I’ve moved 9 times since I left college 8.5 years ago. Three of those moves were international. I’ve also done three “live-out-of-a-bag” stints for 2-3 months each. I’ve started to develop a philosophy on living light.


“It is lumber, man - all lumber! Throw it overboard. It makes the boat so heavy to pull, you nearly faint at the oars.”

— Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat


In this instance, I’m moving back from London to San Francisco. Everything I’ve kept falls into one of these categories:

  • Emotional value: gifts, souveniers.
  • Critical documents: though I’ve tried to digitize as much as possible.
  • Stuff that’s substantially cheaper to move than re-buy: small gadgets, clothes.
  • Stuff that takes a lot of effort to re-buy: climbing shoes that fit well, the right pillow, medicines.


Three boxes
Everything I currently own


Some principles I have:

  1. Avoid buying property: It ties you down and changes the way you make life decisions. I’ve run the numbers on buying a house twice now, once in San Francisco and once in London, and in both cases I found it was also better financially to rent (and invest the capital elsewhere).
  2. Avoid getting attached to furniture: Rent furnished places where possible. Otherwise, buy and re-sell/discard when you move.
  3. Don’t sacrifice on the important things: Invest in things like a good mattress, good work setup, artwork etc, and take the small losses when you move.
  4. Discard things liberally: This took me some work to internalize, since it runs against principles of frugality I grew up with. If anything feels like a burden, get rid of it. Re-buy if you need it again (you probably won’t). Small losses are a rounding error in the broader scheme of things - what matters is optimizing the big decisions in life. By discard I usually mean donate, gift or sell.
  5. Be aware of everything you own: Don’t let there be pockets of storage full of things you don’t know about.

The main upside of living light is that it makes it very low overhead to move. This is important to me because it feels like life keeps changing, and reduced constraints make it much easier to optimize things like work, relationships and happiness. This freedom feels important enough that it’s worth losing some money to buy it. It also frees up time and mindspace by removing a lot of pointless admin.

The main downside is that I don’t get to have certain kinds of nice things. I’ve realized I’m the kind of person that doesn’t value things like nice furniture and having my own place - they just make me anxious at the thought of upkeep.