On this episode of the Simple Life podcast, Brett sits down with author Gary Collins to talk about his new book, Decluttering Your Life: How To Live Off The Grid, and why it s so easy to get caught up in the consumerism driven cult of clutter.
00:00:30.000We begin with why it's so easy to get caught up in the consumerism-driven cult of clutter, how the clutter it generates extends far past a person's tangible stuff, and the cost it exacts from our lives in both financial and psychological terms.
00:00:42.260Gary then explains how to simplify and declutter every aspect of your life, the material stuff, of course, but also the technological, informational, and even social things that end up cluttering our life.
00:00:51.760Along the way, this self-described redneck hippie offers no-nonsense advice that refreshingly departs from the kind of soft-glow, artfully-arranged, white-background pictures of minimalism you might find on Instagram, because Gary's not on Instagram.
00:01:03.280That would be clutter, according to Gary.
00:01:04.740After the show's over, check out our show notes at aom.is slash simple life.
00:01:08.340Gary Collins, welcome back to the show.
00:01:22.900Thanks for having me on, Brett. I appreciate it.
00:01:24.520So we had you on back in June of 2020 to talk about your book, about going off the grid, living off the grid, buying a place, drilling a well, getting your own power with solar or whatever you want to use, propane.
00:01:38.360That was episode number 622, for those who want to check that out.
00:01:41.240You got another book out, and it's all about decluttering.
00:01:45.940And I think this ties in with the previous books you've written, because I imagine you had to do a lot of decluttering and simplifying before you decided to move off grid.
00:01:55.680But I'm curious, sort of your evolution of this, did the desire to simplify your life and get rid of your stuff come first?
00:02:02.480And then you thought, well, I've already gotten rid of a lot of my stuff.
00:02:05.040Why don't I just sell my house and move out to the wild?
00:02:08.500Or did you have the goal, like, I want to live off the grid, so I got to sell my stuff to do that?
00:02:13.980Well, I had the goal to live rural first.
00:02:18.020Then the off-grid thing came later, but it was way before, because I grew up in the middle of nowhere.
00:02:22.820So I was trying to return to that, and that probably happened, I don't know, gosh, five years before I left the government.
00:03:24.020Yeah, well, we better backtrack because it gets a little confusing.
00:03:27.020I have off-grid books, and then I have the Simple Life series, which is written more for, you know, the everyday American who's not looking to necessarily go and live off grid.
00:04:09.300And I think as time went on, I'd accumulated a lot of stuff.
00:04:15.120And it was because I'd left that kind of, you know, shelter of being poor, simple living, went to city living in the government, had more money, you know, than anyone in my family had ever had.
00:04:27.360And I think it just, the society of our consumer society today was rubbed off on me and I kind of was buying in.
00:04:35.800I hadn't fully gone into the cult of clutter, but I was in it for sure.
00:04:40.280And for people to understand, it's this mentality of we all feel that we need a lot of objects and shiny objects, as I say, to make ourselves happy, right?
00:05:14.140It would shift to something else, which would be a production economy.
00:05:17.160So, yeah, the cult of clutter is kind of falling into that, I must consume, I must spend my time on the internet, on the phone, shopping, nonstop.
00:05:27.300And that's kind of where it came from.
00:05:29.860And besides consumer goods, what else do we clutter our lives with?
00:06:14.460That was the only news you were getting all day unless it was a major update, you know, John Kennedy getting assassinated or something like that.
00:06:21.540Or, you know, you would have a break and they'd tell you something major happened on the network.
00:06:26.240Otherwise, that was it, you know, or you got the newspaper.
00:06:29.380Now, I mean, you can literally turn on the channel and get bombarded anytime, anywhere, and not only that, but the internet.
00:06:44.960So the information side is continuous.
00:06:47.640And the relation to that, obviously, is technology because you use the technology to get drowned with that information.
00:06:52.780And on the technological side, it's, you know, I always, I talk about this in the book about, do you need all these gadgets, you know, as an everyday person?
00:07:03.200I run my business on a laptop, Wi-Fi connection, and I have a smartphone.
00:12:19.380And I talked – I don't know if we talked about it in the last interview, but I always talk about my dining room table I had in my house in San Diego that I had eaten at a handful of times.
00:12:28.340But I spent six months driving myself crazy, finding the perfect table that was way too big, never used it, hardly.
00:12:38.100But I had – when I went to get rid of it, I had an emotional attachment to it for some reason.
