I just noticed one of my values change.
Published on Saturday, 09. May 2020I love books. I love reading them. I love buying them. I love the feeling when someone enjoys a book recommendation I gave. I love the smell of paper and the sound when turning a page. And I thought I loved owning them.
Until recently, I wanted to have my own library one day. To have an office where each wall is a big bookshelf. Currently, I don't have enough space for this. I only have one room that I use to work and sleep.
Due to a minimalistic urge, I had some days ago, I removed basically everything except my desk and bed from it. In this process, I moved the shelf with all of my books to the hallway outside my room.
The only piece of furniture besides my desk and bed is now a bed stand. This bed stand is a hollow, wooden cube with a side length of about 30cm. Two opposing sites of the cube are missing, so you can use it as a small shelf.
In it, I wanted to keep my top 5-10 books that I never want to give away.
Standing in front of my bookshelf in the hallway I noticed, that these books don't exist.
This isn't because the decision which books to keep felt too hard to make. I just didn't want to keep any of them.
With this realization, the desire to own a library dissipated.
Maybe I will change my mind on this again.
But for now, instead of keeping them, I would rather buy a book again if I wanted to reread it.
I didn't have any strong emotions about this change. I simply noticed it and found it interesting. Maybe a bit unexpected.