way. It doesn't mean that objectively or externally it's overwhelming. It's just a state of experience right now. It doesn't mean it's going to be like that a day from now. So what can I do to accept where I am or change where I am in order to eliminate or at least reduce some of that overwhelm? Victoria said, it's time to let go of a thing if I wouldn't replace it if I lost it. Yes. So I was talking about earlier, very, very simple, the new audio book. it is downloadable for free over at veryverysimple.com it's 12 tools and one of them is the wouldn't replace it rule and i call this the sort of like step sibling to the spontaneous combustion rule the spontaneous combustion rule says ryan came with us we were in dallas and this girl came to the microphone you remember what she said oh yeah she was like talking about this blanket that her mom made her when she was 16 years old and she loved it and it was like this collage of pictures of her and her friends. And she got them printed on fabric and made this quilt. And she was just like, man, that meant so much to me. And she's like, now it's ridiculous. Like I would, doesn't just fit the motif in my, in my home. And she was like, no one else is going to want it. So like, I just kind of keep it in my closet on the shelf and it sits there and it's bugging me. And I was like, what would happen if you went home tonight and like it's spontaneously combusted. And that's the only thing that like, you know, spontaneously combusted in your home. She's like, like her shoulders dropped. She was like, I feel so, so relieved. Yeah, that sense of full body relief. It's that that feeling. So right now it's I feel overwhelmed by holding on to this blanket right now. And it's like, oh, the spontaneous fucking busted. I feel. Oh, it's the it's the the emotional clutter that's associated with. So the wouldn't replace a rule is for the practical or mental side of it. And so it's if I lost this thing right now, if it stopped working, like if you're if my blender at home stopped working, would I replace it? Well, yes, practically. I wouldn't feel a particular way about that. I might feel like it's an inconvenience that I have to part with this money. But it's if this blender spontaneously combusted, I might feel a sense of loss. Right. And that means I want to replace it. But for the wouldn't replace the rules, like if I lost this thing today, would I replace it? Would I buy this thing again? just as a mental practical exercise. And if the answer is no, then why am I still holding on to this? Whether it's a pair of pants or an old pair of shoes or that blanket or a blender or a toaster, if you don't eat toast anymore, why are you holding on to the toaster? It becomes a just-in-case item. And the question is, okay, the toaster just stopped working today. Would I replace it? And if the answer is no, that's a sign that I want to let it go. One more here. This one's from Megan. And Megan said, I know it's time to let go of something when my claw marks have trailed all the way across it. That is so, so, so good. I suspect that Megan is referencing and appending one of my favorite David Foster Wallace quotes. It's from Infinite Jest. He said, everything I've ever let go of has claw marks on it. TK, you've been diving into David Foster Wallace recently. What do you think of this quote? Oh, man, I've heard you talk about this one a lot. And it just kind of captures that funny relationship we have with our things, even when we are the ones who say, I need to let this go. No one else is making us do it. There's that wrestling with the thought of what am I going to lose in terms of my own soul by letting this thing go? I'm not going to be the same person. I'm not going to matter anymore. I'm not going to be interesting anymore. and just how we're clinging to an identity. And that's symbolized by the claw marks on our things. Yeah. Yeah. When we refuse to let go, we're clinging. Anything that has claw marks we didn't let go of is sort of let go of us. It forces us to let go. What DFW books have you read so far? Oh, I haven't read any books yet. I started with the essay, A Supposedly Fun Thing That I'll Never Do Again. Yeah. Yeah. A Supposedly Fun Thing That I'll Never Do Again. And what's so funny about that is that he's writing about these luxury cruises and he's kind of despising the experience, but he's such a great writer that when he describes the slightest detail I think I wanna go I gotta see that for myself There no way the rails on the staircases can be as interesting as this man describes them The striation of the soap dish takes up an entire paragraph. And that's the paradox. He's talking about the anxiety of the place and how it's crazy making. I think the state fair example is maybe the best example. It's in the same book. The book is called A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll never do again. But then there's a state fair essay in there where it's called Getting Away from Pretty Much Already Being Away from It All. And it's about going to the Illinois State Fair and how crazy making that can be. But the way he writes about it, you feel like you want to go just to experience the craziness. And maybe that's what our consumer culture does to us quite often is like, we think we want to embrace the craziness and then we get steeped in it and we're like, get me the hell out of here. How about you listeners? When do you know? How do you know when it's time to let go of a thing? Let us know your thoughts in the Patreon community chat. Okay, give me something pithy, gentlemen. Ryan, how do you know when it's time to let go of a thing? Well, first off, time is just a flat circle. I just want to be very clear. No, here's my pithy answer. I was going to say at 6.30. 