Tim Fuchs's Key Ideas from Goodbye, Things: The New Japanese Minimalism
by Fumio Sasaki

Everything we have now, from small objects to our appartment is something that we wanted at some point.

We were once eager to buy the clothes that hang unworn in the back of our closet now. The jobs we now occupy once promised the start of a better life.

The simple truth is: we quickly get used to things.

When Tal Ben-Shahar, a popular Harvard lecturer in positive psychology, became Israeli national squash champion at the age of sixteen, he afterwards told people that the happiness lasted for only three hours.

In order to feel the same joy again, we always aim for more, but never arrive.

Fumio Sasaki gives 55 concrete tips on how to say goodbye to things, here is a selection:

• Differentiate between things you want and things you need.
• Take photos of the items that are tough to part with.
• Our things are like roommates, except we pay their rent.
• Let go of the idea of “some day”
• Let go of the idea of getting your money’s worth
• Think of stores as your personal warehouses
• If you lost it, would you buy it again?
• Our biggest items trigger chain reactions
• Don’t buy it because it’s cheap, don’t take it because it’s free
• The things we really need will always find their way back to us