The Clutter Fairy Weekly #248

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

In Goodbye, Things, author Fumio Sasaki shares his personal story of becoming a minimalist. The book also offers lots of tips for saying goodbye to stuff and explores the results of Sasaki’s profound change in lifestyle. In episode #248 of The Clutter Fairy Weekly, Gayle Goddard, professional organizer and owner of The Clutter Fairy in Houston, Texas, reviews Goodbye, Things and discusses the lessons we can take from this popular book about a minimalist approach to decluttering.

Content in this episode is based on the results of audience surveys.

Some content in this episode is based on results of a survey of our audience.

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Weekly Tittle

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.

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