6 30 on Fridays uh the moment to let go arises when courage arrives so what does that mean it means that like the thing that you want to let go of you know you want to let go of it Vanessa has this box of donations that she knows she wants to let go of she has not had this moment of courage that it's going to take for her to be like you know what I'm committing I'm fully committing to this men's game I'm getting this stuff out of my house whether I like it or not I'm going to set a date. I'm going to set an hour. And I'm going to go and do it. And you have to have courage to let go of a lot of these things. So when that moment arises, seize it. Yeah, there's something about courage. We often think about it being this grandiose thing. But often it's the courage to not do things, to avoid doing things, to stop doing certain things. Or it's the courage to do these little banal things every day. It takes a level of an undercurrent of courage. TK, you got something pithy for us? If it comforts at the cost of character, it's clutter. So one of my convictions is that everything we do is a spiritual practice, even if we don't think or speak of it that way. Whether it's playing golf, going to the movies, preparing a meal at home, eating at the restaurant, playing with our kids, taking a walk, going for a hike. because every single thing that we do gradually over time shapes our consciousness in very particular ways. And it organizes our possibilities in ways that comport to the frequency of the activity. And so when it comes to the things that we do, we can always ask not only the question of what does this do for me, but what does this do to me? How is this shaping the person that I am becoming? And when it comes to our physical possessions, we buy them because we want to use them in a way that brings us these benefits. And I say the time to let go of a thing is when what it's doing to you, the cost of that is greater than what it's doing for you. And so if using this thing or holding onto this thing is making me weak, it's making me cranky, it's making me bitter, it's making me stress, making me anxious, then that outweighs the benefits of it makes me look cool or it makes me feel comfortable or it gives me pleasure in my belly. Well, one of the things I'm thinking about there is what does this do without me? And it goes back to the diving computers. It goes back to the weight bench I got rid of. It goes back to any of the stuff that Ryan was holding on to during his packing party that he wasn't using. What does this do without me? Meaning who else might benefit from this? It may serve a purpose. It just doesn't serve a purpose for me anymore. And that's why we cling, which brings me to my pithy answer. if clinging is disrespectful letting go is a sign of self-respect we talked a lot this weekend during the sunday symposium that we had about self-respect either one of you want to expand on that a bit yeah that did come up spider-man right now you go tk you're gonna be much more articulate with this man i've been practicing my nicodemus uh impersonation you want to hear it oh yeah let's Hey, I'm Ryan. Nailed it. Nailed it. Well, one of the things we talked about at Symposium is how, you know, we fail to respect our own potential and our own creative power when we cling to things. Because part of what allows us to let things go is confidence and our ability to imbue any set of circumstances with meaning. I don't need this thing because I don't get my meaning from the thing. I get my meaning from what I manufacture and I bring it to my things. It reminds me of Charlie Parker. Someone had stolen a song of his and a friend was like, are you mad about that? And he's like, no, I got plenty where that come from. All they got was one song. You know, I got the goose that lays the golden egg, so to speak. And when we can have that sort of confidence in our relationship to things, hey, something gets taken away. Something gets lost in a fire. Something is worn out and we have to let it go. It may be a little tough, but we can say, you know, I can recreate that magic with a new thing or even with a new thing because the magic comes from me. Let's say you feel devastated, though, by a loss. Someone does take that song from you and you know it's it's a hit song. Our friend Matt Nathanson, he wrote, come on, get higher. He said, I knew at the moment that like we were recording that this is a hit song. And I imagine if someone stole that from him, it would have totally changed the trajectory of his life as well. Now, it could have been differently better. Or it could have been differently worse. I'm speaking from a subjective perspective, how he views it. But sometimes that can be devastating. You can be in a business relationship with someone and the whole thing becomes crashing down. Or you have a project you're working on together and all of a sudden it doesn't come to fruition. Or maybe like someone steals something from you. Or I just met this woman at the grocery store a week or two ago who her house burnt down in the Palisades fire. And she said for the first month, it was the most devastating thing that ever happened to me. And after that, it was one of the freest things that ever happened to me. What does it take to make that transition from devastation to freedom? Having