Welcome to a new episode of Real Talk from OSYL. In this episode, we have a discussion and share our thoughts on legacies and what they mean to us.
Though this can be a breezy short read, there are a couple ways to listen to the podcast. For the audio portion of the podcast, you can listen below or download directly here: https://realtalkwithosyl.buzzsprout.com/
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During this pandemic, there are many stories about how this period had allowed us to discover new hobbies, or pursue hobbies we had previously neglected. If anything is for sure, this pandemic has threw all of our lives into a loop, and most of us come of out of it looking for new meaning to our day to day lives. But with all this soul searching, there is a lot of time spent at home, too. One pastime that has increased during this time, is watching shows and movies at home. One documentary in particular that has piqued our interest is the documentary on minimalism--"The Minimalists: Less Is Now." Though not related to the pandemic and how to survive or enhance our lives during it, it is a new perspective to shake up our life, anyhow. The idea that there our many things / stuff that are unneeded and cluttering our living spaces is holding us down. The question posed in the documentary, and what we will explore on our own in this episode, is how might our lives be better with less? In this episode, just Tyler and Steven join in to answer this one enlightening question. That question is: how might your life be better with less?
We live mostly in a capitalist society. A majority of us are fortunate to earn more, and that typically means that we spend more. And most of those times, we are spending on items that makes us temporarily happy, but we don't really need. A cool quote from the documentary is that on average, each household in the United States have about 300,000 (thousand!) items. A majority are probably little items that we can clear and de-clutter. As I look around my own room, I am getting the urge to purge of various things that I know I can get rid of and remove permanently from my life. I'm looking at boxes of old electronics that I quite literally have no use for, old charging cables that are ripped (and most likely unusable), and tons of old pieces of paper that I can simply recycle. The supplemental question we ask throughout our discussion, is why or when, did we develop such emotional ties to materialistic items?
In the end, it feels like an endless journey on how we can improve our lives. Maybe discarding unnecessary items that just becomes clutter can help us feel like letting go of some weight. Or, maybe it's all in our heads, and clutter doesn't really impact anything at all. Bottom line, however we choose to live our lives, there is no one right answer that fits all. Find what makes you happy. This weekend, I may take the challenge of finding one item (or, more!) a day to get rid of and de-clutter my home. Living light, may make me feel lighter and freer in the process. Who knows? Worth a shot.