It takes a move to realize how much stuff one has acquired.  It takes a few weeks after the move with the stuff still packed away to realize how little stuff one actually uses.

A recent article in Time described the “100 Thing Challenge,” which is a movement to limit one to just 100 possessions.  Ambitious?  Yes.  Realistic?  Most definitely.

With my academic-year housing contract at an end, I was forced to move to a new apartment here at Stanford.  That meant packing up all of my belongings and schlepping them a quarter mile to my new abode.  It took me three trips with my Outback wagon to move everything.

That’s two more trips than it took me to move to California in the first place.

So, somehow, I had acquired an extra two car loads of stuff over nine months.  Incredible!  How much of that do I actually use?

Some of the stuff is obvious dead weight.  I haven’t turned my desktop computer on in six months.  A certain button-up shirt was damn expensive, but it never fit quite right and so I never wear it.  Despite my best intentions, I don’t know if I’ll ever finish reading Don Quixote.

Other stuff falls in a gray area.  I have a great spring-form pan — and when I need it, nothing else will do — but I don’t use it more than a couple times a year.  Similarly, I have a bunch of photos in frames, too many to actively display, but I feel like I’m insulting the people who gave me those photos if I consider discarding the frames (the actual photos are never in jeopardy).

It’s a huge hassle to lug everything around, and it’s a pain to find spots to store everything once the move is complete. It’s even worse when one’s home is as small as my new home.  My entire studio apartment is about the same size as my master bedroom was in my Minnesota townhouse.

The sense of clutter was so intense that I briefly considered coming to California with only my laptop and the clothes on my back.  In hindsight, that level of decluttering would have been impractical, but 100 objects?  Well, that sounds like it just might work.