all your stuff burned down, I guess. Almost. Close. And it reminds me of like Kapil Gupta. He's like, I wish everyone would go through a near-death experience every six months so they know what it's like to really live. Yeah, man. It's making me think, I don't know if this is probably a left turn, but let's do it. I've had this thing recently come up where I just go with it. And what I mean by that is, so I am working on a project right now with a friend in Missoula that we will announce eventually. But there's a lot of hiccups along the way. Things happen the way that they happen. And sometimes it'll happen the way we want them to happen. And so I could sit there and look at this process and be like, oh, no, like it's not going how we thought it was going to go. It's like if I just go with it, I'm like, OK, it wasn't supposed to go that way. So maybe it's supposed to go a different way. And it makes me think about Matt Nathanson. If someone stole his song, he could have been a much better songwriter. Who knows? Yeah. He could have been like, that was my hit. I'm just going to make hit after hit after hit now. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. So it's like when it comes to our things, I mean, there is a there's something deep down that we know we want out of our things. And if that thing that we want is to get rid of it, we have to go with it. You got to go with it. Yeah. And to me, maybe that's the reclaiming of the self-respect to get back to the maxim there is you can have your whole house burned down and still cling to it, cling to the way you wish things were. And I think quite often we're clinging to the things because we're still clinging to the way I wish things were. I wish these clothes fit me. I wish I could still use these. I wish, I wish, I wish. We spend all the time wishing and hoping and it becomes a type of thought clutter, mental clutter that keeps the physical clutter there in front of you. Josh one exception though if I wrote this is how we do it and one of y'all stole that I can't let that go man everywhere I go they playing that song 20 years later they playing that song and then I'll be the angry guy like I wrote that Ryan and Josh stole it I wrote that and I'm like no you didn't man shout out to Montel Jordan he just beat cancer prostate cancer I think the second time hey congratulations good for him All right, that's almost the end of page one. We still have an entire switchboard of colors to talk to Ryan. But first, real quick for right here, right now, here's one, maybe two or three things going on in the life of the minimalist. First thing, Ryan got a new shirt. I did. Look at that. If you're watching the video version. You want to tell you why I got this shirt? Tell me about it. Okay, so we went to. That was good on you, by the way. Thanks, man. I appreciate it. I really appreciate that, man, because this is the first colorful thing I've bought in like 20 years. And I just got it like on Monday or Tuesday. So, uh, we're staying with some friends and we head up to like the Salton Sea and there's this little town called Julian that we stopped in and we get out of the car and the wind is whipping. It is so cold. And I didn't bring us a day trip. I just brought a little bag, you know, cause I'm a minimalist. Didn't bring my sweatshirt with me. I'm like, man, I was like, I really need, like, we're going to be outside a lot. I need something to like, you know, to keep warm. So we go to this store and there was a sweatshirt, like a hoodie that had the name of the town and had like a nice little logo on it. I'm like, you know what? I'll go, I'll go ahead and get that. Like, it's pretty simple. You know, it's not because I had a logo on it. I'm like, it's not really something I would wear, but dire times folks, like I needed to be warm. So, uh, we were, I'm like walking through the rest of the store and then they had this men's section where they had like shirts like this and you know, with the Arizona blanket looking shirts. And so, um, I was like, I looked at him and I instantly thought to myself, there's no freaking way to ever wear anything like that. I would never do that. and I do this all and it's a total judgment and I know like myself when I look at something and I know whether it's a preference or whether I'm sneering at it and I was sneering at these shirts and so my lovely wife was like try it on you might like it I'm like all right I'll try it on and I put it on as soon as I put it on this guy walks by he's like dude that is a nice shirt man I'm like you just get paid by the store to walk around telling me what I know you but uh but no I went ahead and got it even though like I still didn't think I look great in it but like because my wife's like, no, you look good in it. This random comment from a guy. I'm like, okay, maybe I don't know best. Maybe I'm not a fashionista like I thought I was. My daughter was really young. She's six. You remember those? She was like, when I grow up, I want to be a fashionista. I don't even know what that means. This is such a Nicodemus story though. I was telling Savvy D just this week. I have a picture of Ryan from 2009. We're down in St. Pete, Florida, which is where Savvy D is from. We're the kawa coffee down there there's a picture of him sleeping on the couch at the coffee shop and when he went down there because it was when my mom was was dying so he was down there for with maybe a week or so and he packs his bag but he forgot to pack any t-shirts so he went to the novelty store you know