Letting Go in Advance – The Minimalists

Clothing clutter accumulates at the checkout line, well before it overflows your closets, hampers, and dresser drawers.

According to the EPA, the average American throws out more than 81 pounds of clothing each year, even though 95% of it could be reused or recycled.

Sounds like we are burdened by the residue of regret.
Sounds like we own more than enough.
Sounds like we don’t need more.

Yet we keep buying more: more shirts and pants and belts and shoes and dresses and shorts and jackets and wallets and purses and accessories, 85% of which will soon occupy space in a landfill.

Why are we so addicted to purchasing new clothes that will shortly become trash?

The answer involves many factors—false promises from marketers, slights of hand from advertisers, unconscious peer pressure from friends and coworkers—but the core characteristic of our overconsumption is consumerism.

Consumerism is the ideology that externalities will complete you—that buying more will somehow make your life more complete.

We believe this nonsense only because we don’t understand what enough is. So we accumulate more than enough, hoping that eventually we’ll get to the point at which our wardrobes, and thus our lives, are perfect.

And yet it doesn’t work.
Consumerism can’t complete you.
Because you are already complete.

Even when you’re standing alone in an empty closet,
dressed in the simplest attire,
you are complete.

Think about it.

Have you ever looked at a newborn and said,
This baby is incomplete
so I better buy her a bunch of new things
to perfect that imperfect little child?

Of course not.

So…

If you were complete when you were a born—
when you owned zero possessions—
then at what point did you become incomplete?

You became incomplete
the moment your consumer culture
convinced you to burn yourself
with the flame of consumerism.

Thankfully, that fire
can be extinguished by
the gentle waters of simplicity.

Be it clothes, cars, or commodities, no material possession will complete you or make you happy, even though it feels like they can when you’re steeped in a retail frenzy. If anything, excess possessions cover up your happiness, which means, in a real way, new purchases don’t complete you—they incomplete you!

However, a complete life does exist—it exists on the other side of letting go, letting go of the past by donating and recycling the waste, and then letting go of the future by letting go of the stuff in advance.

You see, the simplest way to get rid of an item is to avoid bringing it home in the first place.