A website on the topic of minimalism and how minimising things can have profound consequences.

How much time do we spend thinking about things?

I have been reducing my belongings little by little over the past few months. I have greatly reduced my wardrobe to a small handing area and a large drawer. I've really enjoyed the result as I now know exactly what I have available and what is in the wash or elsewhere. I can glance over my clothes and quickly decide, from clothes that I love to wear, what I want for that day.

To make a smaller wardrobe work, my things need to be flexible so that I can wear them in different situations - for example, I have a sweater that I can wear for work or leisure rather than having seperate sweaters for each place. In fact, I recently wanted to add a sweater to my collection as I currently only have 2 navy sweaters, meaning I am not very flexible colour-wise, so planned to add a grey sweater to the mix. I spent a lot of time on ebay trying to find a preowned cotton sweater in the right colour, size etc. I become slightly obsessed and compulsive about finding the right sweater at the right price.

The realisation I had was that simply owning less clothing is only part of the picture - I was still spending time, effort and stress on clothes, so I'd somewhat missed the point of downsizing in the first place. My goal when reducing my clothes was to simplify that aspect of my life and reduce my attachment to physical objects and their impact on my thoughts and actions. By getting so wrapped up in the quest for a new sweater, I had lost the focus of the exercise.

I now feel that, while a grey sweater would help my wardrobe, it's certainly not essential and I therefore don't need to spend this effort and time on looking for one until I'm certain that I want to buy one.