4031: Curate Your Life, and the Rest Will Follow by Paula Pant of Afford Anything on Living With Intention

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[00:01:00] [SPEAKER_01] This is Optimal Living Daily. Curate your life, and the rest will follow. By Paula Pant of AffordAnything.com. And I'm Justin Malik. Welcome to Optimal Living Daily, OLD or OLD for short. The show where I read to you from articles that I think are amazing, with permission from the authors. So with that, let's get right to the post as we optimize your life.

[00:01:27] [SPEAKER_01] Curate your life, and the rest will follow. By Paula Pant of AffordAnything.com. Flights into Vegas are fascinating. Most of my fellow passengers are exuberant about their upcoming weekend of debauchery. They order beers after takeoff, slosh their way across the airspace, and holler crazy-isms like, if I win big, I'm upgrading to first class coming back. Don't they know it stays in Vegas?

[00:01:53] [SPEAKER_01] On a recent flight, I found myself seated amidst a rowdy group of grown-ups. One of them whipped out a selfie stick and snapped at least a dozen pictures from her seat in row 26. I imagined the Facebook photo captions, This is us with our seat backs upright. This is us with our tray tables stowed. And this is us with our seat belts securely fastened. That's got me thinking. There's a curious cultural phenomenon of documenting every moment of our lives.

[00:02:20] [SPEAKER_01] We photograph every happy hour, haircut, outfit, bruise, cute cat pose, and funny license plate. But how often do we look at those photos? Almost never. We're so bad at reviewing old photos that app developers built TimeHop to remind us to glance at our memories. Heck, we're so bad at reviewing photos that the most popular social media app Snapchat is based on the premise that we'll never view these images again. But why?

[00:02:49] [SPEAKER_01] Why do we ignore these photos? Maybe this reflects a simple truth. The more items we own, the less we value them. Digital photos are abundant, so we rarely look at them. But the solitary black-and-white snapshot of your grandmother in 1940 is framed and displayed. We look at overstuffed closets and conclude we have nothing to wear. But we can travel for a month with a lightweight carry-on. The more fishing rods and fancy moisturizers we collect,

[00:03:18] [SPEAKER_01] the more likely we'll shove everything into a closet to be ignored for the rest of human history. And yet, paradoxically, the more we own, the more we want. We're dissatisfied with this mountain of stuff. This moisturizer just isn't me. And like a junkie needing his next hit, we wonder if maybe the next thing might satisfy. Maybe this is the frisbee I've been looking for all my life.

[00:03:44] [SPEAKER_01] Our closets and drawers burst with items we need to organize, clean, maintain, polish, tune, upgrade, store, and retrieve. It's exhausting. Our stuff owns us. But there's a simple corollary that fixes everything. The less we own, the more we enjoy the few items we have. Our five favorite shirts, our tiny, beautiful assortment of plates and bowls, our mostly empty pantry that holds only the foods we're excited to eat.

[00:04:14] [SPEAKER_01] Owning less isn't deprivation. It's curation. The less we own, the more space in our lives for things that matter. If we want to boost happiness, we must curate our belongings and lives with the same swift ruthlessness that a museum director uses to curate his exhibit. Because here's the reality. We have space for anything, but not everything.

[00:04:38] [SPEAKER_01] We can fill our lives with whatever we want until we run out of space or money or time. That's why we need to edit the clutter from our homes just as a writer edits words. Editing makes us calmer, happier. And here's an unintended bonus benefit. When we curate, we also spend less without feeling deprived. We're not trying to save money. We're not being frugal for its own sake. We're asking the deeper questions. Do I want to let this into my life?

[00:05:08] [SPEAKER_01] Most of the time, that answer is no. This creates space for the rare things worthy of yes. Curation isn't acting cheap. Far from it. As long-time readers know, I don't shop sales. My purchasing philosophy is to own fewer but better. I'll buy a top-quality $100 pair of yoga pants without blinking, but I'll wear those pants twice a week for the next four years. Curation isn't intended to save money. That's just a byproduct.

[00:05:38] [SPEAKER_01] That's why this practice includes minimizing free and cheap stuff. Why choke your garage with scrap lumber and half-empty paint buckets from the Craigslist free section? It's free, but that's irrelevant. Do you want to hoard 44 paper towel rolls and a broken leather recliner? Or would you rather enjoy a calmer, simpler life? Unfortunately, most people don't curate free stuff. Ahem, photos. Curation is a practice like yoga, guitar, or basketball.

[00:06:08] [SPEAKER_01] You make marginal gains and improve with time. Sure, you foul. You miss some shots. But you keep shooting. You'll never play a perfect game. No athlete does. But you'll get a heck of a lot better. You might even turn pro. Curation is a mindset. It's critically thinking about every element in your life. Objects. Friendships. Time. Let's spend a moment on that last point. Curating your time. Time feels abundant when we're young,

[00:06:37] [SPEAKER_01] so we squander it with drama and gossip and getting tangled by insecurities. Then we wise up. We own less time now, so we value it more. That's when we start focusing on regaining control over our time, which is the natural consequence of controlling our money. We know this is our only shot at life. We don't want third-party forces to dictate our time. There's only one way to defend against this. Grow the gap between earning and spending.

[00:07:05] [SPEAKER_01] Invest that gap and repeat. Eventually, we create more time and money than we need. We're in control. That's better than any collection of shoes, shirts, and sparkle Frisbees. Let's reduce this article to its core. Curate everything. And avoid taking airplane selfies from row 26. Well, unless it's for Snapchat, then it's all right.

[00:07:33] [SPEAKER_01] You just listened to the post titled, Curate Your Life and the Rest Will Follow, by Paula Pant of affordanything.com. And I'll be right back with my commentary. Now, I've gone to the doctor with fatigue and got a sleep study, which showed nothing. No real data, no plan. Turns out it was low iron and ferritin, which is something Superpower checks for. They send a licensed pro to your home or you visit a nearby lab for one draw covering over 100 biomarkers.

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[00:09:13] [SPEAKER_01] Take it to Paula. Fair point when she said that maybe the more items we own, the less we value them. It's tough to argue with that logic. We only have so many hours in a day to tend to what we own. So the more we have, the less each item can have our attention. Paula mentioned a black and white snapshot of a grandmother in 1940. It reminds me, I watched or re-watched actually, Schindler's List somewhat recently. It's a bit older now,

[00:09:41] [SPEAKER_01] but one best picture back in the 90s. And it's a true story documenting certain events of the Holocaust. I mention this because during that horrific time, the Nazis had so much that they stole while the Jewish population had so little. You could see that difference in appreciation for the little things. Now, obviously I would hope that we wouldn't get to that level of poverty ourselves, but it's a lesson and comes back to this idea of curation. And it's up to us to figure out

[00:10:11] [SPEAKER_01] what that curated life looks like in our own lives because there is no right and wrong answer. Hopefully by hearing articles like these, we can get one step closer to figuring that out. So do think about that today and this weekend. Have a great Friday and start to your weekend if you're listening in real time. And I'll see you tomorrow where your optimal life awaits. As though I was trying was trying to erase how this victim be a person who örnei knows.

[00:10:33] So doLA won't get happened.