You have my permission to keep your stuff. Go ahead. You’ve made it this far, and you’re most likely able to open the front door to your home and go to the grocery store and whatnot. Sure, you have to search high and low to find your phone charger every once in a while, but you’re doing alright. Heck, I’ll even come and organize your home with each and everything currently inside.

Here’s the caveat: don’t acquire anything else until your current stuff is used up.

Wear those jeans until the seams split. Eat all of those jars of salsa. Use your current cell phone. Use that moisturizer until you are scraping the bottom.

We all have too much stuff. And our consumption of more and more and cheaper and cheaper stuff is ruinous to our planet, not to mention our bank accounts.

The natural resources, human labor, transportation costs it took the get your existing stuff to the store have already been spent.

The time and money it took to get your existing stuff from the store into your home has already been spent.

There would be even more resources and energy spent dealing with your stuff were you to just discard it.

If you’re just purging all of your things so that you can acquire a whole set of slightly newer things, I’d almost rather you didn’t.

If you can’t use them up because your baby grew up or you lost a bunch of weight, find someone else who can so that at least they don’t have to go out and buy new stuff with a similar cost of resources, energy, and labor.

It’s important to tidy the objects in your home, but it’s even more important to stem the tide in the first place.