The 100 Item Challenge

A fond story of my father: When moving out of my apartment freshman year of college and heading home for the summer, he mentioned how we managed to pack all of my earthly possessions into his Nissan Sentra, saying, "This is the way to live, to be able to fit everything you own in a car."

Understandable, since my father grew up on a rural chicken farm in Paraguay. Now the father of three grown up kids going to college and a successful computer programmer, he owns a lot of stuff in a big house which is filled up with all of the aforementioned stuff. I couldn't help but detect a twinge of nostalgia in his voice. What he would do go back to those simpler days.

Fast forward four years later, and now I am married, packing all of my things to move into a small studio apartment of my own with my new wife. However, this time around it took more than a Nissan Sentra to pack all of my things and cart them out. I scratched my head and wondered, How?

I'm really a terrible consumerist. I've never been used to wealth or accumulating it, and frankly, it tends to suffocate me. The idea of packing a few possessions in my bag and jumping on my bike and going out into the woods for several days is appealing; working in a cubicle so that I can buy more and more stuff that I can't spend time with is not. But as every American attests, it is difficult to live in such a consumer culture as ours and not pick up odds and ends along the way. Such was the story of my life for the past few years, and I decided to fight back. It is a constant battle, a curious relationship with the idea of stuff, waffling back and forth like a cosine curve. I am currently in one of my upswings.

On the internet, there is a lot of mention of the 100 Items Challenge. Recently, it was documented in TIME. When I read that article, I felt inspired. This was it! This is my thing! And I immediately put my mind to work on how I could this.

However, one of the lessons you quickly learn while married is you never do anything alone anymore. For someone as clingy as me, I love it, but I had to run this idea past my wife first. She seemed interested and agreed it was worth a shot, though she is much less optimistic about it than I am. We decided on this rule:

Each person is alloted 100 items, so 100 items for me, 100 items for Dantzel. We decided we would then keep 100 items that we share - silverware, plates, etc. However that person wants to group his or her stuff is his or her problem. No meddling. We will start whittling our shared possessions down after we whittle down ours and get a feel for it - compromise works better when both people have tried it.

100 items. My mind buzzed with excitement. I planned on going all the way - try to whittle it down to literally 100 items, not just a group of items counting as one, such as shoes. How hard can it be? Then I glanced over at our bookcases; we have three five shelf bookcases filled with books, magazines, binders, etc. Do they all count? Another identical bookcase holds our odds and ends. And what about things like paint? Does every individual color count? Clothes, I decided, would be individual - when I was thinking about shirts and pants. But what about underwear? Or socks? What about our Playstation 2? Surely the game system counts as one item - but what about each individual game?

Most people, I figure, start cutting things out until they reach the magical number of 100. I decided that I would start with the core items I can think off the top of my head; if I can think of it immediately, it's probably important to me and I use it often. The list will compile itself over the course of several days, and then when I reach 100 items and decide it's really what I want and need to live with, I can just throw/donate/recycle everything else, right?

Right?