Buying clothing can be fun: the visceral thrill of all the new colors and textures; the gratification of clerks catering to your whims; the way a garment can make you feel like a different person.

Beyond this, clothing is a drag. It’s dissatisfying, as garments rarely look as good in your closet as they do on display. It’s also time-intensive: trying to get one’s pants and shirt to “work” together; burrowing through closets in search of some lost item; or, worrying about whether one’s wardrobe might appear dated.

Cultural norms make this even more inconvenient. We find ourselves contemplating whether we’re under or overdressed, and forced to comply with stifling office dress codes. For a species that considers itself evolved, we sure do worry a lot about inconsequential details.

Clothing is not a representation of one’s success, professionalism, or capability; yet, we fail to treat garments for what they are: a layer of protection from the elements. Perhaps it’s time for us to align our behavior with what we all intrinsically know.

Yes, people do make assumptions based on our visual presentation. This doesn’t need to make us succumb to social pressures. Instead, we simply have to seek out clothing that is deliberately plain and unremarkable. By this, I mean basic garments that are as timeless as possible. Doing so will allow you to blend, and when it comes to dress, this is a good thing. (Should you wish to stand out from the crowd, consider doing so with your intellect, actions, or humor.)

By treating clothing simply for what it is, you are one step closer to eliminating a substantial chunk of mundanity from your life. This will subsequently open up time for more interesting and useful pursuits. It will also keep your closets from overflowing with embarrassing fashion missteps.

Notes:

Some (e.g. police officers) are forced to wear uniforms due to their work. This probably won’t change, but they can apply the above when away from work.

Fear is good: a safeguard hardwired into the BIOS, warning of potential threats. I don’t know about you, but I kind of like having an internal mechanism that stops me from driving off cliffs, poking sharks in their eyes, and telling random people that they should lick my bottom.

The shortcoming of having this system so baked in, is that it leaves us susceptible. There are those ready to prey on this instinct, and how acutely we react to its alerts. It’s also more difficult than we realize to stave off these assaults.

The fact is, you make for a good dog when you’re frightened. You become obedient, open to suggestion, and more likely to fall in line than challenge perceived threats.

This might sound overly heady, but you know it to be true. With age we find ourselves less apt to embrace adventure, as the risks seem higher. In college, you’ll travel to unfamiliar places because the desire to explore outweighs any associated risk. Things change, later in life. With kids, a mortgage, and the need to bring home a pay check, you’re much more likely to just stay put in your little bungalow and watch benign-seeming sitcoms.

Advertisers know this, and are happy to send up false threats in order to keep you in place—and spending. Life insurance, “guaranteed” investments, “safe” SUVs, cell phones ready for those ever-present roadside emergency situations… there are countless ways to profit from those of us who put too much credence into those “what if?” questions.

To live a full life, we must wrestle these fears into submission. We need to find ways to silence/ignore the propaganda that aims to keep us docile and complacent. Our real apprehension should be of reaching the finish line and realizing that our fear kept us from having actually lived at all.

To date, America has borrowed (by some estimates) over $2.5 trillion to wage the War on Terror, while some tens, or hundreds, of thousands have lost their lives. To date, there have been over 6,280 American military casualties alone.

It’s overly simplistic to associate all of these costs to the Bush Administration. It might, however, be fair to say that what happened on September 11, 2001 provided a means to sneak all sorts of bad policies/actions past the American people. These have ultimately had a great impact on all the world’s inhabitants.

When Bush promised to “smoke them out of their holes,” he reassured a scared and confused nation that everything would be made right. One has to ask if, amidst the chaos, anyone actually realized how much they’d give up to fulfill this vision.

In the years that followed, we witnessed the emergence of the liberty eroding Patriot Act, learned of the (ongoing) atrocities of Guantanamo, and stood largely silent, as Homeland Security made notions like racial-profiling and “guilty until proven innocent” seem somehow acceptable.

In a perverse twist of events, the actions of the American government have emphasized what anti-American groups have often claimed. One might even argue that the terrorists’ attacks have underscored how paper-thin the notions of liberty and justice are in the United States.

What’s most concerning in all of this, is that more than 10 years later, we still haven’t (on the whole) looked critically at how our emotions cloud our actions. The American journalist H. L. Mencken once opined, “The average man does not want to be free. He simply wants to be safe.” The past decade’s devolution of policy leaves us with the dismal notion that we have, in fact, chosen the illusion of safety over the inconvenience of doing what’s moral.

If the fallout of 9/11 proves any one thing, it’s that fear leads us to loosen our grip on liberty, and accept that which would otherwise seem ludicrous. Therefore, those seeking the populace’s compliance needn’t make an appeal for the common good; instead, they have to scare them.

