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Here’s a example of how excessive possessions can cause unnecessary stress.

I was at Uniqlo just the other day, and chanced upon a pair of black pants I’d always been eyeing but quickly went out of stock online when the price dropped. There it was, in all its sales price glory of $14.90, beckoning me over.

“Hi, it’s me! You saw me on your screen. Don’t you want me?”

I hesitated for a moment. I have plenty of pants, do I need another one? But hmm, I had always been considering it. And now the price has dropped. It’s the best opportunity to get it now, because I doubt I would be leaving the house again anytime soon.

So I grabbed it and headed to the casher.

—-

Once back in the safety of home, I took the pants out of my bag, glanced at my wardrobe and promptly facepalmed.

Sigh.

I already have so many pants.

The metal rod in my wardrobe is already overloaded.

I have no more hangers for trousers.

Well, I could always rearrange my things to make more space but that will just open up a rabbit hole wouldn’t it?

I was aiming to reduce my possessions, not increase them.

Besides, I don’t need more clothes. I barely step out of the house these days because of the pandemic. At most once a week, or even once every two weeks. And I’ve been working from home since 2019.

The pants was discarded in a corner of my room until I had the mental capacity to evaluate what I wanted to do with it.

A couple of hours later, I found myself getting annoyed with how that randomly-placed pair of pants was cluttering up my minimalist space and decided I should get it out of the way.

Visual clutter.

I rolled it up and stuffed it into a corner of my wardrobe.

It then dawned on me how $14.90 had not just landed me with yet another totally redundant item, but plenty of agonizing on “where am I going to put this?” and “what am I going to do with it?”.

Mental clutter.

—-

This year, I had embarked on a massive clearout of my room because of my recurring asthma, as I vowed to get rid of dust bunnies for good. Less possessions/loose items on display also meant easier-to-clean surfaces so my room looks significantly more empty now, with the remaining items neatly organized into boxes and drawers.

I’m definitely breathing easier, and I find myself feeling immensely happy looking at all the clean, clutter-free surfaces around me. I’ve always been a neat freak at heart and this is the kind of space I always envisioned having. (Previously, my room has always been generally neat – but clutter free? Not really.)

I always look back at 2015/2016 when I had clothes overflowing out of my wardrobe (and even hanging from my floor lamp) and wondered “how on earth did I even put up with that?”

Anyway, the deed is done and I have a new pair of pants. But I hope I don’t find myself dropping my resolve like that again, especially with Black Friday just round the corner.

And how did one $14.90 pants spawn an entire blog post? /scratches head

I just had to write this dream down for remembrance.

Disclaimer: This post will make absolutely no sense if you’re not a Pokémon GO player.

Last night, I dreamt that my boyfriend and I were playing Pokémon GO. (Nothing different from real life, since we do this every weekend.)

Another new generation of pokémon was just released and Yamper (this pokémon that looks like a corgi) was one of them. Now, my boyfriend and I are huge corgi fanatics so obviously we were going around catching all the Yampers we could find.

Chasing corgis aside, the Pokémon GO gameplay had a huge twist from what it is currently.

Because I was a fan of Megumin, this character from the anime Konosuba, Megumin strangely materialized in my dream as a pokémon that can be caught in Pokémon GO. Once evolved, it turns into Megumax. (HAHAHA, my brain churns out puns even in my dreams.)

But here’s the catch – it cannot be evolved directly.

Instead, you had to hunt for bluetooth gadgets that are hidden in real world locations (via partnerships with commercial places) in order to evolve Megumin. I’m not even talking about augmented reality/location tracking anymore, but actual physical gadgets.

It’s literally a treasure hunting game in the physical space.

So my boyfriend and I were running around a mall, hunting high and low for these mysterious bluetooth gadgets. We went from store to store, looking underneath shelves and scouring all corners. (If this was real life, we would have looked so suspicious that the mall will call the police on us, haha.)

Eventually, we found the gadgets at the bottom of a basket filled with chocolates.

Somehow, the Pokémon GO app will pick up the signal from the gadget and the “evolve” button will magically appear.

Very happy, we both were.

Somehow, evolving Megumin and Yamper were one of the requirements to level up from 40 to 41 so we leveled up automatically. And I was musing to my boyfriend about how I was stuck at level 39 for 1.5 years, whereas it took me only 2 months to level up to 41.

But wow, isn’t this game mechanic so cool? It becomes an urban reality kind of game, or an upgraded treasure hunt where the entire world has become the playground. And nope, no amount of location spoofing will be able to help you here.

Then, my boyfriend (in real life) mused “those gadgets are going to get stolen”.

Oh, right.

Reality hits.

So many possible problems with this game set-up. Those gadgets have to be chained up. Oh, and crowd control. We’re still in a pandemic after all.

Dang.

After that, I longed to go back to sleep so that I could return to that dream, where pandemics and shitty humans did not exist.