Preamble

About 9 months ago, I decided to move to a new city halfway across the world.

One big difference to previous international moves — this wasn’t my first rodeo — was that this move was, as far as I knew back then, as good as permanent: a new home base, as it were. Accordingly, I shipped…just about everything.

The only things that, in hindsight, didn’t make sense to ship were those that I didn’t want to wait to have: I shipped basically all of my coffee equipment, but in hindsight probably shouldn’t have shipped things like my V60, because I wanted to use that the day I landed (and my check-in suitcases had no quota left for these relatively voluminous things, especially as I already had the Aeropress and Lido 3 in there). So I ended up buying a duplicate pourover setup pretty quickly.

Once my shipment arrived, then, I had quite a lot of things to sort through and set up.

About 3 months ago — so 6 months into living in the new city — I returned for a 3-month visit. Perhaps time away had given me the emotional distance I needed to re-assess my motivations for setting up a new home.

Regardless, I had started to wonder, given the wonder that remote work is, if I could set up my new home without entirely abandoning my old one. I decided to give it a go; in any case, I wanted to see friends and family in the old city.

Such is the wonder of remote work.

The return

I was a little apprehensive about making such a long trip back: I’d cleared out the old apartment almost entirely and so would be going back to a kitchen without pots, pans, or cutlery; there wasn’t even a desk left.

Even those would be relatively easy to replace: what about my home server, which I’d also moved?

Not having easy access to an abundance of power tools, spare computers, and boxes full of cables for projects on a whim…. Would this just end up being 3 months of doing…not a whole lot other than seeing friends on the weekend?

Well anyway, the flight had been booked, and the cheapest tickets aren’t modifiable…if I wanted to return early, I could buy a new ticket — but then why not just put those funds towards buying whatever items I was missing most?

Of course, I could bring a few things back, but 1 suitcase for 3 months really isn’t much (yet flying anything but economy in this…economy is).

So what did I decide to bring back?

• My most worn-out-but-still-serviceable clothes: if indeed I was to maintain this home in the old city, I’d be here probably no more than 3 months per year, so the priority was to keep the nice clothes in the new city.
• Shoes and sandals, of which the sandals will stay here because the new city isn’t warm enough for me to make use of 2 pairs of sandals.
• 2 mechanical keyboards, because I’d shipped all of them and wasn’t maximising their utility.
• “My” violin — this is one where it’s simply not possible to “just buy another one”.
• My favourite microphone (Audio Technica AT-2020, which was my first proper microphone and which is now in its 10th year of use). I will eventually get another large diaphragm condenser so I can keep one in each location.
• An audio interface (over the years, I have ended up with 3).

It was quite amazing how at-home I felt the moment I walked through the door. The difference of a home you designed yourself versus a home some commercial landlord only cares about if the roof collapses — or, heaven forbid, you dare to drill a hole in the wall. Credit to my family for not changing anything whilst I was gone and they’d even moved a folding table and monitor in for me to use whilst I figured things out.

So here began an interesting experiment: how much would I need to re-buy to “live” properly for 3 months? A golden opportunity to find out, since I have accumulated a lot in my life — and a lot of high-quality items that have stood the test of time, therefore never actually giving me a proper chance to find out if I could do without it.

The answer: surprisingly little. Since coming back, I have acquired or gained access to (in terms of things for daily use, not from shopping for fun, and includes borrowing from friends/family):

• A second monitor, making for a 3-monitor setup including the Macbook Pro’s monitor.
• 2 microphone stands (1 bought, one picked up from next to a bin where someone had left it with barely a scratch).
• A desk
• A pressure cooker (no home is complete without one!)
• A pourover kettle (since I’d shipped my Stagg)
• Two frying pans
• 1 saucepan
• A small set of plates, bowls, cutlery, and cooking utensils
• 3 wine glasses (originally 1, but then I saw 2 Riedel glasses in a charity shop…)
• A few tshirts and pairs of pants, some of which will return with me
• A guitar, a flute, and a piano
• A yoga mat and foam roller

Of course, there are some things that I miss; just a few that come to mind:

• My guitar
• “My” flute
• My clay teapots and assortment of teas — especially the raw pu-erh cakes
• All the camera lenses I didn’t bring back with me
• My studio monitors

But overall, on a daily basis? I’m at the end of my trip and it hasn’t felt bad at all; indeed, I almost feel like I’m going to miss this place when I fly back (in no small part because the apartment I’m renting is so shoddy and overpriced — though I knew right from the start that the first apartment I picked in a city I knew nothing about wouldn’t be the right one).

When I look around me here, it’s abundantly clear that even this newly-rebuilt home isn’t a minimal lifestyle at all; to a great extent, that just shows how much I own — and is an interesting benchmark for how much I won’t need to replace when things start to wear out or break.

Thoughts on owning things

I have always believed that it’s important to have a comfortable, well-equipped home. To a great extent, that means owning things — but then owning too much leads to clutter, and that’s hardly comfortable.

It seems to me that I can make do without a huge amount as long as I have things that help me create in the domains I’m interested in. The things I acquired upon returning to the old apartment, and the things in the new city that I miss, are largely about creation and “doing”: kitchenware, musical instruments, computers…. (Granted, part of the point of a home server is to avoid “doing” via automation, and yes I do watch a lot of videos on my computers, which counts as passive consumption.)

Developing interests around creating — active hobbies, rather than passive consumption — can be expensive in terms of both money and time: musical instruments are not cheap in the slightest and are a lifelong journey in practice, for example; and having a well-equipped kitchen requires no shortage of planning and, to some extent, expense. But, having put that initial investment into a home I can be very content in (and, to be clear, my homes in both cities are small: no bigger than 30 m^2), I find myself quite able to just enjoy life; somehow, I don’t really have a desire to seek the next high by making some big purchase or changing things up. It is enough to sit at the piano and sightread fugues for 2 hours. More than enough, in fact, as far as my brain’s concerned.

Of course, none of this would be possible to such a great extent if my life weren’t so digital: the fact that I can have all my books on a Kindle, that I can create endlessly on a single Macbook Pro, etc. does save a lot of space.

I have long maintained that it’s really just my musical instruments that stop me from living the van life. If I’d been more inclined to learn the harmonica and ukulele rather than dabble with almost every instrument in the Western classical orchestra, I might be in a better position to try that.

Still, of all the places I’ve travelled and all the things I’ve done, few things more consistently bring me pleasure than a morning of music. (I realised a few years ago that it basically wasn’t possible for me to spend less than 2 hours at the piano — my poor neighbours.)