Turtles-Paradise

I’ve gotten rid of a lot of items since I started the Great De-Cluttering Project. The gameboy is gone, a large number of books, the second iPod. Most of the surfaces in my house are a lot clearer. But then, in the middle of archiving all the data from my pile of CD’s, I ran into a problem.

Namely, a space problem. I have a 120gb external harddrive – and it’s full. That’s a lot of data. The problem is, most of it is important – old artwork files, photographs, writing, music, and web-design work. Stuff I want to keep. Memories of who I used to be, old friends, and long journeys to places that changed me.

But, I have no space. I have the virtual equivalent of an overflowing house, and a moving van parked outside. So what do I do?

• I could upgrade. I could buy a 1tb hard-drive for about £65, and never run out of space again (until I do)
• or, I could delete stuff. I could decide that actually, 13gb of music – that’s 2919 songs, or 8 solid days of non-repeating music – is overkill. Especially when I haven’t listened to over 70% of them in years. I could go through the photographs, keep the ones that have special meaning, and delete the thousands of generic and fuzzy shots of flowers, clouds, and people’s backs. I could pare the artwork down to the few pieces I am actually proud of, and dump the experiments with software and colour.

It’s easy to ignore digital clutter. It doesn’t take up physical space in our house and lives – we can truly forget it’s even there. But it is still clutter. You end up losing the few important things in a sea of junk.

Digital clutter is insidious. It’s too easy to download a free song, a free e-book, to sign up to another free RSS feed, another newsletter, and to shove all your half-finished projects onto another hard-drive. After-all, virtual space is endless, right?

Not quite. Apparently, by 2020, we’ll have 35 zettabytes of data globally, and will be struggling to find the room to store it all. The question, of course, is how much of that data is actually worth keeping. In all the frantic digital activity of the last couple of years, as everyone turns to content creation and content sharing, as people get used to tweeting what they had for dinner and facebooking every interaction – will we have enough space to keep it all backed-up? Will there be huge warehouses, filled with gigantic hard-drives, all backing up each trivial comment ‘just in case’?

Don’t get me wrong. That everyone has a cheap and convenient outlet for their creative sides is amazing. That we have leapt into the ‘age of information’ is something to be impressed by, not scared of. But we should all try and make sure that the data we produce isn’t just noise, but is actually meaningful in some way.

Otherwise all the great ideas, the amazing artwork that moves us to tears, the songs that kept us alive through puberty, the writing that opened new doorways in our minds – these will be buried beneath a hundred you-tube videos of someone falling downstairs, a thousand spurious e-books full of fluff and mis-information, and a million doodles of stick-men.

Which isn’t to say that stick-men can’t be genius.

Living a balanced life is something that I feel is they key to happiness. The growth of minimalism, the surge of interest in working for yourself as an online entrepreneur, the desire to live simply and connect with the people around – it all seems to be a reaction to a materialistic, and unbalanced life that has come to be seen as normal.

We are encouraged to believe that working relentlessly until we are 65 is what life is about. School has become increasingly like the world of work – where endless exams, projects, paperwork and uniforms take the place of play and exploration. Work has taken over more and more of our lives, with salaried workers regularly putting in more hours than contracted for, and those with part-time, minimum wage jobs frequently having to take on two or three jobs just to make ends meet.

Meanwhile, the gap between the haves and the have-nots has widened so that in 2006 the top 2% of the world population owned more than half of the worlds wealth. In order to afford the ‘standard of life’ that advertisers tell us is both normal and desirable, we are forced to take on debt, work overtime, and pay most of our income towards the upkeep of an unsustainable lifestyle. A few talented people make millions, a few lucky people inherit millions, and the rest are left to lurch from financial crisis to financial crisis.

The other day, I had to repot some of my plants. I went to the garden centre, and I paid for a few sacks of dirt. Yes, dirt – the very stuff this planet is covered with. Others pay for bottled water. It won’t be long before someone figures out how to sell us oxygen.

My very simple solution is:

• Spend less.
• Work less.
• Have more fun.