00:12:42.940And I remembered shopping for it, setting it up, and how happy I was.
00:12:47.480I finally found the table that matched and worked.
00:12:50.860And because I grew up poor, we ate off TV trays.
00:15:30.300Yeah, and you know who's really good at it, and this is an advertisement, and it will slowly kill you for sure, is Coca-Cola.
00:15:36.960Coca-Cola is a master at branding and advertising.
00:15:42.260Camel was pretty good, too, Camel Cigarettes.
00:15:44.020You know, but they always – if you watch their commercials, and I do it as a business owner, I look at them, and I see what they're doing, and it's always this emotional attachment.
00:15:52.400You have a Coke, and everyone in there is having this happy, joyous moment, and they're attaching that to drinking Coke.
00:15:59.280That's a pretty heavy mental mind screw, you know?
00:16:24.400But actually, I find, like, the commercials where they try to manipulate your emotions, it turns me off.
00:16:28.560I actually like the commercials where they just tell you – I just like the commercials that tell you what the product does.
00:16:32.180Like, the one that I like a lot is that one – it's, like, an annoying commercial that would appear, like, at, you know, 12 o'clock in the morning.
00:16:38.600It was, like, some headache medicine you'd rub on your head.
00:17:46.020So I see how the health industry perpetuates us to stay on this wheel, because if we're not on the wheel, there's no money, because healthy people don't bring in billions and billions of dollars.
00:17:59.220And so what we do is we clutter ourselves up with all these gizmos, gadgets, all this, you know, sweat-wicking clothing.
00:18:05.400I go, you know, I wear it, cotton t-shirt that I pay eight bucks for that goes through an evolution of life of five to 10 years before it turns into a rag and an oil rag at the end.
00:18:16.460You know, we don't need all this stuff.
00:18:17.920The human body is already built for everything we need it to do.
00:18:30.400And so what we do is we buy all these, you know, 15 different, you know, bars and energy bar and a protein bar and this and, you know, how many people I've forgotten, how many people I open up their refrigerator and it's pretty much all condiments and packaged food and that's it.
00:18:51.280It's everything's packaged, you know, and you just keep accumulating food too.
00:18:56.760I've seen that happen to you go in and literally open a shelf and it's like just every food item you can known to man and half of it's never been touched.
00:19:06.440So we clutter ourselves up with all these food items.
00:19:09.660And when it comes to the human body, it's very simple what we need.
00:20:53.400When you look at your, the human body and what you're supposed to consume and how you're supposed to move in those basic elements,
00:20:58.180you'll see how quickly your life is cluttered up with food, exercise, gizmos, and just everything under the sun that you don't need to be healthy.
00:21:09.620Prescriptions, you know, multiple prescriptions.
00:21:12.760Most of your health conditions today are caused by our poor diet and lack of exercise.
00:21:18.700Well, and going back to that idea of being cluttered, like the food aisles and grocery stores are a lot more cluttered than they were 30 years ago.
00:21:29.000And like, again, this is, because we're a consumer-driven economy, companies got to figure out, like, well, one thing that spurs humans to do something is novelty.
00:21:39.120And so instead of selling more Cheerios, just like regular Cheerios, what do you do?
00:21:43.680Well, you come up with like 20 different types of Cheerios.
00:27:12.680Now we're increasing, you know, student loan debt is out of control.
00:27:16.240Matter of fact, it's the next bubble coming.
00:27:19.820And then, you know, they go, well, go get a house.
00:27:22.860Well, now your house, you don't buy a house that fits what you need.
00:27:25.940You buy the biggest house you can possibly afford because they tell you you can afford it.
00:27:30.060By the time you line all that debt up, by the time usually right around $25,000, $26,000, you're almost in so much debt that you can't get out of it.
00:28:09.100I proved, because I was in real estate, and I still am, I still do it as a side business, that the average American will lose money in their house.
00:28:16.780And I got a bunch of pushback on that in the very beginning.
00:28:32.140And I'd lost, I don't know, $20,000, $25,000, even though it showed I made like $35,000.
00:28:38.140Because it's shown, you know, they tell you that, so you think you're making money.
00:28:46.720But even if you do really well, like the market right now, unless you bought 12 months ago, and you're going to flip that house really quick, and it's hot, sure, you'll make money.
00:28:56.340But most people live in a house six to seven years, and then move on and get another one.
00:29:03.040You literally will, if you did that your whole life, you will burn over a million dollars doing that process.