When circumstances shift dramatically in one direction, a correction will usually follow.

The generation that experienced the Great Depression and the Second World War understood conservation. Having gone without, they learned to treat food and possessions with reverence, knowing acutely what it meant to have little, or nothing. Ownership was security.

The time immediately following this must have been a dream for advertisers. Most didn’t have many things, meanwhile, fears were easy to identify and cater to. (Today’s advertiser, on the other hand, needs to invent or amplify a problem, in order to establish a compelling means of selling to consumers.) Just look to those post-war ads (from the “Golden Age of Advertising”) and you’ll find the same message repeated: There’s a product to solve any problem.

This led to a tidal wave of “want” that ran smack dab into another, and another, and another, and another. It fused with American Dream, encountered Generation Me, was given a seal of approval by Reganism, and was later propelled by the rocket-fuel of off-shore labor. Our situation matches that of a starving kid left to run amok at Baskin-Robbins (only to be forgotten there for the next 60 years).

Extend the metaphor and we find my generation representing the grand-children of the Baskin-Robbins shut-in. We haven’t gone without. Instead, most of us have lived believing there’s always more to be had. We’ve learned that it’s easier to buy new than fix anything. Disposable is our default setting, and we’re unwilling to shoulder a moment’s inconvenience to do the right thing. Even as we witness the brutal human cost that comes with our obsession with shiny things, we turn a blind eye.

In lock-step with this is advertising that tells us it’s not just acceptable to continue our bad behavior, but rather, our responsibility and birthright. Keep consuming, kid… The economy needs it, and you deserve it!

All of this might be a little more understandable if we found ourselves happy. This doesn’t seem to be the case, though. In fact, a recent study suggests that the French and Americans have the highest depression rates in the world. Yes, you read that correctly: It isn’t those living in abject poverty who are in need of billions of dollars of antidepressants—nope, it’s our sad, pampered asses.

Where does this leave us? With full closets, empty bank accounts, few job prospects, and the new American Dream: of simply being debt-free.

We need to reexamine how we look at our lives and our stuff and redefine our way of interfacing with the world. More than anything else, we have to unlearn our belief that buying more will lead us to happiness.

Otherwise, this addiction will—very literally—kill us.

It takes me until mid-day to clear my inbox. I type fast, act decisively, and maintain inbox zero. My problem is that I worry about being clear and polite.

These are bad impulses. I respond to things I shouldn’t. I choose words too carefully. I even use emoticons to avoid seeming snarky. (My hunch is that you have an equally unhealthy relationship with email.)

To lead a deliberate life, we need to overcome these instincts. Let’s admit it: few of us have such an abundance of time that we should be word-smithing these messages.

Were it productive work, fine, but our collectively-held email habit is getting in the way, and begs to be addressed. So, I’m calling it quits today, proposing a more sane course of action, and sharing it with you.

If you’re tired of email sucking the life out of your day, I ask you to place the following text in your email signature. It will help explain why your responses have become more brief, and perhaps encourage others follow suit:

Join the Single Sentence Email Project: http://gu.nu/w3H

Then, concentrate on learning a new habit: brevity. Respond to emails with as few words as possible. Aim for a sentence, but if just a word will do, use it.* It will take practice, and some might dislike it. I argue that this is a fair trade for getting more time to work (and live) productively.

* Mom, I’ll still send you emails that are longer than a sentence.

You will die. On that day, those close to you will mourn. Later, the same people will need to deal with the mundane aftermath. They’ll have to sort your possessions, clean your home, and (probably) fill in a bunch of unpleasant forms.

Under your bed, they’ll find a collection of old things you’d cast aside, meaning to eventually toss in the trash. Oddly, this—or something like it—will cause them to become sentimental. They may even feel drawn to hold on to this stuff, believing that by doing so, they can save a piece of you.

You are not your things, though, and no matter how much we might like, there just isn’t a back-up or auto-save. The time we have is all there is, and there’s no way back.

So, here’s my appeal to you: save those you love the burden of having to deal with these things. Before that day comes, pick five things you really enjoy, and plan to pass them on to those you expect will find joy in them. At the same time, ask them to ensure that everything else be donated to goodwill.

While you’re at it, take a look at all that stuff in the “everything else” category. Are you really willing to carry, store, and clean it for the rest of your life? You won’t take any of it with you anyway. Perhaps it’s time to jettison the nonessentials and lighten the load.

In spite of how much we put into work, few of us spend much time asking what we want from it. There seem to be a few key modes of employment. I’ve experienced all three, on some level, as well as the benefits and trade-offs of each.

