The 100 Possession Challenge

I've been interested in decluttering my life for a while, and in spurts I give it a try (though often not getting beyond one room). It turns out that some people are willing to try taking this to the extreme in the "Olympics of decluttering" and reducing their personal possessions to 100 items. Gulp! My family had an interesting conversation about it over lunch today, and decided that it would have to be 100 items per person, and jointly owned family-stuff wouldn't count. But still, getting down to even 200-300 items would be an extreme challenge. I'm not sure if I'll give it a try, but at least it give me great inspiration to work on decluttering my life more. By the way, did you know that ancient Buddhist Law of Possessions allowed a monk to have only 8 possessions? Interesting.... I believe that is roughly what Gandhi owned when he died.

If you want to read more, try the Zen Habits web site article here. ( The Zen Habits site is an incredibly wonderful site in general when it comes to decluttering you possessions, your mind, and examining your priorities.) There is also a guy blogging about his efforts. And finally, surprise, there was even a recent Time magazine article about this movement.

Less than ideal examples of life goals

There are some very interesting web sites out there dealing with setting life goals and life after 50 in general. One that I came across in my searches was http://www.eons.com/ which uses the catch phrase “Lovin’ life on the flip side of 50". Overall it seems to be a nice site, but one thing caught my eye. People can submit their life goals and dreams, then the web site tabulates the 100 most popular ones. When I first saw this, I thought "great, this should give me some really good ideas for setting my own life goals." However, here is a list of their top 20:

1. Lose weight
2. write a book
3. stay healthy
4. exercise more
5. Become debt free
6. Take a cruise
7. Go to Hawaii
8. Retire
9. Travel to Europe
10. Pay off my mortgage
11. Travel in Italy
12. Learn Spanish
13. Go to Alaska
14. Visit Australia
15. volunteer
16. Be financially secure
17. Take an Alaskan Cruise
18. See the Grand Canyon
19. Get a college degree
20. Make new friends.

Does it occur to you that many of these goals are rather superficial?

Write a book (#2), and volunteer (#15) – OK, these seem admirable to me as ways you can indirectly or directly help others. Lose weight (#1), stay healthy (#3) seem to be more examples of good habits than important accomplishments.

The rest, which seem to be dominated by travel, are nothing more than expensive vacations. If you sit down and list what you most want to accomplish in life, and visiting a popular vacation destination pops up to the top of that list, then I think it’s time to do a little soul searching about what’s really important to you. I once heard that nobody wants to die and have the epitaph on their grave stone read "He took exotic vacations".

More on some better web sites I found in the next append.