Spend Less

Downsize your house. Better still, get rid of your house. Live out of a van, or a tent, or a spare room. Learn to see the true cost of things – a £200 washing machine is nearly 30 hours of work at £7 an hour. A £400 iPad is nearly 60. A £200,000 house is 3.2 years of non-stop, 24 hour work.

The places to cut your costs are the places where you spend the most. Your rent. Your food. Your entertainment splurges. Eat more lentils. Is that chicken tikka take-away really worth spending an extra hour at work?

Work Less

Once you’ve cut your costs to the bone, you can afford to work less. Take a single part-time job. Start a minimalist business. Work from home. The less you spend, the less you need to worry about earning.

Have more fun

When you’re not working, what are you going to do instead? You’ll finally have the time to travel. To learn new skills. To cook properly. To have long, silly conversations on the telephone. To take long walks. All the things that you don’t have time for now.

I should make it clear that I’m not there yet. Unlike the many people out there that have succeeded in quitting their full-time jobs and spend their time doing what they love I still work 37 hours a week or so, and I still have a large rent payment and a lot of stuff.

But I’m determined. I’ve spent the last year reading amazing blogs. I now know that it is possible. In a year, we’ll be heading to a place we don’t have to pay rent. In that year, I’m going to work on getting rid of as much of our belongings as possible, so that we don’t have to pay to move it or store it, and so we can start with the wonderful possibility that empty space creates.

I’m working towards a balanced life. What are you working towards?

I love this sky-planter idea. It’s space saving, self-watering, and ideal for those in small living spaces. However, it does come with quite a steep price-tag… so here’s how to make one yourself.

How to make an upside-down tomato planter
How to make an Upside-Down Planter
Go Green: Upside Down Planters (re-uses plastic bottles)
Upside Down Gardening

One of the things that often bothers me about ‘Eco-Living’ is the saturation of the market with products labelled as green, eco-friendly etc. and that as a result come at a premium price. It seems like a triumph of marketing more than anything else.

It also has the problem of penalising people on low incomes, who frequently cannot afford organic-cotton fairly-traded independent designer premium cardigans. Whilst I do believe that we need to put our money where our principles are, it should be recognised that a great many people struggle to make ends meet and often cannot even afford enough to eat. This is true both in the developed world, and in the developing world. The different access to resources between a large corporation and a small independent business needs to be recognised. The difference between someone on a professional income raised with a good understanding of ‘how money works’ and someone on a part-time minimum wage job who generally runs out of money before they run out of month also needs to be recognised.

‘Eco-friendly’ products frequently act as a way of assuaging guilt. They are a way of us continuing a pattern of consumption and convenience but paying a little more in order to feel like we’re still doing the right thing. Buying new clothes every season is not sustainable, regardless of how organic the cotton is.
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My kettle has broken. My guess is that the heating element has burned out, and it being the dirt-cheap value-brand kettle purchased for less than a fiver, it’s not worth trying to get it fixed.

In considering replacement options, I considered getting another dirt-cheap one (easy on my pocket), or doing some research and getting a good kettle that would last. On the one hand, I wanted to be able to get rid of it easily in the event of our eventual move – I didn’t want to sink a bunch of money into something that would only be used for a year or so. On the other hand, cheap disposable appliances use energy and materials in their creation and transport, and they frequently (not always) break down faster.

Then I realised there was a third option I hadn’t considered.

Not replacing it at all.

Here was a golden opportunity for clearing some counter-space, reducing the number of items in my kitchen, and solving both my ‘not spending a lot of money’ and ‘not buying cheap appliances’ problems in one swoop.

I don’t need a kettle. I have two other methods for boiling water – slowly, on the stove-top. And quickly, in the microwave. Do I really need a single-purpose item that does the same job?

The main thing I used the kettle for was making a cup of tea in the mornings. This morning I made it in the microwave. Easy!

The next time something of yours breaks down, ask yourself: do I really need to replace it? What else do I own that can do this job for me?