This past weekend we celebrated Easter. We enjoyed a movie night, played with the kids, cleaned up the backyard and spent alot of time together including in our hot tub. My wife signaled to me that it might be time to clean it out. I had been eyeing a garden hose to attach to the pump to help drain it when cleaning. It looked like it was time to make yet another purchase.
So I did what most people do, I opened my phone and went searching for garden hoses. As I looked I thought “man these things are expensive” but I need one just for this task. Now to be honest, we have 3 perfectly good garden hoses at our house. It never dawned on me just subtly I make decisions without actually looking around my house.
It surprised me that even though I’ve been decluttering over the last few months that I was still absorbing how to approach buying decisions thanks to minimalism. A lot of people (myself included) buy duplicate items because we think we need different or more or (fill in the blank).
What minimalism was teaching me is that you don’t need what you think you need.
We do this with everything from personal care items, kitchen gadgets and streaming services all the way up to the cars we own. Duplication leads more time spent maintaining our lifestyle, more stress, more clutter and more money spent.
So much of how we live is made through these subtle decisions that minimalism is not about “the stuff”, its about raising our consciousness of how we think about the stuff we have before we go and acquire more.
I mean really how many garden hoses do you need?