I’m a relentless purger.
I don’t save stuff. I hate clutter. I like to travel through life as light as possible (I love the backpack speech in the movie Up in the Air).
I can think of two times in my entire life when one of my purging sprees went too far and I later regretted it. An entirely acceptable cost on net for not lugging around all kinds of baggage and having cluttered closets and the cluttered mind that comes with it.
I also purge mentally. I outsource as much work from my brain as possible. If I don’t absolutely need to store something in memory, I don’t. I trust systems – email inbox, calendar, task lists, delegation – to tell me what I need to know and when. This has allowed me to get a lot done while rarely feeling frazzled or overwhelmed. I can be a bit OCD about my systems and my delete, shred, destroy mantra towards unneeded stuff, but on the whole it works for me.
But there are problems. For one, I do occasionally regret some of my purges. (I have been playing guitar a bit more lately, and wishing I hadn’t thrown away a giant D-ring binder of song chords I’d accumulated over fifteen years. When I did, I thought, “It’s the digital age, I don’t need this.” But searching Ultimate Tabs and finding the right version and viewing it on a screen is not ideal. Plus, I had hand-written notes and changes to many songs.) I also think my memory is probably not as good as it could be because my systems demand so little of it. I can also lack some of the mental clutter that contributes to happy, unforeseen a-ha moments.
I am aware of the excesses of my disdain for excess. Still worth it.