Book Club: Goodbye, Things: The New Japanese Minimalism (Sasaki)

The Weekly Tittle is an exercise designed to focus your attention on a specific space, aspect, or challenge of decluttering and organizing your home. We assign a new tittle in each webcast/podcast, then check on your progress the following week.

Imagine Starting Over from Scratch

This week’s assignment is a thought experiment based on a passage from the book Goodbye, Things: The New Japanese Minimalism:

• Consider the following quotation from the book:
  

  “In a thought-provoking documentary film called My Stuff, the protagonist takes all of his belongings, puts them in storage, and allows himself to retrieve only one item each day. On the first day, he really does have nothing on him; he runs to his storage unit wearing nothing but a newspaper to hide his private parts. He retrieves a coat on the first day and sleeps on the hard floor.”

• Imagine yourself in the situation the author describes—everything you own is in storage except the one set of clothing you’re wearing. (We decided to let you have some clothes.)
• Take a sheet of paper and write the numbers 1 through 14 in a column down the left side.
• Next to each number, write down the item that you would retrieve from storage on each day of your two-week minimalist experiment. For example, “Day 1: Blanket. Day 2: Pillow, etc.”
• If you’re feeling ambitious, play out the thought experiment up to 30 items, or 50, or 100.
• Reflect on anything surprising that you’ve learned as you’ve thought about how little you could live with—or how much you could live without.

For the full discussion of this week’s tittle, watch the Weekly Tittle segment on YouTube.