00:29:09.700You know, it's, you know, the financial side, it's just, it's part of the cult of clutter, because we keep buying these items that we can't afford.
00:29:18.920Then we finance, and then it keeps piling and piling and piling until, well, not only you overwhelmed with the things you've bought, they have financially overwhelmed you as well.
00:29:30.900All right. And so, I guess the simple thing of that is just keep your finances simple, pay cash when you can, and avoid debt.
00:29:40.800And like, if you have debt, the way you declutter is to start paying that down.
00:29:45.820And you lay it, right. And there's different, like, everyone's got their way of, you know, the best way to pay down your debt.
00:29:51.440Your advice is like, find what works for you, keep it simple, and just take action and do it.
00:29:55.100And that's, isn't that the biggest problem? And I always tell people, we're also a country of pontification and yelling.
00:30:02.740I'm all, stop. Stop yelling. Stop blaming everyone else. Just do it. Action. Action pays the bills. Action is life.
00:30:12.220You know, if you're not doing something positively every day to better yourself, it's going to get ugly.
00:30:19.740And we're kind of seeing that. You know, we're seeing a lot of people today who've lost their way.
00:30:24.380I've been there. And that's what I mean. I'm not pointing fingers and saying I'm the, you know, supreme being.
00:30:29.420I'm this life clairvoyant of perfection. I am not. You know, I struggle every day just like everyone else, too.
00:30:35.580But one thing I don't do is I don't give up. I always, every day, I have something set to better myself, to better my life.
00:30:44.920And if you keep that attitude, you know, the first couple years are rough. You know, we've all done it.
00:30:50.060You know, you get stacked up in debt. You haven't, you know, you've lost your purpose.
00:30:54.200You don't know what you're doing in life. You're kind of floundering.
00:30:57.740And you go, it's kind of hopeless. So what happens is people give up and they don't do anything positively.
00:31:03.720And you end up in this vicious whip cycle, you know, and I think that's what ends up getting us in the cult of clutter, too, is we're buying items to kind of fulfill us.
00:31:14.360We think it's going to fulfill us. It makes us happy for a short period of time.
00:31:18.180And once that happiness runs out, we go get the next item.
00:31:22.080It's just inner wiring. It's a dopamine hit. It is truly a chemical hit.
00:31:27.820And again, the companies know this. They know if they influence us the right way, that will do it.
00:31:35.520So another area that you talk about our lives being decluttered, I think people only think of this as this could be cluttered, is your social life.
00:31:44.240So what does a cluttered social life look like? And how do you get a handle on that without being a misanthrope?
00:31:51.380Yeah, yeah. And I blame social media for that today.
00:31:55.440I grew up, I still have the same friends that I grew up with as a young child.
00:31:59.880Some of us were babysat together. That's how far back it goes.
00:32:03.720And I've always kept my social circle very small.
00:32:08.060And what I notice is it definitely decreases drama, for sure.
00:32:11.580But with social media, now you can literally communicate.
00:33:18.960And we love, you know, imparting it on other humans.
00:33:22.620So with that, I always tell people, keep your social, your close social groups very small, you know, and it doesn't mean you can't have multiple.
00:33:30.520Like, like I have people I ride my bikes with, you know, that's a group, but they're not, not, they're not super close.
00:33:38.860My super close friends are people I talk to on a regular basis, right?
00:33:42.880I can tell them my deep feelings, you know, I can, I can share things that I wouldn't share with other people.
00:33:50.660If that makes sense, you know, keep your group small.
00:33:53.760Don't, there's a point where you have enough friends and I'm not saying you, you hide yourself or anything like that, but.
00:34:02.340But most people actively search out relationships that they don't need.
00:34:09.000Well, another area too, I think it's kind of related because you mentioned social media, is having a cluttered information life.
00:34:15.940And I think, I think everyone understands kind of has felt that, that having so much information at their disposal is just making them miserable.
00:35:41.640You know, if it's not something that will better your life and you can learn from it to improve yourself, you got to be careful with it.
00:35:50.400Don't go down those rabbit holes of, of useless videos and things like that.
00:35:55.780You know, I'm not saying, you know, never do it, but you have to be really, really careful with that information because it will derail you.
00:36:04.920It will get you completely off track before you know it, especially the news cycle.
00:36:09.300My news cycle is I put it on in the morning and it's a business channel and I hear it in the background.
00:36:15.240I don't sit down and actively watch it.