Like I Was Saying...
I hate grocery shopping. Hate it. Hate. It.
But yesterday, I had to go to HEB to pick up groceries.
Lucy even considers HEB's layout when she's making a list, making it easier to pick up the items.
Don't matter. It's still a soul-sucking experience.
While driving to the store, I remembered something Matthew Dicks said about grocery shopping in his podcast with Brett McKay. Matthew Dicks and I might disagree about politics, but we share a mutual hatred of grocery shopping.
Matthew noticed people stroll in the grocery store parking lot. That drives him nuts because the grocery store isn't a place you stroll. While parking my car, I saw the same thing.
Like why?
The grocery store is the banalest place on the face of the planet. And I'm like most Texans in my love for HEB, but still, the simple act of grocery shopping is soul-sucking.
I threw on a pair of earbuds, found an Audible book, and walked through the store, a breakneck space.
And don't even get me into the price of things. Ugh.
After hauling the groceries and putting them away, my Sunday was pretty tame.
Except for the fact, that I had given myself a project and everything in the world decided to go wonky from trying to get me to complete it.
Lucy was trying to print out some paperwork for school, and our printer wasn't accepting the Wi-Fi password. So that took a while to figure out.
I went to pick up my mother-in-law, but she had already gotten a ride home. Lucy had missed a text before I left.
The dogs were especially randy yesterday.
But I eventually got the project to a comfortable place.
It's almost done.
A couple of years ago, I stumbled onto the Minimalists, Joshua Fields Millburn, and Ryan Nicodemus (a cool name). I read their stuff and got what they were saying.
I loved their first documentary, Minimalism, and tried to incorporate some of the principles of limited success. Unfortunately, stuff still ways me down.
But I discovered yesterday, via YouTube, that they had made another film, called Less is Now.
So I watched that, and it was pretty good.
There was one stat in there that boggled my mind. That the average American household has over three hundred thousand items of stuff, I think that was the number.
I thought that was a little high, but when you consider the junk drawer, that's about a hundred thousand items there.
One thing I realized a couple of years ago is that all this stuff is also time.
You see because to accumulate this stuff you have to buy it. This is because a product comes from money earned. The way you earn money is by working.
So that's my time. I often ask with an item, how much of my time did that cost me?
Was that bought during the time I was stressing out about work? Was that item worth it?
Anyways, Less is Now was another eye-opener.
The big question is will I act on it, or will one day Marcos and Lucy sigh at the accumulation of my stuff?