Curate your space

Most people live in rooms they didn't design and live lives they didn't choose.

I: Rooms

I had been travelling for a year and a half before I considered what coming home would look like.

Intending to maintain the growth solo-travel provided, I came up with a list of things to do once I was back at home.

Scrawled onto that list was a simple goal: “Curate my space.”

That one simple line proved to be magnetic. People would always ask why “curating my space” was important, specifically why it was as important as other, more obviously lofty, goals on the list.

The other goals were clearly long-term, but something as simple as filling up an apartment seemed more like a transient thing; you move in somewhere over a weekend, not a lifetime.

I believe this is categorically bad framing. While you likely don’t redecorate every day, you do use your space every day, and this implicitly accepts your space as-is. Your space shapes your life by what it offers: if you have a coffee machine, you can make coffee at home; a dining table, you can entertain; and a reading nook, you can read comfortably to your heart’s content.

The existence of things (and the absence thereof) determines both what is possible and what is likely.

Filling an apartment is not about making the day-to-day decisions, but instead it is making decisions about what day-to-day decisions you will consider making in the future.

There’s a certain “meta-ness” to the decision-making.

When you get that first apartment, you are forced into this meta-decision-making process, whereas a few months later, you simply live in the apartment, subject to the decisions previously made.

II: Curation

My goal of “curating my space” is not about decorating the apartment; instead, it is the act of consistently evaluating the apartment and being able to re-decorate it according to bolder and broader thoughts. It is an active practice of not wantonly rejecting the status quo but being aware of the status quo and being able and willing to change it.

“Curation happens automatically. Humans pass judgments in the blink of an eye.

As you go about your life, you are constantly curating. The products you purchase, the places you visit, and the media you engage with all reflect deliberate or unconscious choices.

Through your social interactions, you broadcast these curated preferences—whether you mean to or not.”

- An edited excerpt from Information Dark Matter

So, how would I want to curate my space?

If I were to look at my current living room, I might think about getting a bigger TV, a nicer table, a bigger bookshelf, more board games on the shelves, and fewer video game consoles.

If I were starting from scratch, I’d want a conversation pit, with bookshelves and art surrounding it, cozy lighting, maybe a record player.

The current living room is thought of incrementally, whereas the new room removes that notion. Empty space (a vacuum) is not thought of as something pre-built that needs to be altered or added to. Instead, empty space forces you to consider the meta-decisions of how the vacuum will be filled.

In a previous essay, I stated that vacuums should be filled intentionally. I now know how true that is, but I also now know that they should be sought out for the sole purpose of doing so.

Vacuums naturally lay fertile ground for intentional thinking to occur.

A perfectly rational thinker may see a filled room with the same open-mindedness as an empty room; however, just as a two-dimensional creature would see a line on a page as an impassable wall, we too are limited by our reference frames.

So, we need to think of the room as empty. But, this is still not enough.

Is this the apartment I want to live in?

Is this the neighborhood I want to live in?

Is this even the city I want to live in?

III: No defaults

One of the reasons solo-travel was so conducive to growth was not the exposure to new things that one might assume, but instead, it was the lack of “defaults” to fall back on.

There may be standard “things you must do” in each place you visit, yet these are more of suggestions than limitations. Without a default way of being, you are forced to make meta-decisions. This trains you to be agentic.

At the beginning, this radical accountability was challenging. Normally, these hard decisions about what you want out of life emerge rarely, even if you implicitly make them quite often.

Empty space forces you to make decisions on what you actually want.

Seeking empty space forces you to start thinking about what you actually want.

I call this experience “the chase,” where you are able to choose the direction you want to go and the force you want to use to get there. The more opportunities you have to chase after what you want, the greater control you have of your own life.

Life tends to fill up with things you “must do,” which limits our natural exposure to these “chases.” For many, you may only decide what you want to do when thinking about your weekend, and often not even then.

Having a curator’s mindset, bringing each and every activity into question through meta-decisions, will not just improve your ability to get what you want, but also give you the ability to think more critically about what you’ve accepted in the first place.

When not subjected to the defaults, you are able to consider all possibilities.

Your space, and by extension your life, is not defined by what it has been, but rather what it could be.

There is no need to eschew the status quo.

Start small:

Look around your room and curate your space.