where you buy like five t-shirts for a dollar or something and they're just these silly novelty t-shirts so i've got this picture of ryan laying on a couch wearing a bright green t-shirt with a camel on it that just says want to hump that's so great i used to love ironic clothing my favorite one was the one that had uh weapons of mass destructions with two arrows pointing to the biceps he kept that one after florida for a while that was great uh we eventually had to minimize that i think during the packing party yeah yeah a year or so later all right the second thing that's going on in the life of the minimalist. TK just did the Ramsey car wash recently. Remember, we did that several times, right? He was down there in Tennessee, and he was giving a devotional for the Ramsey team. And while he was there, he stopped by the George Campbell show. Watched his car. Got a lot of money for that. Then I watched John Deloney's car. Yes. Fast cash, man. So he was on Deloney's show, George Campbell's show, and Ken Coleman's show. A bunch of things stood out to me. We'll put a link to all three of those interviews in the show notes. The Delaney one isn't out as of this recording, but hopefully it'll be out by the time this episode comes out. But there are a bunch of things that stood out. I love the concept you were talking about with Ken Coleman about noble boredom and sitting in boredom, but in a noble way. Maybe you can expand on that briefly. Yeah. Being present to the moment and whatever comes up for you without demanding that it be something in particular, without clinging to an expectation or without requiring it to be easy, opening yourself up to forms of pleasure, forms of joy that don't have an immediate payoff that that demands something of you, you know, for example, learning a new language, learning how to appreciate art, learning how to listen to and enjoy genres of music that for the most part you are unexposed to learning how to play something like chess or learning how to play a new game that you've never played, picking up a new hobby, learning how to play an instrument, whatever it may be, it doesn't have to like be in the category of art or sports, but something that is different for you and you know on the other side of it there a kind of pleasure that comes from a new way of connecting with other people or understanding your world But it not immediately easy for you like pop music You can just expose yourself to it on the first day and get all the benefits That's great. But you want a balanced diet of superficial and substantial pleasure, pleasure that challenges you and demands something great of you in order to experience it. You mentioned learning how to play a game. So Mariah and I, we play a lot of board games. And there's sometimes like, you know. Board games. Yeah, we're playing this like we'll pull out this complicated game we just bought and we got to learn how to play it. And every time this happens, I'm like going through the rules and I'm like so overwhelmed. Like, how is this game going to work? You know? Yeah. And what I've learned because we've done this so many times is like every time I get that overwhelmed feeling, I'm like, dude, you feel like this every time you go to play a game. And then once you go through the rules, it's real simple. You never have to read all this stuff again and you understand how to play the game. But it is like kind of what you're talking about, just being with that. You call it boredom, but I guess I'm talking about being overwhelmed. But, you know, boring, being bored can be overwhelming sometimes. Yeah, I think especially if you sit down, meditate or you mentioned prayer when you're talking to Ken Coleman, both of those things you mentioned. And meditation is overwhelming, even though it's about doing nothing, essentially. Yeah. But you're so overwhelmed by the thoughts and am I doing this right? And the thoughts about the thoughts. Maybe I shouldn't be having these thoughts. How do I catch these thoughts and let go of the thoughts? No wonder I'm so overwhelmed. This is really boring and I'm overwhelmed at the same time. And so that noble boredom that you talked about, that really stood out to me. We'll put a link to all three of those interviews. The George Campbell one was hilarious, man. And TK was in rare form. He got to talk about things that I rarely hear him talk about. And I really enjoyed listening to those. So if you want to see a different side of TK Coleman, you can check out those three interviews that he did over there at Ramsey HQ. Q. One other thing. We got Ryan's shirt. Oh, I'm going to talk about my shirt during the added value segment today. I should have brought a new shirt. We brought you one. Wanna hop? Oh, I wish I stole that shirt. I sold it at the thrift shop. I was at the other day. Yeah, for $150. Yeah, exactly. We got one other thing for you. Our decluttering course, it's called Simplify Everything. It opens in a few weeks on February 2nd. TK, Ryan, and I, we did this course. It's five weeks long. It's 17 different video lessons, 45 clutter problem areas, 135 decluttering solutions, 50 minimalism resources, a 30 page workbook and student forums. And we do this a couple of times a year. You have 72 hours to enroll. It starts on the second, but if you go to simplify course.com, put your email in there, we'll notify you when enrollment opens. I've got to say Nicodemus really stole the show on this one. and do you know why? Because he was so frustrated that first day. It was the devastation we were just