Living in 80 square feet

For the past seven years, my personal living space has been under 100 square feet — and sometimes substantially so.^[1] My current bedroom is under 80 square feet, and I don’t have a closet. I grew up in the suburbs where space is cheap and I was accustomed to having quite a bit of it. Then I went away to college and had to share a room with another person.

Then I moved to New York. After living here in even more cramped quarters for a few years, I’ve come to see a small room as more of a feature than a bug.

That’s because constraints breed innovation. Or at least fun problems to solve. Here are a few things I’ve learned living in small quarters:

You can find furniture that fits. When I moved into my current room, I needed a computer desk. I knew exactly where I wanted to put it, how big it needed to be, and roughly what I wanted the desk to look like. I went to Ikea and looked around. They had maybe a dozen computer desks, none of which fit my criteria. I considered having a desk custom-made but decided that was extravagant.

Then I remembered: We live in the 21st century. We no longer have to be content with choosing from only a few dozen computer desks. So I went to Amazon and searched for “computer desk.”

Yes, you’re reading that correctly: Amazon offers about six thousand computer desks!^[2] Eat your heart out, Barry Schwartz.

This means that, if you’re willing to put in a little effort, you can find a desk that fits your room really, really well. At least, that’s what I did, and I managed to find a desk that fits my needs just about as well as I could have asked for.

Get your cables under control. This one was so easy I don’t know why it took my so long to do it. I just mounted my surge protector beneath my desk, added a few twist ties, and viola — no more cable clutter. This also has the benefit of making cleaning around your cables much easier.

Grow up. While the horizontal space in my room may leave something to be desired, I’m fortunate to have gloriously tall ceilings. I’ve mounted a whiteboard, coat hooks, and two bookshelves on my walls. One of the bookshelves runs along the wall next to my bed. The other is mounted eight feet high, and there’s still plenty of room for me to build higher. I like to think of my room as like Manhattan in this respect, except I get to look at exposed brick instead of New Jersey.

Stop putting things away. Every time I clean up and find myself “putting things away” I know it’s only a matter of time until I have to clean them up again. The clue is right there in the saying: putting things “away.” Not where they can be easily found, not where they’re likely to stay, not where they’re properly organized, but “away.” Don’t get me wrong, some things should be put away, like a Christmas tree stand, since you know you won’t need that for another year. But other stuff almost by definition can’t be put away, like books you’re currently reading or mail you’ve yet to process. Next time you’re putting something “away,” ask yourself if there’s a place you can put it that makes your room feel cleaner but is still accessible. Find an equilibrium state for your things.

Get rid of stuff you don’t need. For someone who doesn’t shop for clothes, I manage to amass an impressive amount of clothing. I also have a hard time getting rid of stuff, usually because I either tell myself I’ll surely need it someday or I can’t get rid of it because it has sentimental value. This is unsustainable, and luckily a friend taught me a trick for clothes that you’re having trouble ditching: Go through your clothing and take out all the stuff that you think you should get rid of but can’t bring yourself to. For anything that has sentimental value, take a picture of it. Then fold it neatly and stick it in a bag. Place the bag under your bed and go back to living your life.

If after a few weeks or months you haven’t found yourself searching for that old X-Men t-shirt or pair of cargo shorts (why I was unsure about those I’ll never know), take the bag out from under your bed and donate it to the Salvation Army, Second Mile, or Purple Heart. You already know you don’t really need or want any of the stuff in the bag, since you’ve been living just fine without it, and you won’t ever lose the memories of it because you’ve already taken a picture.

Bonus: Before you forget, record what you donated so you can be sure to write it off come tax time.

1. For my junior year of college I had a 235 square foot single, but I’m going to ignore that.↩
2. OK, the number is actually smaller than that because there are some erroneous results. Still, my point stands: Amazon sells a staggering number of desks.↩

posted by Nicholas ⋅ Comments Off ⋅ tagged design, housing

An open letter to my future self

It may already be too late. The rigidity of custom and the tyranny of experience may already make the point of this letter moot by the time you read it, but I write nonetheless in the hope that such is not the case, that your mind is still open to persuasive and something beyond self-serving rationalizations masquerading as unbiased reason.

Look around you. With each day, the new world progresses and those of the old world scream more about the base nature of the latest changes. How before — it’s never quite clear when this was, but assuredly not today — Things Were Better. Television had a more wholesome approach, music was created by actual musicians and not greedy producers, shots in a movie lasted longer than 50 milliseconds, and everything wasn’t commercialized. People had to communicate face-to-face, and they were patient enough to actually wait for things. Politicians had more of a sense of patriotism or honor or duty. Children obeyed their parents. Sex meant something.

Have I made my point? No? I’m talking about the perpetual love affair with the great past that so many people have. I used to just think that it was a personality thing; that there were some accustomed to dynamism who welcomed change with open arms, and that there were others forever wed to the status quo. And while I still believe that appreciation for change is a characteristic unevenly distributed across the population, I no longer think it’s something we typically hold onto as we age. Its natural course is to be diminished in the aged, regardless of philosophy or politics.

Let me be blunt: With every passing day beyond some point in adolescence, humans tend to become less open to change. We are still, on the whole, comfortable with whatever changes that took place while we were coming of age. But the next round, the ones welcomed by those even just five years our junior, we greet with indifference, skepticism or outright hostility.

Why? I don’t know. I have some hypotheses, united by their common lack of evidence, the most obvious of which I will here assert for lack of a realistic alternative. It may prove to have an evolutionary advantage to wish to keep the world as it was when we originally ascended into adulthood, for our skills will be best developed for the technologies of that time; our vocabulary most tuned to that day’s vernacular; our worldly conceptions formed by that period’s prevailing events and beliefs.

But none of the above justifies stemming the tide of progress. An affinity for traditional sex-based divisions of labor does not make denying women’s entry into the workforce acceptable. Comfort with segregated schools doesn’t legitimize their continued existence. And being accustomed to traditional conceptions of marriage is a vestige of the past, not a basis for denying gay people equal rights.

But, you are almost certainly thinking to yourself, surely there is a large difference between desegregation and the crass nature of today’s television, right? And of course you are correct: Obviously not all change can be legitimately called social progress, and not all progressions are of equal importance. There are in fact immense differences. But the groundwork for the most significant social progress is laid gradually over time, much of it by supposedly “crass” cultural artifacts. When The Simpsons first hit the airwaves in the early nineties, many predicted the downfall of Western civilization. Twenty years later, the show has proven to be a groundbreaking and important piece of American culture. The fringe has a tendency to become the mainstream which with time can become venerated. Think jazz or rock music.

So why am I writing this letter? To encourage you — no, to implore you — to fight the all too natural tendency to become obstinate and stuck in your ways and to dismiss the culture and values of the day in favor of those nurtured in your youth. What terrifies me is that no amount of rational persuasion will be enough to convince you, my future self, to buck the trend and remain a friend of modernity. But I have never subscribed to the idea that we are not ultimately in control of our own fates, and thus still hold out hope that somehow, in at least some small way, this letter will have an effect, and that it will help you live a long life, waking each day with eyes open to wonder and a mind open to change.

posted by Nicholas ⋅ 2 comments » ⋅ tagged progress, random thinking