Why Life Reboots are so hard

This post coming to you from the beautiful island of Isla Mujeres. Well my fellow Badass Gentlefolk, we made it. Life Reboot completed. Total tally came out to a little over $30k in goods sold ($15k coming from a vehicle sale the day before our flight!) and around $3k donated. Still have one car left, but it's ok as it's the family car and will come in handy when we return to the Bay Area briefly for Burning Man.

A whole lot of "Why do I still have this?"

I spoke to quite a few people about the Life Reboot. Most have experienced it at least tangentially (e.g., moving homes). Aeron from Fitness Wave Norcal has completed two full-on Life Reboots! In our own process, it felt like no matter how much we sold or donated, there always seemed to be more, as if our possessions were secretly procreating behind our backs. Having a drop-dead date was a great forcing function. And we did it just in time, with one final Salvation Army drop.

The general consensus is that it feels amazing to streamline possessions. Equally amazing is how we still continue to accumulate stuff we barely use no matter how many times we purge. Why do we forget so easily? One reason is because our living spaces tend to get larger over time, and we feel the need to fill those empty spaces. It's also loss aversion working against us, because we fear the cost of giving something up far more (4X more) than we appreciate the benefit of not carrying it around. Or sometimes it's just because keeping things is the path of least resistance. From all these conversations, it is clear that gaining sufficient momentum at the onset to carry through the Life Reboot is key, as there is a lot of friction along the way. In our instance, using travel as a forcing function did the trick.

There are rare instances where the collection of beautiful items is a transcendent hobby. I have witnessed incredible examples of this myself. But unless you happen to be Dr. Albert Barnes (he collected a museum full of Impressionist / post-impressionist art way before it was cool), this does not apply to you. In 1950, the average American home was 983 sq ft, and an average of 3.37 people lived in that home. Each person got ~292 sq ft to themselves. In 2011, the average home ballooned to 2,480 sq ft, with an average of only 2.6 people in the home. Now each person gets almost 954 sq ft. That's 3.27 times more space per capita! And that doesn't even include the $22 billion dollar storage industry.

Carpet picnic courtesy of Blue Line Pizza

At the end of the day, Life Reboots boil down to one simple thing - choice. All it takes is the will to make it happen. The decision to purge is a choice, just like deciding to keep old shoes or supersizing your home. Our family has chosen in a way that best suits the life we want to lead (streamlined, mobile, necessity-based). Others may not want that life and would prefer to live in one place all their lives and place several generations worth of treasure in the attic. We want our treasure to be comprised of extraordinary experiences shared with those we love.