533 | Irreplaceable Things

0:20Every little thing you think that you need Every little thing you think that you need Every little thing that's just feeding your greed Oh, I bet that you'd be fine without it Yes, hello everybody the minimalist here Joshua Fields Milburn TK Coleman what's happening here's something to chew on TK on a long enough timeline everything is replaceable I wrote this down and then I don't know if I completely agree with it maybe there's a context in which I agree with it and maybe there's a context in which I disagree with it and I'm not really sure which maybe they're both correct and this reminded me of at our live events we've been doing minimal maxims and I will read a minimal maxim to you and you'll help me unpack it so maybe you can unpack this one with me in this new segment here I'm calling something to chew on on a long enough timeline everything is replaceable do you buy that well disagreement has always come easily for me it takes no effort to disagree truculent it takes no effort to disagree and I can share where I disagree but I'm I'm I like to I like to try to interpret it charitably and say okay what what do you think the author was trying to tell us from this like what's right about this what what's the part that is like if you understand it this way it's gold what would that understanding be you tell me I wrote it and I don't I don't really know okay and so you give me the charitable unpacking of this on a long enough time frame everything is is replaceable that you could say look most of the things not all not all not all but most most of the things that we trouble ourselves over are things that for the most part either can be replaced or don't really need to be replaced yeah right yeah um and that you know it's like uh yeah most things that we worry about aren't worth worrying about and there are only a few things worth worrying about and if you worried about those things you might be free from worry altogether yeah yeah yeah there's something to me that on a long enough timeline everything is ephemeral that's sort of where i was starting with here yeah and that is true you know if you pan out it's the alan watts line that that mountains are waves in slow motion when you think about it that way it's like oh i guess they are fundamentally the same if you just pan out enough eons yeah and yeah i think everything is replaceable even if the thing isn't replaceable because we never hold on to a thing and that's in fact that's what i want to talk to you about today our first question in fact is about irreplaceable things let's just dive right into the callers here for wait really quickly i got to quote our man ray fleming who who said when he was on the show that if you have a problem that money can solve you don't really have a problem and so one very charitable way to interpret this that i think makes it go is if you interpret it literally like things right so the the stuff that's not replaceable is really non-stuff you can't replace having time with your children while they're children right you can't replace the opportunity to say i love you because that person might be gone but when it comes to things like whether it's the car or the house or the watch it is replaceable in principle even if you don't actually succeed at replacing it even if you never make enough money to replace it at the end of the day if you have to choose between having that car and having your life having that house and having your health having that money having that watch versus having your peace of mind choose the thing that can't be replaced the thing that's actually not a thing i definitely want to unpack that even further here with the first question 406-219-7839 if you'd like to join the program also you can just send a voice memo right from your phone to podcast at theminimalists.com our first question today is from maria hi minimalists this is maria from minnesota i'm a patreon subscriber i'm looking to move to england this autumn and i'm having a hard time knowing how to let go of so many things that i find joy in where i currently live a beautiful life has been cultivated here and i know it's time to move forward but i'm just not sure how to start when i still find so much value in my current life it's important to note that i'm a thrifter and a multidisciplinary artist and most items i own i've spent a lot of time on or have intentionally brought in and feel beautiful and timeless and seem irreplaceable to me i likely wouldn't have the opportunity or the money to replace them in my new home if i did get rid of them i'm not sure where i'll be living while over there and what space i will have and don't like the idea of hauling tons of luggage with me i would consider shipping but i assume shipping overseas will be more expensive than i can afford as well i feel stuck with the logistics on top of grieving all the deep meaningful connections i'll be leaving here in the states any and all advice would be appreciated thank you for everything you do your thoughtfulness towards the core of letting go has been immensely valuable to me oh maria thank you so much and that word seeming irreemingly irreplaceable things they seem irreplaceable right tk how can we help maria let go of these meaningful seemingly irreplaceable belongings how strong is that why how strong is that why for for leaving to go to this new place uh some of the best advice i got was from dr sylvia culp philosophy professor at western michigan university and she said to me go get answers to your questions you know go get answers to your questions sometimes we do things not because we have the answers but we have the questions the questions that burn in our hearts the questions that keep us awake at night the questions that make us ask what if and you've got to go get the answers to the questions that burn in your heart and i don't know what those are for you you know when you think about going to this new place it could be hmm i wonder if i could be happy in that new place and i tend not to orient my life around those types of questions they make for great hypotheticals great casual conversations over coffee but then there's those questions that make me say man what would happen to me if i did that you know could i ever be happy if i didn't know the answer to that and sometimes you have to do challenging things things that feel dangerous things that feel risky because you know that you