Marie Kondo my whole fucking existence vs. STORAGE WARS

I been doing too. much. shit. like the last fucking six years. I really gotta chill out. I've moved so many times. I think what they say about the shit you own ends up owning you is true in a lot of ways. I acquired a lot of fucking shit. I was living with my wife and baby daughter in a 3500sqft 5bed/4bath in the "suburbs." But it wasn't the fucking suburbs. The West Chicago suburbs are basically still the city. I could see into my fucking neighbor's house out my window. But I lived there and payed that fat mortgage so I could be "close" to Chicago where my company managed residential rental property. But over the last 3 years, it went from a 10-15 minute commute to a fucking 25-45 minute commute. I could have been living in the real suburbs like the NorthWest and commuting for the same time and money.

And I fucking hate doing business. Running my company for 5 years was boring as fuck. My brain was melting. But I was anxious constantly, essentially on-call constantly, didn't take a day off in 5 years. Working from your phone and laptop in Rome while being anxious your employees aren't burning everything down back home is very similar to working from your phone and laptop in Seoul while being anxious your employees aren't burning everything down back home.

So I'm miserable and I have a high disposable income and there's no end in sight in this tunnel. So I started filling this bigass house I thought I needed to achieve the American Dream with shit. I don't even know what, bro. Just shit. My home gym has been a decent investment. Although I'll tell you what. Moving a home gym sucks donkey dick. And now I'm gonna have to do it again. And I'm kinda proud of my library. Which is now sitting packed in boxes in a storage unit. Anyway, I acquired a lot of shit. Some of it is still in the box. I'm sure I forgot I own a lot of it. 

So I got rid of my company. I fired some clients an then sold everyone who wanted to stay to another property manager buddy I had. I was glad to be able to help him grow his business pretty significantly. The last 1.5 years of my business saw very significant growth and most of it went to him. His personality is far better suited to this dogshit profession than mine is.

I got BURNED. OUT. Burned the fuck out. There was nothing left in me. I said fuck this shit. My kid's dad is gonna end up taking a nap in this garage here with the cars running and I think that's more detrimental than her maybe not having a massive playroom for a few years. And if this wife here, who married me when I was broke and showed no interest in becoming some business bigshot but who I somehow got into my head the idea I had to provide a fancy lifestyle for, decides to leave over it. So be it. You'll find another one. Actually, you'd probably be single for a really long time maybe forever because you got married way too young but anyway the point is that you'll be fine regardless. Ball's in your court. Could even look at this like a test for her.

'So listen, here's what we're gonna do. The company is done. No, I didn't include you in the conversation because you're not the one having panic attacks and it's not up to you. Are you gonna pay this mortgage? Do you even know who has our mortgage? Do you know I paid $550 to ComEd last month? No? OK stfu we're moving. We bought this house at the perfect time and this is the perfect time to sell and we lived here just long enough to not pay tax on capital gains and this was all completely an accident. But my point is that between this cash we're gonna make on appreciation I can always turn into income streams, all the cash I have saved, my dividend-focused portfolio, the equity in our rentals I can always turn into income streams, and the income off our rentals, I really don't have to work again if I don't want to. One of our leases is coming up. We're gonna move into that apartment and I'm gonna take time for myself to figure out what I'm gonna do next.'

So that's where we are now. But it isssss kinda small. And I'm tired of being in the city. Shit is too degenerate out here and getting weirder. I have a daughter to raise. And a fucking cement factory opened up not far from the park and I can taste that shit. I'm outie. I've always seen myself as a homeowner since we bought our first place 6 years ago, so I hadn't considered renting and didn't wanna jump into another purchase. But I decided we're gonna rent a house in the NorthWest burbs for a few years while I figure out what's going on with my grad school situation and just take some time to settle. I don't wanna settle here. I'm about to drop $3K on a sauna for my new garage gym and I don't even wanna be here and the sauna won't survive a move. So let's just go rent a house where we'd much rather be and closer to our parents so they can help with the kid more easily.

Goldie wants to be a wild man spear fishing in he mountains, living in a cabin, reading esoteric shit, doing snatches in the forest as the critters cheer for me. As I push 30 and assess my surroundings, I have to truly accept the series of compromises I have been making over the years. Let's scratch Plan Mountains or Bust and just go live somewhere nice - not a city and not a city-like suburb.

But what do I do with all this FUCKING SHIT? I'm renting a 2,000 sqft unfinished basement from my brother-in-law in one of the buildings I used to manage in Chicago for $150/month. Great deal, right? It's fulllll of boxes and shitttttt. There's a lot of nice shit so it's tough to just be like, 'Yeah call up the junk removal people let's scrap it all.' I'm telling you, I've done that for a lot of fucking trashed apartments and it's gonna be over a grand just to DISPOSE of all this shit. Or I gotta basically make a whole other move and like drive it to a junkyard myself. You can't just put a whole basement worth of shit in the alley.

I'd love to hold onto all my books. I've only read probably half of them. I probably have like $25K of audio equipment alone down there. Do I start selling it myself? What about all the other shit? I've had a lot of times now where I needed something at our new place, I know I own it and it's somewhere down there, but I have no idea which of the maybe 100 unlabeled boxes it's in. So I just buy the thing. And dealing with a bunch of boxes and digging through shit to find some $20 item makes me feel poor. And I HATE feeling poor. When I was packing, I just threw shit into boxes. Like how do you even label it? By room? By each individual item in there? It was just too daunting and I wanted it to be over, so it's just a shitload of boxes. TVs, nice furniture... how do you just toss that? 

We could be renting a house for like 3 years. Am I gonna pay to store shit I might want in the next house we buy for 3 years? This seems like a trap to me that I fell into and I gotta get out. I gotta cut and run from all these possessions. They're taking up not only physical but also mental inventory and that shit's valuable. I used to do Ebay flipping for like a year way back when. I know I have like six figures + of random unlabeled shit sitting here. All different categories of shit. I have the attic of a rental we own also full of shit. That batch of shit is from like 5 years ago. Oh my god so much shit. And now we're accumulating kid shit. And do we hold onto  that shit for the next kid? Well we've been ruthlessly tossing shit out. You brought me to this Capitalistic consumeristic fucking place and I played the game but retained a broke immigrant mentality and accumulated a bunch of shit and never threw anything out. I wasn't fully embracing the system. Embrace this consumerism. Things are cheap and available. Throw your things out. Pile up the landfills. Fuck a dolphin. Buy new shit as you need it. Most things can be bought on Amazon for $12 with same-day delivery. What a fucked system. But what do I do with all this shit?