A Life Less Throwaway. Tara Button
4. Identifying which items you need to fulfil those priorities and to live comfortably without being swayed by status. (Chapters 9–11)
5. Identifying your true tastes and sense of style so you can buy future-proof items. (Chapters 3 and 7)
6. Identifying your values and the brands that reflect those values. (Chapter 9)
7. Taking stock of the items you already have to understand your present tastes, priorities and buying habits. (Chapter 10)
8. Letting go of the clutter and the superfluous. (Chapter 10)
9. Developing a healthy attitude towards money. (Chapter 15)
10. Choosing each new item with your long-term priorities and tastes in mind. (Chapters 7, 12 and 13)
11. Developing the skills to take care of and keep the things you’ve chosen to bring into your life. (Chapter 14)
This book contains practical exercises on how to put all these steps into action. Skipping straight to the exercises may leave you with a shallower understanding of why they are important. However, if time is short and you just want to get cracking, go ahead – there’s a list of exercises on the next page, or simply flick through the book for them.
This is above all a book on how to be happy in the ultra-commercial world we live in right now. It’s meant to be useful, so please use it in the way that’s most helpful to you.
Let’s get started!
Persuade yourself of the importance of non-material actions
Simple ways to combat materialism every day
Identifying your homeware aesthetic
Free yourself from celebrity influence
Make your own adverts
Ad-blocking
Separate lifestyle and product
Finding your fashion identity
Dressing up for the roles you play
Shape up
Find your true colours
The mindfully curated capsule
Turning necessities into luxuries
If you were the last person on the planet
Refusing to feel ashamed
How to increase your sense of being valued by your tribe
Digging deeper to find purpose
Discovering your passions
Kill yourself off (metaphorically)
Bringing it all together to find your ‘42’
Your purpose and your purchasing
The common threads of taste
Where your values and brand values meet
An exercise in commitment
The life-less-throwaway challenge
Write your own unwish list
Nourishing your self-esteem
Identifying impulse-buying triggers
Preventing lost property
Memory training for glasses
Saying goodbye to an object
Prioritising where your money goes
Find your freedoms
Connect with your special people
Find your tribe
Grow every day
Tell yourself a better story
Have a purposeful weekend
Be a friend to yourself
Improving your home’s mood
How to resist a world that’s trying to make us broke and lonely
Our relationship with ‘stuff’ may sit squarely at the centre of this book, but I should be clear from the outset that the purpose of it isn’t to make you obsess over material things. In fact, it’s to help you do the opposite. I want to give you the tools to understand what you need and don’t need, and how to make the objects in your life work for you in the long term.
THE BENEFITS OF MINDFUL CURATION
We only have a limited amount of money, headspace and time to spend as we frolic on this planet and we can very easily waste a huge amount of each on meaningless stuff. Mindful curation helps us to free up all three, so that we can spend them enjoying the things we find most meaningful.
Being more mindful about what we buy protects us from impulse spending and gives us more resilience to advertising and marketing manipulation. So we find that we start saving money over time. Crucially, though, it doesn’t feel as though we’re making a sacrifice. Savings come naturally out of a better understanding of what we need and what best serves us, which is usually much less than the average person buys.
When we practise mindful curation, we’re also releasing ourselves from the trivial, the bland and the shoddy, and living a life where the objects around us perfectly match our needs, pull their weight, reflect our values and put a smile on our face. This frees up our time and energy for the things that matter most, like family, friends, pursuing our passions and finally finding out who wins Game of Thrones.
THE BENEFITS OF LONGER-LASTING PRODUCTS
Not all products are made equal, and I believe we’ve left longevity out of our decision-making for far too long. The commercial world does everything it can to tempt us away from longevity, but that only serves its ever-hungry self, not us, the people who have to deal with