would not be happy having to speculate on what the answers will be there are things i've tried in life where i've failed i didn't like them and i go oh that was a waste of time or like i lost a lot of money but i'm glad that i did them because i would have tortured myself with a story completely unlike what really happened if i hadn't gone to do it and so i got my answer it wasn't the answer that i wanted but i got an answer and that's the most important thing so i would encourage you to to think really deeply about that and and anytime anytime we embrace a new adventure we're going to have to pay the cost of giving up our current comfort our current certainty our current sense of security and we're going to have to place that at risk but i also like to think that when you go out into the world and you do things that make you interesting make you more interesting and make you come alive even if you do come back to old spaces you come back to those old spaces with new eyes a greater appreciation and and with the power to do things with them that you wouldn't have ordinarily been able to do i think there's something about that that word irreplaceable that is sometimes even disempowering because i could say anything's irreplaceable if i have an old coffee mug of my mother's of course the mug itself is replaceable with another mug that's not what we're talking about here right we're talking about the sentiment that i attach to it so the possession is never about the thing it's and so it's not the thing that can't be replaced it's what it's the memory is the association and that's something that's already going on inside of me i don't actually lose that association when i let go of the thing maybe i lose a trigger and so i want to take a picture of the thing and i did that with a lot of my mom's stuff i've done that with other things that i'm struggling to let go of i'll take a picture of it even if it's a pair of jeans or a pair of shoes and do i go back and look at the the photo of the shoes no not really it's like when you go to a concert and you're like you see everyone filming the concert and i've certainly done this as well and then you never go back and watch the footage that you filmed or you go on vacation take a bunch of photos with your phone and do you ever go back and look at those photos and the more photos you have the less likely you are to actually go back and and scrutinize them that's why when i go on vacation with bex we will take one photo together and that's it and then you have like this this sort of time stamp of that moment and and it is irreplaceable in one sense but even that if i were to lose it i don't lose the love or the other pleasant feelings that i might have for the other person yeah you know what else is irreplaceable it's it's the the opportunity to discover who you really are by doing things that you haven't done before that's also irreplaceable so sometimes we we cling to what we've created and discovered in the past and we say i don't want to go to new places or try new things because i would have to let go of what i've created or discovered from the past but you're you're also sacrificing something else right because the reason we have a hard time letting go of these things is because we embraced experiences that once upon a time were new you know we we did a lot of thrifting in places we hadn't been before and we made a lot of cool discoveries and we accumulated the rewards of that and now we cling to them saying oh man but i can't replace these things but guess what if you go to a new place you'll also discover new stores and you'll also thrift in a new direction and you'll also accumulate other things that one day you will be tempted to cling to and so the magic the magic isn't in the things with which we feel tempted to cling the magic is in us our ability to discover things our ability to play our ability to create and make beautiful moments happen anywhere we go you're making me think that every thrift store is filled with quote unquote irreplaceable things right the things that were so precious in the moment and then what happened someone died or someone just decided to let go and that thing that was the story we were telling ourselves is that that is irreplaceable and i love the distinction you're making here is like sometimes you have to give up the past in order to make room for the future but the opposite of that means i'm going to give up this promising future in order to cling to the past and no wonder there's a world of hurt behind this clinging it's not because the things are hurting you and they may weigh you down in a physical sense but they weigh you down in this metaphorical sense because you feel like you can't get where you're going until you let go of what you need to let go of in order to move on you know we see good examples of this in entertainment where you have certain people like the rock he goes from wrestling to you know being an action star uh joe button goes from being mostly known as a rapper to being one of the top podcasters or you look at mark wahlberg right once upon a time there are certain people who still know him as marky mark and the funky bunch right but then he made that transition into acting and doing like serious dramatic work and each of these people and so many more than we can name had a choice point where they said i can keep doing this and i know i can succeed i can keep selling albums for a little while i can keep doing wrestling matches for a little while but they said i'm going to go do this new thing that i might possibly fail at but in all of those cases they open up an entirely new chapter of life that gives a different kind of meaning to what they did in the in the past but also just does something even more beautiful you know i totally agree i would give our caller the permission to think about some of the things that were irreplaceable from her past that she let go of things that felt so irreplaceable in the moment and why did she let go of them yeah and does she still pine for every single one of those things or do you realize that what feels irreplaceable today is often invisible tomorrow i don't even think of all of those so-called irreplaceable things from a decade ago but in the moment i can't possibly let go of this because of blank what is that blank it's the why you mentioned earlier right but there's also a disempowering why here's why i have to hold on to this here's