talking about with Matt Nathanson. We were filming and Ryan was like, oh, I didn't prepare the way I wanted to. And then we came back the next week and he had prepared. I think he didn't sleep. He just prepared for a week straight. I really feel good about that. No, that first day of filming, I did prepare how I wanted to. Oh, well, because I'm so much better at ad-libbing. And so like we're covering these things that we talk about all the time. And I'm like, oh, I can totally ad lib this stuff. It's just very, it was just very different ad libbing in that situation. It was a situation I was like, Oh, I have to like really practice for this. I mean, it's literally a speech class one-on-one when I took it in college, it was, it's like for every minute that you have to do something, practice it for an hour, you know? And I, and I don't know if I put that much time into it, but I, it was daggone close to that much. Yeah. Yeah. I really thought you stole the show. And after the, the sort of learned lesson of that devastation, you came back and it was just focused, you know, straight to camera. And we're going through all these sort of decluttering lessons. We have 135 different solutions throughout this to deal with the clutter. It's the physical clutter. That's the first week. But then we break it up into subsequent weeks. We talk about mental clutter and emotional clutter and financial clutter and digital clutter, career clutter. We talk about all of these things throughout the course. And what we're doing is we're presenting the problem and then also some practical ways that we and other people have let go. If you want to sign up for that, simplifycourse.com. Put your email in there and we'll notify you the day that enrollment opens so you can enroll with the rest of the students and you can start simplifying your life right away. All right, we got much more coming up, y'all. But first, here is a minimalist tip from one of our listeners. Hi, this is Ben, a Patreon subscriber from the 937 area of Ohio. I wanted to share a small realization that surprised me recently, and maybe it'll help some other listeners. I recently drove from Ohio to Florida for a triathlon about 17 hours each way because I assumed that I needed to race on my bike. That was just the rule in my head. No questions asked. But afterward, I realized what that assumption actually cost me. Roughly 30 hours of driving, extra hotel nights, mental fatigue and less time with my dad who lives near the race venue. All for something that probably didn't matter as much as I thought. The race even had a reputable bike rental partner. Renting would have been fine. Not perfect, but good enough. Maybe at worst, a few extra minutes on the bike ride. And that's the insight. Sometimes we confuse preference with necessity. We optimize for control or familiarity without asking what we're trading away. In my case, I optimize for equipment certainty instead of time, energy, and connection. And the return on that decision was pretty low. So the takeaway I'm sitting with is this. Every rigid assumption has a hidden cost. And letting go of just one, just once, can buy something far more valuable than whatever we think we're protecting. Next time, I'll rent the bike. So good, Ben. Thank you for that lovely, thoughtful, profound comment. Shout out to Dayton, Ohio, by the way, the whole 937. Ryan and I still have 937 area codes all these years later. It's almost paradoxical, gentlemen, that when you let go of the need for certainty, you often pick up a peace of mind. What resonated about Ben's comment here? Oh, man, I'm going to paraphrase, but how he talked about how our preferences basically will ruin the moment for us. We don't realize like our preference is actually getting in the way of a better circumstance or a better situation. I instantly thought of this where I'm like my preference. I was so rigid with my preference. Like, no, I wear dark colors. They look good on me. I can't pull off the wild and extravagant things. I admire that. Like I got a buddy who like wears dragon pants. You know what I'm saying? I got another Josh Wagner, my friend in Ireland. And where's pirate pants like patches and browns and like pastels? I mean, it's like it's unbelievable. But I'm like, I can never pull that off. But but yeah, it's like my preference was getting in the way. I needed something warm. I wanted to buy something I was going to continue to use, too. Right. And so like I was like, all right, I'm not going to let my preference ruin that. Maybe this this coat looks good on me. Maybe the shirt looks good on me. And I'm telling you, man, like the next day I'm looking in the mirror. I'm like, I'm really glad I got this. Like how many times have I brought it up, Mariah? of like during this trip i'm like i look good in this i like this you know it's funny you mentioned the preferences thing if you want to be miserable be more rigid the easiest shortcut to being more rigid is having preferences about everything having opinions about everything and tk does a great job of dropping the opinions by not picking them up in the first place uh do i really do that did i do that i knew it was him yes actually it was me and i grew the beard to try to get some privacy oh my god it was annoying going to the malls and having kids be like hey steve urkel can i get an autograph i gotta grow this beard i think if you just put the pants down if they're probably at love you'd be fine I would just love to see TK and some suspenders. Laura, what I love about this tip is