7 Ways Owning Too Much Stuff Secretly Drains Your Energy

In a world where more is often seen as better, it’s easy to lose sight of the hidden costs of owning too much stuff. For most of us, life isn’t an either/or, with only the two extremes to choose from. It’s not as if you have to choose between complete asceticism or coveting everything you lay your eyes on. There is a subtle art to choosing what you own.

Most of us are somewhere in the middle of this spectrum, but I’d argue that most of us are closer to the “too much stuff” end than we realize. In fact, it’s completely possible to be satisfied with what you have and not be in a continual pursuit of more, but very few people are truly in this state of mind.

Having spent a lot of time writing and thinking through these issues, and experimenting on myself, I believe the way is simpler than we think. In life, it is nearly always easier to identify what you don’t want than what you do. And so, the easiest path to contentment, is figuring out all the things you don’t want in your life, and then ruthlessly eliminating them.

From there, you simply enjoy what remains and don’t get off that path unless something extraordinary comes along.

One of the things I think most people don’t want, but are maybe unaware of, is huge, high-stakes trade-off between having lots of stuff, and enjoying long stretches of time and mental energy to do what you want. Most people vastly underestimate the effort and money it takes to support a lifestyle of having more and more things.

Balance that against the enjoyment of the things you truly get value from, and the rest seems like obvious clutter to me. Identifying this bit of clutter and getting it out of my life, has been one of the most profitable changes I’ve ever made.

And that’s why I’m so passionate about getting this message out to people— I believe it’s good news. It’s one of those rare cases where you can have your cake and eat it too. You can have everything you need and everything you want, all without the burden of maintaining a status you no longer desire.

If this has piqued your curiosity even a little, I invite you to read further and explore the possibility of a lighter, more intentional lifestyle and all the benefits it might bring.

Every item you own has to be cleaned and moved

Every possession you add to your life means more things to clean and more things to move when you change houses. I remember when we were staging our house to sell— every room looked so much cleaner when we got rid of our least-used things, and the last time we moved out of an apartment, the realizations we had over how much unnecessary stuff we had been holding onto.

The same could be said when we were setting up our nursery for the twins. When you buy things you’ll use every day, it’s easy to design a place to live around those objects, but eventually you begin accommodating your least-used stuff, throwing them in closets, under beds, and putting things in storage.

All this comes back to bite you when you have to clean your house, move apartments, or sell your home. Or even worse, like an invisible tax, it weighs upon you ever so lightly, every time you have to clean or tidy up, and becomes a consistent voice of friction in your life.

Too much stuff clutters your space

It’s not just the physical clutter of stacks of paper and piles of clothes, eventually that clutter begins to invade your mental space too. Every time you see something you plan to put away later, or plan to throw out someday, it’s like adding a tiny weight to your mental load.

Maybe you’ll eventually get around to doing something about it, but maybe you won’t. I’ve made a commitment to myself to only own things I use or love, and to have a place where everything belongs. That way there’s no in-between state for objects to get stuck and add to the clutter of our home or my mind. It’s just a simple way of deciding to live, and like all good rules, it removes a friction point from my life.

Wasted energy looking for misplaced items

My wife and I have an internal joke about the number of times I’ve had to re-order something from Amazon because I know I had bought it once before but just can’t remember where I put it. This kind of silly procrastination happens when you don’t have a system for the things in your life, and by system I mean a place for everything and everything in its place.

I have no excuse for being disorganized with my stuff. I worked at NASA for 7 years as an engineer where we followed 5S principles in our labs and work spaces. Every tool and piece of equipment was labeled and returned to its proper place so that people could find things easily and keep everything tidy and clean. These principles are transferable to home life if you’re willing to take the time to implement them, and they offer huge savings of time and energy in the long run.

Investing time organizing instead of doing

A system is only as good as it’s simplest part. That’s an old adage that I just made up, but I think I’m onto something. Have you ever started organizing your home, or garage, or basement only to have been left feeling disappointed with the progress you made? It’s not just me, I’ve heard plenty of people talk about the failure of Marie Kondo’s advice to work miracles in their own lives. I don’t blame Marie, but I do think organizing as a solution has its limits.

For one, I believe most chronic messiness is actually an inner problem first and foremost, not a matter of laziness or not knowing the right system. I also believe that whatever system of organization you design, it needs to be extremely simple. From personal experience I can tell you that doing is the best way to tackle most of these problems. Doing forces you to make hard choices, rather than just putting off decisions for later. If you really want to tackle the problem of your excess stuff, you must be willing to ruthlessly get rid of things, and not just arrange them in new ways.

More things to maintain and fix

I remember the great excitement we had when buying our first home. It was a row home in a quaint urban neighborhood with a small backyard that needed landscaping and several porch areas that needed work. That first summer, we worked hard to get those areas looking nice, but by the end of the year, we realized we had bitten off more than we could chew. Retaining walls were beginning to collapse and rainwater made poor drainage a serious issues. I underestimated how much effort it would take to just maintain what we had.

Those same problems carry over to our possessions. Ownership is the easy part. The hard part is storing, cleaning, maintaining, and fixing everything you own. Most of the time, these efforts are a time-drain, and not all that enjoyable. For that reason, I recommend severely limiting your intake of new possessions while you build a leaner version of what you own. You can always add back later, but for now you might be surprised at how much you enjoy the lighter touch.

The opportunity cost of money spent on stuff

Spending a little money here and there isn’t necessarily a problem. For many people it’s a natural outlet and healthy way of treating yourself for the hard work you do. The problem is that very few people have a plan for their money, and so they spend whatever is left after everything else is paid for.

This might be fine, but have you ever asked yourself how much spending would be the right amount for you? Whatever you spend now is probably your point of reference, but what if, for example, you could free up several hundred dollars a month to do something else? How might that money accomplish something more than another set of clothes in your closet or gadget in your drawer?

Without some imagination, it’s hard to see the opportunity cost of not having that money to invest in something more meaningful. And without that comparison, shopping when you feel like it will always seem like the easiest and best option. It’s only after experimenting with several seasons of more serious spending restraint did my wife and I get a feel for how our lives might be richer by not spending everything that we earned.

Possessions keep you busy, not happy

When I got my first real job out of college, I remember being awestruck by the amount of money in my bank account. And instead of thinking deeply about how I wanted to invest that money in my future, I mostly just bought stuff. For a long time, I bought nearly every book that I heard about that sounded interesting. I still have piles of unread books in our basement, and to be honest, I’m not sure what to do with them now.

Occasionally, I’ll make a dent in those piles, but for the most part, I just waste more time thinking about them than actually reading them. The bigger picture is that they’re just a distraction from what I should be doing, which is reading the books that interest me now, and from the good intentions I should have had to just go to the library and be content to check them out there.

The lesson I take from that experience is that there is a difference between keeping busy and making progress towards your goals. The greater the number of possessions in your life, the more you’re going to be weighed down by them and the less likely to make progress towards what really matters to you.

Over time, you become a slave to your things and not the other way around. If you don’t want to become a slave to your possessions, you must be willing to part with them more easily. If you believe something good will come along to replace them, it’s easy, but what if you won’t have enough? That fear keeps a lot of people back in the cluttered, consumptive mindset. I’m convinced, however, that there is a better way to live, and I’m committed to rooting out that fear in my own life.

Don’t get me wrong, I think there are a lot of wonderful, beautiful, and useful consumables in the world. I just think we should apply an exceptionally high standard to what we let into our homes and daily lives. Only the very best of the best should make the cut, and everything else should be left for someone who will value them even more.