Is your stuff stopping you? | Elizabeth Dulemba | TEDxUniversityofEdinburgh

Wow so I have an important question for you today is your stuff stopping you if it is I'm hoping that we can change your priorities a little bit so comedian Steven Wright said I have the world's largest collection of seashells I keep it scattered on the beaches around the world perhaps you've seen it the idea that something could just be in the world and that that could be enough was radical to me it changed my life the idea that you didn't have to own something for it to have value to you so November of 2014 my husband and I decided to sell almost everything we owned and move to another continent no I do not blame Steven Wright for this I actually had some good reasons so I came across this note that I wrote to myself when I was about 25 years old and it was goals that I wanted to accomplish by the time I was thirty what was amazing to me when I found this note was how it hadn't changed a bit I wanted to be getting a Masters of Fine Arts I wanted to be teaching I wanted to be published I wanted to be volunteering and the bit big-ticket item was I wanted to be living overseas and maybe even speaking another language fluently but by the time I was 30 oops by the time I was 30 only one item on that list could be checked off and that was volunteering which I was very proud of it I had volunteered for an adult literacy program but look at all the other stuff on that list that has not been checked off but yet I had some work to do so my husband and I in 2014 we're living the American dream we had the big house the cars a garage full of toys and a house full of so much furniture I counted it out there were no less than 50 different places where I could sit my precious rear end needless to say I was not a minimalist let me say that again I am NOT a minimalist so how does somebody like me wrap their head around something like what I'm doing well this all looks really from the outside right but we were also experiencing a 10-year long recession and it hurt a lot of people it hurt us it limited our opportunities in life it limited our chances towards adventures that we wanted to have so instead we had taken to this new hobby of watching HD TVs House Hunters International you guys know this program this is a TV show where people pick up their lives and they move overseas and they're looking for an apartment or a flat and you get to be a voyeur and go along with them and it's really fun so every night my husband and I would say okay where do you want to go tonight you want to go to London do you want to go to Paris do you want to go to Spain and then we'd sit there on the couch watching the program going why isn't this us why isn't this our life it doesn't look that hard and I'd look around that all the stuff that was surrounding us you know everything that was in that house that American dream that wasn't on my list so finally the recession breaks up thank goodness life gets a little bit easier and things start looking up for us and one day my husband who was very familiar with my list looks at me and he says what if you got your master's degree overseas ha ha I think he's kidding right yeah of course he is no I look at me he's not laughing I said really he said you know if not now when and truly if the recession had taught us anything it was that you don't always get to choose when opportunity is at your door and when it's not so I said ok and I got online I start looking at universities trying to figure out which one's going to be the best fit and the University of Edinburgh kept popping to the top this is Enver I have to admit Scotland was not on my radar but they had an MFA in illustration which I am a children's book author and illustrator which that was high priority the faculty is very picture book centric again very important to me and I could stick around for PhD which I hope to do so I was like you know what this looks like the best fit and I applied to one school the University of Edinburgh and I got accepted whoo-hoo then I realized I had a big problem I had all this stuff now my husband and I are not independently wealthy people and we were not being sponsored by a company so there was no picking up our old life and moving it across the ocean to this new life that was not feasible if we were going to make this fly we were going to have to sell almost everything and again I told you what I am NOT a minimalist so how does somebody like me wrap her head around this idea I had some wake-up calls the first one is a few years ago I had health scare I spent two years walking with a stick called cane and in the States I was in a lot of pain I gained a lot of weight my hair turned gray and it was looking like my days of walking the sidewalks of Paris or anywhere else in Europe for that matter were behind me instead of ahead of me my life was actually winding down pretty quickly and it was really scary I was lucky as you can see I'm standing before you we figured it out I changed my diet I had some surgery and I'm now living a second chapter a new lease on life my friend Liz Conrad was not so lucky she was a beautiful children's book author and illustrator and was about to introduce hold scads of children's books to the world to share with our children beautiful books when she came down with cancer it took her very young and way too fast it made me realize two things good health is not a given good health is a gift life is a gift and that led to one more realization which seems a little odd being aware of our finiteness that we have a deadline is a gift when we're in our 20s we think we have all the time in the world to achieve the dreams that we want to achieve to do the things we want to do we think we're infinite indestructible and then you get a little older and something like that happens to you you have a health scare you lose somebody close to you and you realize that we have a deadline single one of us in here has a deadline we don't know when it is but when something like that happens to you there is nothing like that they will put a fire under you and inspire you to get into some action because right now I'm not just living my second chapter I'm living for all of the opportunities that my friend Liz missed out on as well Tom Hiddleston who played Loki in the Marvel movies said it really well he said we all have two lives the second one starts when we realize we only have one it all comes down to stuff versus experience are you a stuff person or are you an experienced person now there is nothing wrong with being a stuff person I have no problem with that I like visiting other people's stuff but I think there's nothing more sad than being an experienced base based person stuck in a stuff based lifestyle and the weird thing is science has even proven stuff does not make us happy dr. Thomas Gilovich of Cornell University has been studying happiness for over 20 years he said it really comes down to this we can surround ourselves with stuff and we can even identify ourselves with the stuff that we keep around us and think it's part of us but it will always be separate from us it is not truly a part of us whereas our experiences are a part of us we become the sum total of our experiences so if this is true stuff cannot make us happy why do we keep it well lots of reasons but today I'm going to talk to you about three the first one is that stuff makes us feel safe now this goes back to the lizard brain caveman days it used to be that if you were the leader of your clan you had to go out with a big spear and kill a woolly mammoth to bring back meat and furs and keep your clan safe for the winter and the cave that had the most stuff had the best chance of survival but we don't live that way anymore nowadays if you want to steak you can pop in your car go down to the corner market and buy a steak no Spears involved and yet that lizard brain part of are us still rains the second reason I want to