So I came to terms with the fact that I am easily attached to material goods a couple years ago. It has been a struggle to get over this for the past few years. I don’t easily detach myself from items, I see non-monetary value in things that make it difficult for me to get over the loss/separation of something. Things like the SD card with all my Wii saves on it, if it got corrupted or something, it would be tough to get over. But really, I rarely play Wii these days and it should have little value to me. Things like books that I haven’t read in ages and probably won’t read again are hard to part with. When I moved to Chicago last year, it was very therapeutic. I had something that would force me to part with a number of things. But I still see things piling up around me and I feel the need to figure out ways to minimize the things I am attached to.
My thought is that if my apartment were to be robbed or burn down, what things would I miss/wish I had with me. I know that clothes are easily forgotten and the furniture going only hurts the wallet. But what I struggle to lose are things that hold other value. The recipes I have written down/marked from trying out. The saved games for various video games. Source code I haven’t backed up yet. CDs with possibly important things on them. My goal for the next few months is to at least get some of these things moved into one of two piles, either safe guarded or tossed. Safe guarded in that they are digitally backed up and on my online backup. I have a stack of discs I need to go through and a pile of cookbooks/notecards to type out. I also need to clean up the code I have and figure out what I should version control and what goes in tarballs for the online backup.
I feel like I need to know and quantify the external things that make me happy. The stuff that I absolute, cannot live without. Kim asked me to list those things tonight, I came up with my laptop, phone, and Kindle. I would probably also include my desktop (for now). I am still continuing to try and backup the important things on it to somewhere else, to decrease the mental value of it. Probably the greatest value in it is all the time spent configuring and massaging the system to do what I want. That is often what keeps me from reformatting. Data is very hard for me to part with, like with how I want to delete entries for this journal, but I want to be able to archive a backup of them before I do (which is silly, it is not like I will suddenly get nostalgic about things I wrote). But the advantage of this, is it appeases the packrat in me without taking up any real space.
Inevitably, I hope to shrink down what I base my happiness on until it can fit in a backpack. Then I can take that with me whenever I travel and know that if my apartment burnt down, all I would lose is monetary value, which is replaceable (albeit at a cost).