Minimalist Travel – All the Benefits of Liberating Yourself

The Experience of Owning Less and Travelling More

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The concept of minimalist travel has completely changed our lives. It is true that you never quite understand something unless you experience it for yourself. Lately, we have been pondering on how our circumstances and our choices have shaped our lives so far, and if we had to pinpoint one that has not only affected our overall quality of life, but also our relationship with travel (yes, relationship – we are committed!) it would be decluttering.

So here lies the conundrum: is it travel that leads to decluttering? Or is it decluttering that leads to travel? In our case, it’s a little bit of both. Here’s why:

1. At some point, Too Much is Too Much!

When we first started travelling, we would be sure to check in a large luggage in addition to a hand-luggage and a handbag. The idea was always to do as much shopping as possible, (we could easily do that in a few hours – not something we are proud of now) especially if items were on sale. Problem is, if you do that every time you travel, that could easily amount to over 100kg of clothing a year! We hardly had any space left and needed extra storage! Finally, we knocked some sense into each other and made a promise which we have kept:

• No more checking in of large luggage
• Sort through all the clothes and donate to charity shops or sell them online
• Refrain from filling up empty space again!

2. The Power of Want vs Need

If you’re constantly travelling, how many items can you actually fit in your hand luggage? What about back pain problems ten years down the line? Do you really need to own 10 pairs of black trousers? And if you get to wear all of them in one season, won’t people think you’re never washing your trousers because they always look the same? (your business, but we’d hate to be thought of as those people who do not do laundry lol).

We certainly feel guilty about having so many unused items in our wardrobes. Our solution: Ask yourself if you really NEED an item before you buy it. This question has led us to put items back on the rack and only to treat ourselves to the very few special ones which we think are sustainable and will wear for a long time because they won’t go out of fashion. Our backs have definitely thanked us – we used to carry too many extras on our travels, which was unhealthy.

3. Minimalist Travel Saves You a Ton of Money

Needless to say, if you make do without these things, you will end up saving lots of money without even trying. Read this post on how to save money for travelling, or anything else you want, really!

4. Embracing Empty Space

There is something about having empty space that allows us to get in touch with our creative side. Every time we tried to concentrate on a new project in the past, we would look at all the clutter surrounding us and let it take up headspace, preventing us from focussing on the here and now. We love reading and learning new things, but at some point even most of the books we owned had to go. We used to buy books from every bookshop we went to. Don’t worry, we never gave up on reading. We read eBooks instead.

Clearing out clutter made us feel lighter. We became more organised, knew exactly where things were placed, and as a result we became more eager to write new posts and also had time to do so. Worrying where to place things took up more time than we care to admit, only to lead to a mess whenever we could not remember where we’d stored something. It was a vicious cycle! In relation to travel, it became easier to pack and less time-consuming. We could easily live out of a suitcase now (as long as there’s a launderette available!)

5. Minimalist Travel is Better for Mother Earth

We should probably say that awareness of the effect of our actions as a collective is what made us start this journey of reducing and reusing whenever possible. For the purpose of this post, we will focus on the reducing part. Thanks to influential people like Leonardo DiCaprio, Greta Thunberg, Lauren Singer, and the documentary Years of Living Dangerously, we began to notice each and every one of our purchases.

It became clear that most of the products we’d been buying, being food, clothing, electronics, all had an impact on the planet, especially in the manufacturing and then disposal processes. Consequently, we have become more conscious consumers and travellers. We mention travel here because before we knew about all the effects of airplane emissions, we never bothered to plan our trips in such a way that trains would be used more than planes.

So to conclude, and to relate this point to the title of our post, we should say that the lessons we learned led us to be happier living with less, hence the natural decluttering and the intentional decluttering. With regard to travel, we learned that owning less things makes room for more experiences and that attaching oneself to too many items that have to be dragged around on the journey is not beneficial at all. It’s already bad enough that we have no choice but to take a plane sometimes, so caring for the planet in other ways is the least we can do.

Final Thoughts

We feel much less hindered by things now. It’s liberating to let go of things that no longer serve us and to not get attached to material things again (or at least to do so with things which do not reflect your personality and have a purpose in your life).

We also feel like we have made a positive difference in terms of caring for the environment. Obviously we still have aspects of ourselves we need to work on in order to become more unattached to material things, but we also accept the fact that there’s still lots to learn and it’s okay for change to take time, as long as it happens in a healthy way.

What are your thoughts on this? Let us know in the comments below!

Best,

Passport & Pathways x

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