Long ago, Buckminster Fuller saw a future where technological development would allow you to do “more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing.” His dream has played out well in recent years. Our smartphones and laptops have helped usher in the recent movement of tidying, minimalism, and tiny housing. We no longer need CDs and DVDs, flashlights, maps, calculators, and so on.

But technology cuts both ways. Modern commerce has become frictionless. Jeff Bezos‘ US$280B laboratory is hellbent on pushing more and more stuff into our lives. We are all subjects in Amazon’s countless experiments, like Subscribe & Save, which finally makes doing nothing at all an act of shopping.

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A one-click bottleneck has formed in the circulation of products through our economy. Big American suburban homes are the perfect receptacle for all this stuff, their expansive square footage just begging to be filled. Stuff pours into our closets and garages and is held there by its own physical and psychological weight. The overflow spills into a booming self-storage industry whose facilities now cover an area larger than four Manhattans. This doesn’t clear the bottleneck, it only widens the bottle.

There is work being done to remove the physical barrier to reuse. Several peer-to-peer reuse marketplaces and apps have sprung up in recent years. Yerdle, which I co-founded, is one of them, and it makes personal reuse as easy as shopping. Launched in 2013, Yerdle has facilitated the reuse of nearly a million items.

Apart from the logistical challenge, there’s a big psychological barrier to reuse. Behavioral economist Dan Ariely posits that we overvalue things we own — sometimes way beyond what they’re actually worth — because of our attachment to stories and familiarity. I sat looking at a series of design books I’d spent a lot of money on. They no longer served me, but I was holding onto them out of guilt. Working through this guilt and pain is part of letting our stuff pass on.

And this is where someone like Marie Kondo comes in. A Japanese professional organizer, Kondo has written two excellent books about how to simplify your life by reexamining your belongings. Her obsession for it leaps from the page. And she has optimized both the principles of tidying and, crucially, the experience design of tidying. For example, Kondo advises holding a mini-ceremony in which you thank items for their service before letting them go.

Kondo’s process is extreme and time-consuming — it took us about a week to completely tidy our small two bedroom apartment. We found that we owned more things than we could possibly manage. These things took up precious space in our lives, badgering us about unmet commitments and tugging us in the direction of outdated dreams. We needed space for new dreams.

It would be amazing if our stuff were like software and we could update all our belongings at the tap of a button. We could reboot our lives, and suddenly have reinforcements for our most current interests. Yet stuff is not software. We must attend to each item in our lives, one by one, to uncover the things that spark real joy, and those that don’t.