The first hailstone hits the roof of the car with a sound like a small-caliber bullet hitting a sheet of galvanized steel. Then another. Then 14 more in a rapid-fire sequence that turns the sky into a percussion instrument. I’m sitting in the driver’s seat of a vehicle that cost me exactly $44,004, and I’m staring at a garage door that is currently guarding nothing but a graveyard of 2004-era particle board furniture and 54 boxes of things I might need if the world suddenly reverts to a pre-digital state. The driveway is only 24 feet long, but in this moment, the gap between my vulnerable car and the safety of the garage feels like a canyon. I have spent the last 4 minutes trying to remember the passcode for the keypad-typing it wrong 54 times in my head while my actual fingers fumble-only to realize it doesn’t matter anyway. Even if the door opened right now, there isn’t room for a bicycle, let alone a mid-sized sedan.
This is the tyranny of the ‘someday’ pile. We call it frugality. We call it being prepared. We tell ourselves that that half-empty bucket of 14-year-old joint compound or the stack of 84 magazines from the mid-nineties are assets. But as the ice marbles start to pockmark the hood of my car, the reality hits harder than the weather: My stuff has evicted me from my own life. I am paying interest on a loan for a car that is being destroyed by the elements because I am providing free, climate-controlled housing for a broken NordicTrack and 24 rolls of wallpaper from a house I sold back in 2014. It is a specific kind of madness that only humans seem to cultivate, this hoarding of the past at the expense of the present.
The View From 304 Feet
I met Anna J.-C. on a job site last year. She’s a wind turbine technician who spends most of her days 304 feet in the air. When you live your professional life tethered to a fiberglass blade in the middle of a Kansas wind farm, you develop a very particular relationship with gravity and volume. Anna doesn’t carry ‘someday’ tools. If a wrench isn’t necessary for the 184 bolts she has to check that afternoon, it stays on the ground. She told me once, while we were watching the sun go down over a field of 44 turbines, that people are the only creatures who build nests they can’t actually fit into. We spend our health to buy things, and then we spend our peace to store them.
“
Anna J.-C. looks at a garage differently than most. She sees it as a functional airlock. If it’s full of junk, the airlock is jammed. You’re stuck outside in the storm, or you’re stuck inside the house, suffocating under the weight of things that are supposedly ‘valuable.’
She once spent 24 hours helping her brother clear out his basement. They found 104 pounds of old plumbing fixtures that he had kept ‘just in case’ a pipe burst. When a pipe actually did burst, he didn’t use the old fixtures; he called a plumber who brought modern, code-compliant parts. The ‘someday’ items didn’t save him $474 in repairs; they just cost him a decade of usable floor space.
The Financial Weight of Indecision
Garage Floor
(At $404/Sq Ft)
We suffer from a scarcity delusion. We act as if the local hardware store will disappear tomorrow, or that we will never again find a deal as good as the one we got on those 34 mismatched ceramic tiles. But the floor space in your home is the most expensive real estate you own. If you live in a city where the average home price is $404 per square foot, and your garage is 404 square feet of unusable junk, you are essentially lighting that capital on fire. It is a psychological weight that sits in the back of your skull, a mental tab that never closes. My brain feels like my browser when I have 44 tabs open and the cooling fan starts to scream. It’s the same feeling as typing that password wrong over and over; the system is overloaded with garbage data.
[the space you inhabit is a mirror of the space in your head]
There is a profound liberation in the act of subtraction. We are conditioned to believe that more is always a net positive, but in a saturated world, more is just noise. When I finally called Junk Haulers Modesto to deal with the 4-car pileup of clutter in my storage bay, it wasn’t just about the physical objects. It was about reclaiming the 14% of my daily mental energy that was being spent on ‘managing’ that mess. Every time I walked past the garage, a small part of my brain would register the chaos. It would calculate the work required to fix it, feel the guilt of not doing it, and then bury that guilt under a layer of fresh anxiety. That cycle happens 24 times a day, every day, for years.
The Financial Ghost
I watched them haul away 74 bags of ‘what-ifs.’ There was a box of electronics from 2004-cables for devices that no longer have ports, chargers for phones that died a decade ago. Why was I keeping them? Because I remember what they cost. I was honoring the price tag, not the utility. But the price tag is a ghost. The money is gone whether the cable is in a drawer or in a recycling bin. By keeping it, I wasn’t getting my money’s worth; I was just letting the ghost occupy a room in my house.
I watched them take the 44-gallon drums of old paint. I watched the old recliner with the broken spring disappear into the maw of the truck. And as the floor of the garage began to emerge-a concrete expanse I hadn’t seen in 4 years-I felt my heart rate drop. It was as if I was finally able to breathe after being submerged in a pool of my own history. The garage isn’t just a place for cars; it’s a transition zone. It’s where the world ends and your sanctuary begins. If that transition zone is a nightmare of tripping hazards and cobwebs, you never truly feel like you’ve arrived home. You just move from one set of problems to another.
Clutter Creates Friction
Anna J.-C. says that in the turbine business, cleanliness is a safety requirement. A single oily rag or a misplaced bolt can lead to a fire or a mechanical failure that costs millions. Our homes aren’t that different. The clutter creates friction. It makes it harder to find the 4 tools you actually need, so you go out and buy a 5th one. It makes it harder to clean, so the dust piles up, affecting your lungs. It makes it harder to move, so you stay stagnant. We think we are preserving our future options by keeping everything, but we are actually narrowing them. We are tethering ourselves to a version of our lives that no longer exists.
(Nearly 3 full days lost to the past)
I think about the 64 hours I’ve spent looking for things in that garage over the last few years. 64 hours of my life I will never get back, spent digging through boxes of Christmas decorations from 2004 to find a single Phillips-head screwdriver. If I had just cleared the space 4 years ago, I would have gained nearly three full days of life. That is the real cost. It’s not the $44 in scrap value; it’s the time. It’s the ability to pull the car in when the hail starts and walk into the house without brushing against a dusty treadmill.
The Blank Canvas
I finally got the garage door open, and for the first time in 54 months, there is nothing in the way. I pull the car in. The silence inside the garage is absolute… I had to decide that the space was worth more than the stuff. The ‘someday’ pile is a lie we tell ourselves to avoid the work of living today.
SPACE CLAIMED
There is a specific kind of grief in letting go, I suppose. Each object is a tether to a memory or a dream of who we thought we would be. That surfboard in the corner represented the year I was going to move to the coast. The bread maker represented the version of me that woke up early to bake. Letting go of the item feels like admitting that those versions of ourselves are dead. But they aren’t dead; they’ve just evolved. And by holding onto the physical remains of those old dreams, we don’t have the hands free to grab the new ones.
I stand in the center of the 24-foot-wide space and just look at the floor. It’s just grey concrete with a few oil stains from 2014, but to me, it looks like a blank canvas. I can work here. I can breathe here. I can park my car here. The tyranny is over, not because I finally used all that stuff, but because I finally realized I didn’t have to. Today is all we actually have. The rain is still falling, but for the first time in a long time, I am exactly where I need to be, and there is nothing standing in my way.