The Year of Less: How I Stopped Shopping, Gave Away My Belongings, and Discovered Life Is Worth More Than Anything You Can Buy in a Store

by Cait Flanders

While my friends were moving on to the next stages of their lives, I was still working on myself.

One lesson I’ve learned countless times over the years is that whenever you let go of something negative in your life, you make room for something positive.

I also believe we choose who we share these internal struggles with before we make our final decisions, because we almost always tell the person who will enable us to make the bad choice.

The best and worst part about building friendships with people you meet online is they almost never live in the same city as you.

I had opted not to learn any of the same skills my parents had, knowing I could pay—and cheap prices, at that—for everything instead. I valued convenience over the experience of doing anything for myself.

The truth, I was learning, was that we couldn’t actually discover what we needed until we lived without it.

Working remotely for two years might have looked like a dream on the outside, but it came with some difficult and often unspoken truths. The first was that it had taken almost those entire two years to create any kind of healthy routine.