What Should You Do with Your Stuff before You Die? | The Walrus

The Nugget

  • Practicing "death cleaning" involves minimizing belongings, organizing paperwork, and cleaning your home in your later years to ease the burden on loved ones after you pass away.

Make it stick

  • 🧹 "Death buying": purchasing with your own future absence in mind.
  • 💡As you age, you start measuring decisions against your remaining time.
  • 📚Choose experiences and possessions with durability and longevity in mind.
  • Understanding mortality leads to making choices based on what truly matters.

Key insights

The Concept of Death Cleaning

  • Embracing the concept of "death cleaning" involves minimizing possessions, organizing documents, and decluttering to ensure a smoother process for loved ones after one's passing.

"Death Buying"

  • The idea of "death buying" involves making purchasing decisions with the future absence of the buyer in mind, focusing on items that will last and serve a purpose even after they are gone.

Making Choices Based on Remaining Time

  • As individuals age, they begin to evaluate decisions based on the time they have remaining, leading to a shift in priorities towards experiences and possessions that have longevity and durability.

Acceptance of Mortality

  • Understanding and accepting mortality allows individuals to make intentional choices about what truly matters, leading them to focus on the quality and significance of experiences and possessions over quantity.

Key quotes

  • "Minimize belongings, clean your home, and organize paperwork so that your death will be less of a burden on your children or other loved ones."
  • "By the time this car starts giving out, I’ll be too old to drive anymore probably."
  • "There’s enough inside of me for a hundred lives: enough to fall in love a hundred times, to happily settle down in a hundred places, to pursue a hundred different passions, to see the sun set on a hundred different horizons."
  • "You start to realize that the rest of your life is a little more limited, year by year. And you have to start choosing: Which of these possibilities is most important, and which path will you take?"
  • "Every step I make is determining which one single life I will have to squeeze my existence into has been, at times, a hard revelation."
This summary contains AI-generated information and may have important inaccuracies or omissions.