My Life For Sale

In the book All My Life for Sale, artist John Freyer sells every single last thing he owns on eBay, netting about $5000 in the bargain. I must be wealthier than him, because I've only sold off only a quarter of my belongings, and have made about $3000.

To give you an idea of the magnitude of this purge, I can nearly fit all of my belongings in my car, excluding my furniture. (This is a claim which garnered a "Get the hell out of here!" exclamation from my stylist.) My closets are filled only with things I touch or use or wear on a regular basis. I now own only two kinds of things: stuff I love and stuff I need.

There is something addictive about this kind of simplicity. Once you've experienced it, you want your entire life to be so elegantly sparse. You scrutinize your belongings with a merciless eye, looking for just one more thing you can get rid of, just one more inch of beautiful space you can create in your life. Getting rid of stuff becomes a near-religious ritual of cleansing, like colonics for your apartment. It just feels oh-so-very good.

And it's a pursuit that allows you to connect, in very small ways, with people one would never encounter otherwise. I've sold video games to a poet in rural Mississippi, a soldier in Iraq, a kid in the Ukraine. Every time I've addressed a parcel for delivery, I've marveled that someone in such a distant locale and I had this one thing in common: we are fond of the same obscure Japanese video game.

A mother from Stone Mountain, Georgia, who purchased a Game Boy Player for her children, wrote this about me in her feedback: "He is truly honest." I was kind of touched by that.

Every person who purchased something from me has directly contributed to the success of this small adventure. And to my surprise, what appeared to be very simple transactions of goods and money are actually something more: a small reminder of the ways in which we are all connected to other people.