🎨 Are You a Prisoner in Your Own Life?

At a glance:

• What attachments do we have in our lives?
• My journey towards detachment and how it began.
• How to effectively audit your attachments.
• Essential tips to support detachment.

Everyone owns something, and the current global trend is to accumulate more and more. People adhere to consumption habits, often purchasing items they don’t truly need. This includes succumbing to trends, new designs, and aggressive marketing and promotions that are pervasive everywhere. Ask yourself, how many of you could pack all your life essentials into one cabin suitcase? Probably very few.

Moreover, our attachments are not limited to material possessions; we also cling to statuses, situations, and emotions. This attachment can lead to a paralyzing fear of loss. It’s not just about the fear of losing tangible items like a wallet or a phone, but also about the potential loss of a job, or jeopardizing our public image and social status.

On one hand, you find yourself surrounded by an ever-increasing array of objects, convincing you of their necessity. On the other hand, you become comfortable with your achievements, the people in your life, and the representation of your life at the moment.

What happens if you lose something important? You might find yourself at a loss on how to handle the situation. The frustration of losing a wallet, or the existential dread from losing a job, can be overwhelming.

So, what’s the solution? The key is to begin by recognizing your attachments before you embark on a journey towards detachment.

My story:

My own journey towards detachment began with a common issue many face—having too many clothes in the wardrobe. Half of them hadn't been worn for years, some were kept for 'better times', others held emotional significance, and some were unworn yet too new to discard.

Over the last 15 years, I’ve moved apartments ten times, each time with more belongings. Each move made me wonder if my possessions were somehow multiplying. The real turning point came when I was building a family house in my hometown and moved my partner from their apartment of nearly 30 years to our new home.

The volume of accumulated items was staggering. It took me about two months to gradually move things out, giving away and discarding tons in the process. This part of the journey was particularly challenging for my mum, who found it difficult to part with many items that, from an external viewpoint, seemed unimportant. While I managed to persuade her to let go of some things, it was not as many as I had hoped.

This experience has driven me towards a more minimalist lifestyle. I no longer want to feel controlled by my possessions or feel distressed by their loss or the need to relinquish them.

From these experiences, I've developed several rules to limit my attachments:

Rule 1. Quality over Quantity: Always prioritize buying one high-quality item over several cheaper alternatives that are likely to break or lose their appeal quickly.

Rule 2. 'Hell Yes' Concept: Make purchasing decisions based on this principle. If it’s not a 'Hell Yes', it should be a 'no'. This applies to all aspects of life.

Rule 3. Categorized Storage at Home: Organize your possessions into dedicated zones, such as bookshelves, beauty zones, or areas for board games. When a specific zone becomes overcrowded, it’s a sign to stop buying and start decluttering, following the '1 in, 1 out' rule.

Rule 4. Regular Decluttering: Consistently review what you own, particularly your wardrobe. Donate items not used in the past two years. Apply this yearly to other areas of your home as well. Tackle it shelf by shelf to avoid overwhelming yourself.

Rule 5. Audit Emotional Attachments: Regularly engage in self-reflection to understand your emotional attachments to people, statuses, or situations. Face your fears by contemplating what would happen if you lost one of these attachments. Every loss releases energy that can be redirected to new areas. Consider how you would reallocate such energy to manage your fears more effectively.

Your turn:

Reflect on your life and the things, people, and positions that you are attached to, and consider how their potential loss would impact your life. Look at the below three-step approach you can follow to understand your attachments and the level of fear related to each of them.

Step 1: List Your Attachments

Ask yourself, what are you afraid of losing?

Start with external, material things like cars, houses, physical mementos, jewelry, and favorite gadgets. Write down everything you can think of.

Then, shift your focus towards internal aspects such as emotions and feelings, including security, reputation, status, friendships, belonging to a group, authority, and power.

Write down everything you can think of.

By making these two lists, you have likely identified the sources of your greatest fears in life—the possibility of losing any of these things.

Step 2: Rate Your Fears

Draw a line representing your level of concern with a rating scale from 0 to 10, where zero indicates no worries, and ten represents a devastating state—the worst thing that could happen to you.

On this line, place each of your fears identified in Step 1.

If none of your fears fall into the 0 or 10 ratings, consider what fear you would rate in this way and then place it on the scale accordingly.

Step 3: Detaching

This is a lifelong task.

Face your fears by imagining what would happen if you lost one of those things.

How would you approach the situation?

What would you do?

Remember, each loss releases some energy that you have allocated to that person, status, situation, or thing.

This energy can be allocated to a new area.

Think about how you could reallocate such energy to make the fear more manageable.

In a second phase, start thinking about internal factors.

Keep in mind that nothing is constant; things are temporary and we can’t truly control or own anything. Hopefully, these exercises will help you to appreciate living in the moment more than being attached to idealized images or material possessions.

Closing remarks:

In the end, moving toward detachment isn't just about clearing out your closet; it’s about freeing yourself from the emotional weights that hold you back.

Remember the saying, “If you love something, let it go. If it comes back, it’s yours. If not, it was never meant to be.” This idea is at the heart of detachment—letting go of our fears and the things we’re scared to lose, so we can really enjoy life. By looking at what scares us and figuring out our attachments, we open up a path to a happier, more mindful way of living.

Take this step today, start to let go, and see how much lighter you feel.