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I'm not on Facebook so can't wade in to defend you, but for what it's worth I burn all of my private journals. I kept them forever, and one day started wondering if I really wanted them left behind after I die. So I gave myself 10 years (really!) to make that final decision. I waited the decade, made the choice, and burned all the way through journals literally going back to when I learned to read and write at around 8 years old, and haven't regretted it. I write in one almost every day, so had a lot of fire pit fodder! Now I just burn one when I've filled it up.

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Feb 27, 2023·edited Feb 27, 2023Liked by Anna E

I’ll have to look through my clutter to see if I have any clutter to de-clutter. For now, I lack the “urge to purge “..: know what you mean though, having moved the rough equivalent of three households to NoDak, then moving myself out, then moving again, and finally a third time...by necessity I purged at those times, only to find that in my new, relatively spacious 2 bedroom duplex, I can have more shit. Good thing there’s no garage. 🤦🏽‍♂️

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Thank you for the incentive to (start to) take a deep look in my closets & drawers.

In the early 2000s I followed FlyLady - a hourly/daily/weekly/monthly rotation of tiny house chores for those of us who didn't absorb the "how" of keeping tidy as children.

Last year I moved in with my love and the vast majority of my stuff is still wasting my cash in storage. His random, post-divorce stuff is tossed into drawers. I *need* to get in them and toss, but it's tender -- I have no real idea what is deeply meaningful without asking about each & every item. Exhausted by emotional labor is not the point!!

Anyway, it's good to have the gentle shove and I did my own closet between reading & commenting!

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I am horrified- but not in a judgy way. :D

Almost all of my personal records are digital. Journal entries, pictures, audio recordings... pretty much everything is in cloud storage. I get pleasure, periodically, from reviewing them. I am normally just as surprised by the things about myself that are the same as the things that have changed.

I know that buying something is not in the spirit of minimalism, but sometimes you have to buy the right thing to replace all of the wrong things that you purge, right? So, I've been doing a lot of research into e-notebooks while I've been taking the late-night feeding duty of our 8-week old. They are like e-readers (Kindle, Nook, Kobo) but with stylus's you can write with. One of my favorite possessions is the Kindle 3 that I've had for 13-ish years, because it has condensed the bookshelves of public domain books that I would have bought into one tiny device, and all of the books have been free. So, when I saw the e-notebooks like the reMarkable (which has been targeting me me with ads for the last year because THE INTERNET KNOWS ME BETTER THAN I DO), I immediately began salivating for one.

In the end, I'm going to try out the Supernote next month, because it has all of the features I'm looking for, and will condense a dozen notebooks into a single device, which can keep all of the data in the cloud from now until an EMP or unstoppable internet virus wipes out the internet, in which case I can feel the virtuous twist of fate that a minimalist must feel after a house fire. But, until then, it looks like something like a Supernote will give me a place to put all of my ideas into the right place, encourage creativity, and keep it all with me in my satchel, and without fear of the horrifying, journal-dumping scenario you described in your post. :)

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