What You Put Up (With)

Back in the early 2010s, I got interested in minimalism.

Part of it was financial—less stuff, lower expenses, faster path to time freedom.

But part of it was a desire for freedom of movement. Simplicity. Less to manage.

Around that time, I started going down the RV and Van Life rabbit hole. It wasn’t just interesting—it felt like a possible exit strategy.

I remember one video in particular: a family of three moving into an RV. Each person got 100 items. Everything else? They either sold or gave away.

Another one was a guy who had it all—a high-level tech job, big house, cars, toys. And he walked away from it.

He sold everything and started living out of a backpack. He traveled from place to place, working remotely, focused on building a business he cared about.

No clutter. No excess.

Just… what mattered.

These ideas hit me harder than I expected.

By 2012, I decided to run my own version of the experiment.

Could I do 100 items? — no, that felt extreme.

But what about 1,000?

So I started counting.

Every day, I set a timer for 5–10 minutes and inventoried what I owned. Room by room. Closet by closet. Eventually all the way out to the garage.

I tracked everything in a spreadsheet.

There were a few rules:

Collections counted as one item (up to 10 total - I had 7: CDs, books, etc.).

Everything else was counted individually. Every shirt. Every fork. Every pair of shoes.

It took months.

When I finished, the number surprised me:

Over 2,800 items.

That’s when the real work started.

I went back through the list—same 5–10 minutes a day—and started cutting.

If I hadn’t used it? Gone.

If I was keeping it “just in case”? Gone.

Day by day, I worked it down.

By the time I hit the garage again, I was under 1,000 items.

That was my first big reset.

A few years later, I read The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up and added a new layer to the process:

Not just how much I owned… but why I owned it.

Do I actually love this item?

Or am I just… putting up with it?

That question changed things.

I even tried pushing down to 500 items.

I stopped around 680.

At that point, it felt… right. Not minimal for the sake of it—but intentional.

This isn’t a finished project.

I still have things I don’t need. Things I could let go of.

But that process shifted something for me.

Less stuff. Less friction.

More space—for time, energy, and attention.

A couple things to think about:

Do you have any idea how much you own?

And how much of it are you actually using… versus just putting up with?

If you had to cut it in half—what would go first?