Stockpiling While Knowing You’ll Leave

You know you’ll leave.

A place, a phase, maybe even a version of yourself. And yet, you keep stockpiling—acting as if you’ll never go. Shelves fill up, hard drives overflow, and drawers refuse to close. Strangely, as your surroundings grow more crowded, something inside you begins to feel emptier.

Excess doesn’t only take up space.

It occupies the mind. Every new object, every quiet “this might be useful”, creates a subtle void within us. We try to fill that void with something else—a new camera, a new notebook, a new plan. Most of the time, it doesn’t work. The cycle repeats. Consuming without producing and accumulating without reflecting.

At some point, you realise you’ve drifted off orbit.

You own many things, yet feel connected to very few of them. That’s when direction changes. Instead of acquiring something new, you begin to look more carefully at what you already have. You shoot slower with the same camera. You write fewer but more honest sentences in the same notebook. This is, after all, what the analogue way teaches: fewer frames, more intention.

That’s where simplicity reveals itself.

Quiet, yet powerful. It carries an undeniable appeal—but it isn’t a story everyone dares to begin. Because simplicity asks you to remove rather than add. To let go. To say, “Maybe I don’t need this.”

Perhaps the point isn’t to own less.

Perhaps it’s to build a more conscious relationship with what we already own. Slower. More attentive. More sincere.

And sometimes,

The clearest direction appears only after you decide not to buy anything at all.

Nikon FM3A - Ilford Delta 400

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