The Urban Nomad: Portable, Mobile, Compact Lifestyle
Imagine being able to pack up all your belongings and be gone in under an hour or two.
You never know whether a natural disaster, social upheaval situation, or other trouble might force you to split.
Ditch the subwoofer – Use decent 2.0 desktop speaker system if necessary (that means two speakers to handle everything), or just get some good headphones.
Avoid air mattresses with air cells that run length-wise, rather look for ones with vertical cells.
Cook like MacGuyver – be creative with your kitchen accessories, using one tool for multiple jobs. You don’t need an egg whisker when a fork will do. Avoid the useless bulky gadgets unless they’re expendable or absolutely necessary.
Forget the clunky salad spinner, just strain the stuff.
Donate unused clothing – If you don’t wear something during the course of a year, you don’t need
Go for quality, compactness, and durability
It’s true that paying more means paying less in the long run.
Better to buy it right the first time instead of upgrading later and having the old thing taking up space.
This goes for shoes, computers, and anything that you intend to use often and for a long time.
If you’re looking for maximum durability with lowest price, you’ll have to seek out used or military surplus goods,
No separate dvd player, amplifiers, plasma screen, huge speakers necessary… no, just the laptop and its two external speakers to watch movies and online videos.
As for the television, that’s what your laptop is for.
Folding Chairs/Couches – They make decent replacements for that heavy couch. These are bucket chairs, casual leaned-back chairs, etc… that go into a living room and fold up nicely. Try them out first to make sure they are comfortable, otherwise you’ll end up not even using them.
eBooks – Unless you absolutely cannot stand reading on the computer, it’s better to have a collection of eBooks than several boxes of heavy hardcopies
It’s not about shriveling up, materially starving, and withdrawing from the world, rather think of it as converting quantity into quality, becoming more honed like the edge of knife, going for zen-like simplicity and efficiency, becoming more skilled with a fewer number of higher quality items.
