The Objects We Choose to Live With

I spent two weeks last January removing objects from my apartment. Not decluttering in the popular sense — I was not asking what sparked joy. I was asking a simpler question: does this thing do work, or does it merely occupy space? By the end of the second week, my kitchen held fourteen items. The living room had a low table, two cushions, and a single reading lamp. The silence that followed was not emptiness. It was clarity.

The Problem with Decoration

A shelf of ceramic figurines collected over a decade. A set of coasters never used, still wrapped in cellophane. Three different pour-over coffee devices, each purchased in a moment of optimism about who I might become in the mornings. We accumulate not objects but versions of ourselves we never became. The figurines were from a trip to Kanazawa in 2014. The coasters were a gift. Each item carried a story, but the stories had become excuses for keeping things that did nothing.

The most honest objects are the ones that refuse to explain themselves. A glass is a glass. A chair is a chair. It does not need a narrative to justify its presence on the table.

There is a particular kind of calm that comes from using a single wooden cutting board every day — the same one, for years, until the surface wears smooth in the center. I bought mine from a workshop in Takayama during the winter of 2019. The craftsman had no website, no brand. He made boards from local cypress and sold them at his storefront. That board is the most expensive thing in my kitchen, and it cost less than the coffee grinder I replaced three times.