The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning
And about staging for your Next Phase of Living
Cassidy Steele Dale writes to equip you with the forecasts, foresight skills and perspectives, and tools you may need to create a better, kinder world.
And one of those ways is to give you a way to stage for your next phase of life.
Programming notes:
I don’t have an Easter message but I have something else in mind for a few weeks from now. Something that may have an echo.
The election timeline I laid out a few weeks ago still holds even though some of the time-windows are a little spongy. The changes going on right now are within the forecast; they don’t break the forecast. More on that in the coming weeks.
OK, back to it:
Being a futurist is only half about forecasting; the other half is about getting yourself (or someone else) ready for the future… or the next world era… or your next phase of life.
Enter The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning. It’s a book about döstädning, a Swedish practice of you engaging in your own death-prep-decluttering so your grieving loved ones don’t have to do it when you’re gone.
I am most of the way through a version of a Swedish death clean — but don’t worry. I’ll come back to that in a minute.
Per Laura, host of the YouTube channel How to Get Your Shit Together, the difference between the KonMari Method of holding up every single item you own and asking yourself Does this spark joy? you instead ask Will my loved ones consider this crap? and thus they will be burdened by its disposal. Or, more precisely, Will anyone be happy that I saved this?
She explains it better here. In an Irish accent.
So to wind back: I’m not dying. I’m not retired or anywhen close to it. The kids aren’t grown and out of the house. Sure, I had a milestone birthday maybe 19 years ago and I’m-running-behind-on-this-but-that’s-not-the-point.
The point is I’m using this as an excuse to stage/clear the decks for my next phase of life of (1) writing a lot more of these newsletters, (2) losing weight and getting in shape, (3) becoming Indiana Jones, (4) becoming Advanced Grill Dad, (5) writing the Great American Novel, (6) and building a log cabin and extensive homestead in the Yukon, and (7) somehow living off-grid while living on-grid enough to watch Netflix, YouTube, and post these newsletters. You know, (8) with a pack of wolves lying on my rough-hewn wood floor around my handmade easy chair in which I will be their pack leader and rename myself with my wolf name — which would be “Nick Offerman” but that’s already taken. I may take up pipe smoking. Because that’s the sort of thing that would impress wolves.
In the case of John and Bev from the YouTube channel Retirement Travelers they’d been unwittingly slowly death cleaning for a while. Then they got a real vertical shock: Bev was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. So they decided within the span of about a week to sell, donate, and give to their kids pretty much everything they own and become full-time world travelers while Bev was still healthy enough to do it. So they Swede-cleaned their asses off [Note to self: bad, multiple-ambiguous phrasing. Change before… whoops] so they could start their next phase of life rather than just death-prepping. Here’s how they explain it (and answer everybody’s questions along the way):
My dad did a great job with his own equivalent of Swedish death cleaning maybe 10 years before he died. But there was no Swedish death cleaning in the U.S. at the time so for him it was more like an Ozark-pit-fire-and-academic-library-donation effort. So when it came time to clean out his office it took my sister and I only an hour or so, thank Jesus.
A year ago I went through his last two boxes of files — his teaching notes (he was a seminary professor full-time or part-time for 112 years) and his notes for a book he would never finish writing — and then realized I’d probably better get on the stick about getting my own Ozark-pit-fire and/or Swedish death clean under way.
Since Swedish death cleaning has almost no rules to it — and thank God because Marie Kondo has earned herself a place in hell for saying we should limit ourselves to 30 books and I have at least that many by the bed for reading and/or home defense purposes — I devised a few thought experiments.
First, I asked myself what I absolutely want to pass down to my kids, both in terms of belongings and/or ideas, family history, etc. This was actually very easy — barely took an afternoon because (1) I have so few belongings that merit passing down, (2) I’ve been writing letters like these newsletters for the kids since before they were born (futurist!), and (3) the Dales come from a long line of have-nothings so we have almost nothing to pass down. Seriously, it appears the first Dale just walked out of the woods one day about two centuries ago and headed west across the prairie.
