Stuffocation: Living More with Less

the best place to find status, identity, meaning, and happiness is in experiences,

It really opened my eyes to how little I used all the stuff I owned,

Instead of trying to understand who we really are, we reach for the “Real Thing”. And when the goods we buy fail to match up to those deep desires, instead of giving up on material goods, we just keep banging our heads against the wall and buying more.

Suddenly I realized that nothing could be worse than that moment,” she says. “And as that thought came to me, I felt this very odd, very strange sense of peace. In that moment, I realized, if no one could help, the only person who could do something about it was me.” From

In that system, where more is always better, you can never have enough.

The industrialists, with their machines and factories and clock-time, began the onslaught against anyone who was content to take it easy.

I almost felt,” he says, “ungrateful—’cause I had everything I’d always wanted.” At

happiness is more likely to come from the enjoyment of experiences rather than the accumulation of stuff.

They were called “minimalists,” and they thought that the best route to happiness was not by getting more, but by having

Life is not about having things. It’s about having good experiences.

They were called “minimalists,” and they thought that the best route to happiness was not by getting more, but by having less.

Overwhelmed, and suffocating from stuff, we are suffering from an anxiety that I call Stuffocation. Nicodemus,

People have been turning their backs on civilization ever since it began.

I hate taking pictures,’ he says. ‘I feel that if you pick up a camera you take yourself out of the moment. You’re no longer there, living it purely for the experience. You’re trying to record it for someone else.

research suggests every shared car takes up to thirteen others off the road

You are more likely to be happy, so studies have shown, if you do something for intrinsic reasons.

fewer chemicals and additives in your food, a greater sense of self-sufficiency, and more time to spend together as a family. But

We still believe that to be considered successful, by our peers and by ourselves, we need material badges of success—and that still means a lot of stuff. The

Everyone is an autobiographer nowadays, it’s like everyone is actively writing their own biography all the time,

as the psychologist Oliver James observed in Affluenza, the more a society resembles the United States, in that it becomes materialistic, the higher the rate of emotional distress.

Are you stuffocating too? Stuffocation is the story of one of today’s most acute, till now unnamed, afflictions. It is about how you, me, and society in general, instead of feeling enriched by the things we own, are feeling stifled by them. Instead

They are quite happy to have things, if they need them, but they are not hoping to find meaning, status, or happiness in material things. The

as per the law of unintended consequences, no matter what people’s intention when they do something, they rarely know what the ultimate outcome of their actions will be.

Let other people speed past you on the highway to success, if that is what they want. Just because they are hurrying about, it doesn’t mean you have to.

We live in a cluttered world of too much information and too much stuff.

In the 1980s, people wanted a fast car. Now they want a good story to tell.

The more innovative and connected a system is, the more quickly an innovation will spread. In

By having less and doing more, we will be happier, healthier, richer, in every sense: less clutter, less regret, less anxiety, more meaning, more flow, more intrinsic enjoyment, better conversations, more connections, a healthier take on status, and a stronger sense of belonging.