Simplifying UC Davis student life

College can be great time to start crafting your future life and UC Davis is a wonderful place to do it. Moving into your first Davis apartment is a great opportunity to cut the clutter and simplify your life. But what is clutter? One person’s clutter is another person’s necessity. Many UC Davis students will fill their Davis apartment with crates of junk that they might need “just in case”.

As one of our favorite bloggers, Leo Babauta writes in A Simple Strategy for Simplifying:

Ownership, for me, is more fluid and less concrete.

We don’t own something for life — that’s wasteful, because most of our lives we don’t need or use something. We “own” something just for as long as we need it, and then pass it on.

Think of ownership like a public library — we check things out when we need them, and then return them when we’re done, so that others can use them. If we ever need something again, we can always check it out again.

In practice, for me, this has meant passing books and clothes and other things on to friends and relatives when I don’t need them. It means giving things away to Goodwill and other charities. It means getting things from Goodwill, used book stores, thrift shops, Craigslist, Freecycle, friends and family. And yes, sometimes buying things that I owned years before.

This means sometimes spending a little more, but it also means I’m giving away a lot of value, and others benefit from things I think are great. It means things pass through my life, into the lives of others, and I don’t try to hold onto anything. It means no object holds much emotional meaning for me, and so the meaning is instead put into experiences, relationships, conversations, the moment.

At Tandem Properties, we will rent you all the storage space if you want it, but when planning your move to your first Davis apartment, less is much, much more. Cutting the clutter not only frees up space in your Davis apartment, it frees up space in your life. Check out  the full post to discover if you have any of these “just in case” clutter symptoms.