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The Art of Letting Go | The Minimalists | TEDxFargo
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CEFR Level
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Subtitles (309 segments)
Translator: Morgane Quilfen Reviewer: Helena Bedalli
Joshua: My name is Joshua Fields Millburn and this is Ryan Nicodemus.
Together, we run a website called theminimalists.com
and we promise the folks we'd kick things off this afternoon
with something inspirational,
(Laughter)
something to get you all excited.
(Cheers)
So, I'd like to talk about something uplifting.
(Cheers) (Laughter)
Let's talk about death!
If any of you are uncomfortable talking about death,
now might be a good time for you to leave.
(Laughter)
I have a feeling we will be seeing him again in a minute.
Anyway, yeah, we could talk about death.
Let's see, seven years ago,
I was 28 years old, and up until that point in my life,
I had achieved everything I ever wanted:
The six-figure salary, the luxury cars, the closets full of expensive clothes,
the big suburban house with more toilets than people,
and all of this stuff
to filled every corner of my consumer-driven lifestyle.
Man, I was living the American Dream!
And then my mom died. And my marriage ended.
Both in the same month.
And these two events forced me to look around
and start to question what had become my life's focus.
You know what I realized?
I realized I was so focused on so-called "success" and "achievement,"
and especially, on the accumulation of stuff.
Yeah, I was living the American Dream,
but it wasn't my dream.
And it took getting everything I thought I wanted,
to realize that everything I ever wanted wasn't actually what I wanted at all.
You see, just a year earlier, mom, she moved from Ohio down to Florida,
to finally retire.
Because that's what you do when you live in the Midwest.
And, well a few months after she moved down there,
she found out she had lung cancer.
And a few months after that,
she was gone.
I spent a lot of time with her down in Florida that year,
as she went through her chemo and radiation.
And when she passed, I realized I needed to make one last trip,
this time it was to deal with her stuff.
So, I flew from Dayton, Ohio, down to St. Pete Beach, Florida,
and when I arrived, I found about three apartments' worth of stuff
crammed in a mom's tiny one-bedroom apartment.
But don't get me wrong, it's not like mom was a hoarder,
she wasn't.
I mean, I didn't find any dead cats in her freezer.
(Laughter)
But she owned a lot of stuff.
65 years worth of accumulation.
Did you all know
that the average American household has more than 300,000 items in it?
300,000!
But of course, most of us aren't hoarders, right?
No, we just hold onto a lot of stuff.
We hold onto a lifetime of collected memories.
I know mom certainly did.
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