why i can't let go here's why i can't move forward and it's an excuse but it's a really powerful excuse that keeps us sort of stuck where we are and the truth is that sometimes it when we let go of something we do miss it at some point in time i have something called the didn't know rule yeah it was in our last audiobook that we did together very very simple and um that rule is if i find something i didn't realize that i owned it yeah what happens i give myself permission to let it go but just recently i had this i talked about this on our skincare episode we did i took a bunch of glutathione because of my doctor he was having me do this test and i got this weird sort of dermatitis all over my eyes as a result of that it was a knock-on effect of the gluta high-dose glutathione that i took took and i'm like oh man i don't own sunglasses anymore because i don't do sunglasses yeah and i was just in our junk drawer we call it a junkless drawer the other day and i saw bex's eyeglass case for her sunglasses and i'm like does she still use this let's get rid of this what it's just sitting in this drawer and i was going to talk to her about it and i open it up and it's my old pair of sunglasses and i'm like i thought i got rid of these i didn't know i owned these and in the moment what i tell myself i'm sure am glad i held on to them because i want to wear them right now while i've got this dermatitis that i'm dealing with on my eyes i want to cover that up and so i'm like oh maybe the didn't know rule doesn't actually work for me like well no of course it works it just didn't work in this one instance and had i not been dealing with that eye issue i would have saw those sunglasses and i don't use sunglasses anymore i'm just going to go ahead and sell these i bet you i can get 30 40 bucks for them and that's worth it for me to spend the time trying to sell them but it doesn't mean the rule doesn't work it there are times when they don't work all the time there will be things that you let go of that you might regret and that's just another opportunity to let go to let go of the regret that follows the letting go and and be sure that you will let go there is no neutral ground upon which you can stand where you get to say if i make this choice i don't have to let go of anything you will let go of something but the real question is what is the cost of letting go of what i already know and have versus what is the cost of letting go of what i'm wondering about and what i dream of doing which one of those costs scares the hell out of you and which one of those costs are you willing to pay you think you can live with the last thing i'll say is sometimes the the fear of loss you know when you have the the rearview mirror and it's like objects in the mirror are closer than they appear i would say that that sense of fear of loss the the sort of scarcity mindset that is often associated with that it feels so much bigger than it actually is so it's sort of the opposite of that mirror thing where it's it is not nearly as big as it feels in this moment it feels really big right now and it feels emotional but the more distance you get between you and the letting go now all of a sudden you realize like oh yeah that fear was so much smaller and had i even gotten rid of those sunglasses and i went back i said oh i i wish i wouldn't have guess what i could find another pair of sunglasses if i really needed them i could buy them used i could buy them at a convenience store i could go buy a nice pair if i really wanted to go back to buying sunglasses but letting go of the things i didn't know i own giving myself permission to do that gives me permission to let go of tens of thousands of items and even if one was a mistake so what it's obviously replaceable i'd love to send our caller here a copy of emotional clutter by the way it's now available on audible and kindle congratulations tk our uh our author here in the studio he wrote this book called emotional clutter and you can download it for free on our website as an e-book but if you want to check it out on your kindle or listen to it on audible you can do that now as well before we get back to our callers let's unpack the question of the week tk all right i'm gonna propose a scenario for you this is this one's probably the most difficult one i've ever had to deal with you just packed your bags for your dream vacation can you imagine it tk you've got your bags packed for your dream vacation i'm wondering does tk to go to the airport with like four pieces of rolled-on luggage i just don't know what he's doing over here all right you've packed your bags for your dream vacation at the airport you're told you have to give up your luggage or your trip which do you surrender all right let's check in with our patreon community chat christine said i would keep the trip and lose the luggage i'd have fun buying new clothes and necessities when i get to the destination then when i'm back home every item of clothing i bought would remind me of that adventure i think that's a a different kind of souvenir for for christine tk what souvenirs do you say yes to and are there any souvenirs that you would never say yes to no i mean back in the day i used to uh to buy shot glasses when i would go to a different location and it usually has something to do with that place so when you looked at it there was a clear story behind it and and that's because there was this lady i used to work uh work with she worked in the kitchen at this assisted living facility and i used to call her mama and uh and mama would always look out for me so she loved shot glasses so whenever i was on a roll for something i would make sure i got mama a shot glass but uh yeah i don't i don't really there's nothing that i really value in terms of things that's based on where it came from now at this point it's just either i like it and have a use for it or i don't you know what i mean yeah you're more utilitarian in that sense why do we buy souvenirs quite often i i think it's kind of a way of planting the flag of crystallizing the fact that we have been somewhere you know experiences can be so um ephemeral we we know that we went to a vacation but then you know several months you know when it's gone all we kind of remember is how we felt but we don't remember the things that we did and sometimes when you have a physical object it can anchor those feelings in in in more detailed memories oh yes