Second, I thought a lot about van life and Airstream trailer living in order to better differentiate what in the house is ultimately utilitarian versus sentimental. Put another way, if we sold the house and went on the road in a top of the line Airstream trailer what would we no longer need (ie. sofa, kitchen table, etc.) versus what we would want to keep in a storage unit or take with us (family photos, etc.) Once you subtract furniture and kitchen stuff from your house there’s not actually not a huge amount left. Once you mentally separate out the utilitarian stuff you may find you barely have a single room’s worth (in sheer acreage) of sentimental items or things you love. The utilitarian stuff doesn’t spark joy, it sparks food.
Note #1: “Van life” refers to people who live full-time or part-time in their vehicles — sometimes really glossily tricked-out vehicles. This can range from (1) people who are otherwise functionally homeless to (2) full-time nomads who travel and work seasonally or full-time from their vehicles to (3) the gorgeous Instagram people who go hiking in the hinterlands at dawn and know all the names of the sizes of Starbucks cups. (Oh! Starbucks! Might be good ideas for a wolf name on the menu: none of those words are real words anyway.)
Note #2: Again, as a reminder to my wife and to you — this is a thought experiment for parsing death-cleaning-from-not more than any actual desire to Instagram-coffee-in-the-wild. My actual preferred version of vanlife would be to trick out a van such that it would be glorious, prepper-stocked, satellite-connected, capable of venturing deep into the National Parks, and then park it outside the Doubletree.
Now, pretty quickly I realized I’m still using 90% of our utilitarian stuff to, you know, sit on, to raise my kids, and to spark food. This meant I decluttered only somewhat at first (we house-purge semi-regularly already) but things really spun up when I went through clothes, books, hobby stuff, and sentimental items.
Clothes? A lot went immediately but since I’m only partway through my getting-in-shape-Indiana-Jones-wolf trajectory I’ve batched the rest of my clothes by size so I can donate them later by chunk. Pun intended.
Books? I still have so many that if I wanted to build a fort/barricade situation in the basement and hold off a phalanx of home organizers for six months I actually could as long as they don’t cut off the water. But I’ve begun the slow process of giving away/trading in books for credit to used book stores — boxes at a time. This process will ultimately take a few years and will be the long tail of the long tail of the endeavor.
Hobby stuff? The big surprise was that I didn’t have nearly as much as I thought I did: it all fits on and under my desk. And I will purge maybe a quarter of that this spring. (My main accomplishment on this front was to decimate the hobby-stuff accretion-stacks that surrounded my easy chair such that I’d begun referring to it as the Easy Chair Metropolitan Area.)
Sentimental items? (1) I have relatively few of those, most of those only matter to me, and I’ve left notes saying that 99% of those can be donated, (2) only a small amount of those I’ve marked to pass down, and (3) I’ve written notes explaining what all of those pass-down items are and why I’m passing them down.
So semi-superficially I’m trying to prevent my family from finding pieces of my life that make no sense without explanation and asking themselves What the crap? What the ever-living what? Dad was never in the Navy — what the crap is this? What the heck are we going to find by the end of this — do we own property on the moon or something??
Note to my family: We do not own property on the moon. Don’t be ridiculous. We own property on Mars. About 80 acres. We inherited it from the Dale that walked out of the woods and across the prairie after he portaled here two centuries ago. The Mars property is the original homestead. Also: we own space cows. About forty head. Do not eat them — they are the Sol system’s liaison to the space cows on Alpha Centauri. And don’t mess with their equipment. It’s delicate and they spent a lot of time on it.
The idea is to prevent something like this:
But the real idea is this: I’ve almost completely cleared the decks of the life clutter of the past few decades. And what’s left is only a few condensed handfuls of stuff for the next decade and those handfuls are metric-denser than a white dwarf.
I have a family. And I have ideas. And I have plans. And they’re no secret; you’ve been reading them all along.
You can do this, too. Trust me.
Yours wolfly,
Venti