that it captures for me what is at the heart of minimalism. We tend to look at the concept of selling your soul like it's depicted in fiction as a one-time transaction between a person and the devil, and the devil always shows up with the pitchfork in a red suit, right? But selling your soul can be a very gradual bit-by-bit process where you simply do nothing more than sacrifice what is most important to your soul for the sake of something that you could technically live without. And that happens at every level of income that can occur with any activity. Everybody, no matter how much or how little you make, faces temptations to spend what they don't have or to sell themselves out in a way and let the other person get the better end of the deal. And moments like this are learning opportunities, not to regret them, but to say, Okay, that's a very valuable lesson. Next time, I'm going to think about what really matters most to me, and I'll orient my relationship to things around that. That's the heart of it. I love it. Yeah. It makes me think of the whole, you know, things come into your life for a reason, a season, or a lifetime, right? When it comes to my stuff, hardly any of it's for a lifetime. Yeah. You know? Almost none. And it's like I'm realizing that, I mean, I was living a different life in high school. I was living a different life when we were working at the telecom company. I was living a different life when I was on this show on a weekly basis. I'm living a different life in Montana. Those are different lives. And with that, it comes new stuff, and that's okay. It's almost like I did the opposite when we were in the corporate world. I threw out all my suits. I wanted to throw them out. I donated all my suits, donated all my ties, all my nice shoes, thousands of dollars and stuff because I was like, I am not living that life anymore, which was great. Like I didn't want to live that life anymore. So the whole process of, you know, starting the minimalists was about that process of letting go, freeing myself from this persona, this identity that I had wrapped myself up with. But to it did me it was to my detriment because there's a certain point where like I did need to have a suit. Well, it's not that I did need to have a suit, but it was a lot more respectable to other people to have a suit. I used to show up in weddings and like shorts, those barefoot shoes and a T-shirt. Right. And there's nothing wrong with that. Like no one ever judged me for that. There was just a certain point where like I had the thought where I'm like, you know what, man, this is someone's like wedding day. And like they're really trying to make something here. And so you could go and flex and be like, I don't have to I don't have to conform with all you conformists wearing suits. Or I could join in the celebration and make a special form instead of making it about me. Because that's really kind of what I was doing. You know, and now he shows up in that Wild West shirt he's wearing. That's right. You know, last thing on the opinion side of things, I catch myself all the time now getting ready to pick up an opinion about a movie or a song or a scientific study or whatever it is. And it's just like, OK, do I need to have an opinion about this? And it's my opinion that I don't need an opinion about this. So let me go ahead and set that down in advance. Ben, thank you for that lovely comment. For anyone else has a listener tip or insight about this episode or any other episode, send a voice memo. to podcast at theminimalists.com so we can feature your voice on the show. Up next, page two and page three. But first, let's take a quick pandiculation break. We'll be right back. All right, y'all, that is the first 36% of episode 523. We'll see you on Patreon for the full two-hour maximal edition with Ryan Nicodemus, which includes answers to a bunch more questions like, why does it feel like I have more things after I declutter? What if every single one of your purchases followed you around? And why am I keeping things that I know my kids do not want to inherit? Plus a million more questions. Also, what the heck are these things? I had an added value segment where I told Ryan about the five things that have been adding the most value to my life recently. And this is definitely one of them. We'll talk about that on the private episode over on Patreon. The link is in the description. When you subscribe, you can listen to our private podcast episodes on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Plus, you'll gain access to all of our podcast archives all the way back to the very first episode when Ryan and I were in that storage closet at the University of Montana for episode 001. Shout out to Ryan Nicodemus for being here today. Let's give him a round. Come on. I'm so happy to be here. Thanks for having me. RyanNicodemus.com for his occasional mentoring messages. and he's got some big news coming soon. Stay tuned for that. That is our minimal episode for today. On behalf of Ryan and TK and Audio Ben and Spire Jeff and Dave, Jordan No More, Tomcat, Professor Sean, Savvy D is on the board over there and the rest of our team. I'm Joshua Fields Milburn. If you leave here with just one message, let it be this. Love people and use things because the opposite never works. Thanks for listening, y'all. We'll see you next time. Peace. Every little thing you think that you need Every little thing you think that you need Every little thing that's just feeding your greed Oh, I bet that you'd be fine without it