Moving House Is the Test of a Minimalist

It's only when I move that I find out how much stuff I really have.

I'm moving again these days. I still remember the day I moved in last year, I was watching AL play T1. In the blink of an eye, a new Worlds is about to start.

I've always considered myself a minimalist, and my home is usually pretty bare. But every time I have to move, I get a headache, and I think maybe I'm not a minimalist after all.

It seems like a true, hardcore minimalist only needs one suitcase to move out. To put a number on it, I've been hauling my things to my mom's place one suitcase at a time. So far I've hauled eight suitcases, and I'm still not done.

I've long since lost track of what exactly I've hauled over. My shoes alone took a whole suitcase, and that's after I threw out five pairs myself. Otherwise they wouldn't have fit in one.

Right now I have two pairs of leather shoes, two pairs of casual shoes that double as sneakers, and one pair of boots. I think that's a pretty reasonable setup, though it doesn't seem very minimalist. If I cut one pair each from the leather shoes and the casual shoes, I'd only have three pairs, which seems more reasonable still. But I always feel like I need a pair to swap between, so I keep two of each.

Then there are the clothes. Over the past year I refreshed my wardrobe and threw out a lot of clothes I'd been wearing since high school. Still, I have to say, there's still a lot. Counting inner and outer layers, I have a few dozen pieces. Fall and winter clothes take up a lot of space, so the clothes alone took me two or three suitcases.

The rest is all kinds of odds and ends: helmets, keyboards, basically small bits and pieces. Stuff all that random stuff into suitcases and it fills another two or three.

So honestly, I think people who can move with one suitcase are amazing. They're the real minimalists. Someone like me is at best a broke loser who just doesn't buy much.