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Emptiness

2012-03-25

Living in a real mess is quite fun and enjoyable. It is also reassuring at some point; you might feel safe surrounded by your things all around. I actually lived (or tried to live) like that for years since it was pretty pleasurable to have some kind of mystic room which reflect your own personality.

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But it had more drawbacks that you might think. And no, I won't be talking about the fact you are always looking for your items; an organized chaos can be pretty efficient as long as it's only for yourself.

The real issue lies in your concentration abilities in such environment.

I personally have some concentration issues; or to be more specific, I'm mostly creative, and being surrounded by items make me think of a lot of various related stuff, and I have real trouble trying to restrain these thoughts.

So about two years ago I started to drop my stuff. And thus, I got rid of a lot of things, living my apartment in emptiness. This wasn't really easy; while I really don't have the love for the items (like some Apple braindead fanboys can have for their ugly pieces of plastic and aluminum for instance), I often have the feeling of making use of them at some point. Giving these items instead of sending them to the trash makes me feel better, so I generally opt for that solution.

With my autistic tendencies, I don't bring back much people in my cavern, so I can actually drop a lot of things and reduce my environment to a desk (to work, play and eat), and a place to sleep. Thus, it looks like this (sorry for the very low quality):

Some people find that kind of place quite depressing. I personally never felt so relieved, and I'm now able to remain focused longer on my stuff. It is also much easier to reach a peaceful and contemplative state of mind.

I still plan to drop even more stuff, like replacing the PC with a laptop, in order to free some more space. Though, I'll keep my monitor and stuff, because I don't want to make compromises on the comfort; this is all about visual pollution, and not much about "having space".

It is also quite comforting to know you can move out of your apartment at any time easily - even if you don't actually plan to. This is a little freedom feeling I don't want to lose.

All of this is kind of related to the way of working in a sane environment (openspace versus closed desks) which won't be treated in this post. A lot of other bloggers obsessed with productivity already expressed their rant about this, I'm sure you can find some more interesting posts about that on r/productivity.


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