We’ve all held a job at some point. The singularity of a job is rather beautiful: a straight-forward exchange of time for currency. In the ones I’ve worked, I’ve had little latitude, but that changed at day’s end, when I could turn work off and do as I pleased.

Some who work jobs start to ask questions. They wonder what it would be like to have more influence, or purpose, in their work. These people tend to move into careers. Their days are often longer, but in ways more enjoyable, as they become less constrained and more fully engaged. Career-minded people have a blurry division of work and life. (They also check their email obsessively and at inappropriate times.)

A third group seeks greater freedom, control, and involvement. Instead of working hard for someone else, they choose to do so for themselves and reap the associated rewards. What few of them initially realize, is that the cost of pursuing one’s own business/passion may be every evening, weekend, and holiday they used to take for granted.

I’ve noticed that there’s also a fourth state that a very small group of people arrive at. It involves realizing that the whole thing is a kind of hamster wheel, and that although the busy-making can be gratifying, it doesn’t—in the grand scheme of things—lead to all that much.

This state-of-mind leaves things less defined, mostly because there aren’t that many role models to follow. Out of all my friends, I know only one who has sold his stuff and uprooted his family, choosing to live in the tropics rather than a suburban wasteland.

By asking some bigger questions, one might find options more plentiful and diverse than previously imagined. They can live differently, indulge passions, travel and explore, or drop out entirely.

Every once in a while, you meet someone who’s grappling with these points, and their excitement is palpable. Sadly, few stay in this state for very long. Considering these questions is a sufficient challenge; acting upon their findings requires even more bravery and resolve. Meanwhile, the allure of being one-of-many is difficult to resist. This leaves an awfully long line of humans waiting to take their turn at the hamster wheel.

Life is very short if you spend it continually pressing fast-forward, scrambling from conference-calls to board meetings to soccer practice. I ask whether we owe it to ourselves to more carefully consider all that might be out there for us to see, experience, and share.

Our ideas about stuff are weird. We spout platitudes about how objects shouldn’t matter, while remaining locked into a pattern of feverish consumption. It’s akin to the way we treat food: we don’t savor it like the French, instead, we devour mass quantities.

We make bad decisions when it comes to both food and stuff. It seems we’re so concentrated on the “having” part that we fail to actually enjoy much. It’s shameful to admit, but we’re starved of happiness and experience due to our excess.

The time has come for us to reconsider our collective relationship with objects. What things do we really want, need, or enjoy? How many items do we wish to move, store, and maintain? Might we be willing to invest more in things that last longer, provide greater value, or are more pleasurable to use?

There’s little wrong with finding satisfaction in objects. In fact, loving things might be a path out of the madness our consumption has spawned. By carrying a lighter load, we find ourselves less burdened, and with more time for experiences. We also lessen our demands on a planet pushed past its carrying capacity.

To live deliberately, we must eschew the home overflowing with crap, in favor of a small number of selectively chosen objects. (I don’t know about you, but I’ll actually wear out a pair of good jeans, while the many pairs I bought “on sale” remain untouched, in a cluttered closet.)

This shift will require us to reprogram ourselves, starting with our values and habits. We need to beat down our hoarding tendencies, and curtail knee-jerk reactions to special offers and bulk purchasing. These will be replaced by the shared act of acquiring only things that improve our lives. In doing so, we will reacquaint ourselves with notions of quality and craftsmanship, and re-learn how to treat our stuff with care.

Buy less, experience more, and know the joy of good things.

It’s beautiful today. It’s crisp, the sun is shining, skies are blue, and the temperature is just right: neither melting, nor an ice box.

The spectacular mountains surrounding our city have been lightly dusted with fresh snow. I should be gliding down one of those peaks; instead, I’m looking at a screen: the same screen I spend most of my waking hours in front of.

Earlier in the week, I made casual plans to “play hooky,” and spend this day in the mountains. (I hadn’t anticipated how breathtaking it would be; I just wanted a little break from the grind.) Like so many other ideas we fail to act upon, though, this impulse was soon forgotten.

We complain about bad luck and a lack of opportunity, when we actually fail to see what’s right in front us. Meanwhile, instead of putting a small amount of effort into acting on our impulses, we retreat to the same old routine we’ve created for ourselves… and then complain about being bored.

Life offers us brilliant opportunities. Often, it even repeats itself, begging us to pause for a moment and take notice.

At other times, it is less forgiving, giving us just one chance to do something spectacular. These are fleeting instances. If we don’t show interest, they move along to someone else, never to be made available again.

Instead of lamenting what we didn’t “get,” we simply have to start paying attention.