Caleb and I have recently embarked on the exciting adventure of building for ourselves a teeny tiny house! One of the most drastic, unexpected exciting parts has been the changes in our perception to consumerism – the preoccupation with buying more and more things.
We are not building a tiny house out of material necessity – we could work 50 hours each, and get ourselves a 30 year mortgage to live in a Rototuna McMansion if we wanted to. The exciting part is that we are in a position to be able to buck the trend and see where it leads us!
Obviously our tiny house will have space constraints, leading us to start clearing out our stuff even this early in the game. We have been forced to consider why on earth we bought all this ‘stuff’ in the first place! We have been selling, donating and throwing out. I was always sure the experience would be a positive one, but boy did I underestimate it! We both never realised how enslaved we were to all this stuff, until we began to ruthlessly cut it out of our lives! How freeing!
Not only are we freer not to own stuff, but we are freer not to buy the stuff in the first place! Caleb takes great delight in not walking aimlessly around shopping malls while I look for rubbish to throw money at. Haha. We have honestly been surprised at all the areas in our life the tiny-house-ideas have filtered through – we’ve convinced family to all take a holiday away together this Christmas instead of buying gifts! Quality time instead of stuff – I think that’s what we all really want after all.
Hannah
