stuff... stuFF... STUFF!

It's January 8th, and finally... finally my house looks somewhat empty. I move out on the 13th. Most of the stuff is now gone. The shippers came over and picked up my 23 boxes (including my bicycle) this afternoon. My furniture is ready to be hauled away by a friend. My 2 suitcases to India are packed.

Everything else - needs to be thrown away.

And it is this "everything else" that has been worrying me for the past month. How the hell do I get rid of all this. This includes: random CDs, tapes, cups, plates, worn out shoes, nails, screws, drywall anchors, coathangers, power strips, cleaning supplies, random towels, merchandize boxes, old magazines, photo frames, audio cassettes (yes, those still exist), cables, computer keyboards, icecube trays, half-used groceries, perishables, trashcans (throw trashcans into other trashcans?), old cellphones, chargers, lamps, paper, shelf liners, random pots & pans, small electrical appliances, etc etc etc. I can't take these with me to India. I can't really give everything to someone else - most of this stuff is worn out, dirty, used, cracked, and generally unseemly. I have made perhaps 6 trips to Salvation Army, Goodwill, and the local recycling company and donated may be a dozen large garbage bags full of clothes and thrown away another half dozen boxes worth of e-waste.

And so I had a couple of good friends come over to help me out this evening. We filled out perhaps 10 large garbage bags worth of stuff and threw them away in the dumpster. We tried to separate out the recyclables, but it was not easy. I'm sure we didn't do a very good job. They did their best to take away whatever stuff seemed usable to their own homes. Finally though, it's all gone. Very conveinently out of sight.

This raised several questions in my mind. (1) Did I really need all this stuff? Couldn't I have lived with 10% of this stuff? (2) If I have so much stuff, how about everyone else together? (3) What's going to happen of all this stuff that I disposed of? (4) Did my father's generation have 10% as much "stuff"? 20%? 1%? (5) How much of the stuff that we all own (let's say, the average middle class resident of the western world) do we really need? how much of it do we really use (which is different from "need") ...

All rather tough to answer. Perhaps B-school will help me tackle these sorts of questions. But today I made a decision - to leave as little trash as I can behind on this earth. That means acquire as little stuff as I need. To try and buy used and recyclable items. And to donate periodically to those who can use surplus. After all, I'm no King Tut to be buried with all my worldly belongings...