suggest is that stuff gives us the illusion of permanence we like to think that if we have all this stuff around us it's not going anywhere right so we're not either but we know this is an illusion we know this isn't true things can happen floods fires war you can lose all of that stuff in the blink of an eye question is it's going to be up to you to somebody else the third reason was is one that is so pervasive I'm not sure you're even aware of it the FIR third reason that we keep stuff is because the marketing machine tells us we should they tell us that we should buy buy buy buy and not just what we need is there's this thing called um that Hannity always gonna be up that's word let's move on they the whole point is for them to make sure that you're happy with a purchase when you make it and we all know that glow but shortly after that they want you to be unhappy with your purchase about a week a few months they show you something better something new or something shinier now you want that instead the reason they do it is because if you stay happy with your purchase you're not going to buy anything new and if you don't buy anything new you're not going to be giving making any money for anybody they have convinced us that our value to society is wrapped up and how much money we can pour back into it I think we're worth more than that they give us choices so many choices and they convinced us that these choices represent freedom when really it's just a ploy to make us buy more stuff but ask yourself do you really care about what they want you to care about Henry David Thoreau said the price of anything is the amount of life we exchange for it how much of your life have you changed for trying to figure out what they want you to care about instead of what you actually care about so if I convinced you have I sold you on this idea how do you get rid of stuff if this is the lifestyle for you if you want to end again I'm not a minimalist you don't have to get rid of everything maybe you just streamline a little bit the first step is to become a conscious keeper this means to become aware of everything that you have in your life everything that surrounds you make sure nothing is sticking around that isn't serving some purpose you know if there's something that has bad karma maybe it came from an old boyfriend or there's something buried deep in your closet so deeply you don't even know you have it get rid of it these are the things to clean out so when you do get rid of it how do you get rid of it well there's plenty of ways you can sell it online you can sell at a secondhand shop you can have a yard sale or what we did which was an estate sale which is basically a big fancy name for a yard sale means you're selling everything instead of just what will fit in your yard but my very favorite way to get rid of it is to donate now I told you about this recession our local library had one year during this recession where their budget for buying new books was big old goose egg zero dollars my husband and I are both writers and readers and we had an enormous collection of books so we piled up our car from bottom to top no less than three times and drove all of these books to our library they were thrilled there were so many books they ended up disseminating them to our local libraries as well all the libraries in our area so instead of those books sitting in our shelves where only we could enjoy them and only one at a time they were out in the public where lots of people could enjoy them what a warm fuzzy feeling that is I love it and I recommend it I hope you do it too and I can see it in your eyes you're saying okay I can do this I can do this but I gotta put some stuff in storage right they see it you know this I did it too I had a pile we created this pile it was going to be this stuff goes to storage okay that's but every time I walked by that pile I started really realizing that this was going to cost me sure financially all this stuff was going to go into a dark closet where nobody could use it and we didn't know our five-year plan or ten-year plan we had no idea when we would be back for it or how so it was going to cost a lot of money and then there was the emotional cost was going to sit there like this anchor embedded in my old life you know tying me to this old way of living it doesn't feel very good and then there was the experiential cost I started looking at it going is that table going to cost me a weekend in Amsterdam does that lamp gonna cost me a dinner with my husband and eventually that entire pile went back into the house for the estate sale where it could fund our new adventure so it finally came time we were out of there we're pulling out of the driveway in a car that has a big for sale sign on it and I'm looking in the rearview mirror waiting for that gut check moment you know the moment where you're like oh my god what have I done what if I was wrong and I can tell you honestly all I felt was relief the weight had slid off of my back I felt liberated so this was what our life looked like for the next few months first we went to Holland's University in Roanoke Virginia where I teach in the Masters children's book writing and illustrating program and we lived in faculty housing for about six weeks this is basically using other people's stuff putting a little bit of our stuff in or basically renting which is really all of us are doing in this life if you really think about it now I'm fine and then it was time to go to Europe but there was this one hiccup faculty housing ended on August 2nd and we couldn't enter Scotland on my student visa until August 17th we had several weeks in there with no place to go we were homeless I've never been homeless in my life I panicked until my very smart husband said to me well what about your host family and sure enough I was an exchange student in France when I was in college and I had stayed very close with my family and I called them up and explained the situation and lo and behold they had a little flat in blow off France overlooking the Lohara River that but nobody was using so guess where we went even when we got to Scotland we were looking for a flat place to stay we got here right in the middle of Fringe bad time to go apartment hunting at any rate we ended up staying in a short term let right on the Royal Mile wouldn't want to live there full-time but it was great for a week all of these things happened as a direct result of we had become so mobile we had so little stuff we could turn on a dime we could say what do you think about that let's do it so let's look at my list now I'm happy to say I have checked off almost everything I am a now a Masters of Fine Arts student in illustration at the University of Edinburgh I teach at Holland's University in the summers as I mentioned I'm published I have two dozen books including my first novel bird on Water Street which has been doing quite well I volunteered like crazy in the States and I'm looking forward to doing it again here and the big-ticket item I now live overseas in one of the most beautiful cities in the world and verse Scotland now you might notice there's one little item that's missing on that list speaking another language fluently I think you know me well enough now to know that I'm working on it so if there's anything that you take away from my talk I hope it's this I want you to realise that the stuff that we keep in our lives affects how we live our lives think about what's in your life is it holding you back is your stuff stopping you and if it is I hope I've inspired you to do something about it thanks so much you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 1,068,314

Rating: 4.8621011 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United Kingdom, Life, Adventure, Book, Change, Future, Learning, Life Development, Sharing, Value

Id: 8Pb-hjqdjbY

Length: 17min 40sec (1060 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 11 2016