If you’re like many Americans, you’ve made efforts to unclutter your home or life — perhaps even made uncluttering your New Year’s resolution. Maybe you’ve gotten so frustrated with your messy desk, crowded kitchen, and inaccessible garage that you’ve started dreaming of getting rid of all your belongings and starting over from scratch.

Then perhaps you might like to try the 100 Thing Challenge. That’s the name of the year-long feat achieved by a San Diego native called Dave Bruno, who managed to whittle down his belongings to fewer than 100 items — and lived to blog about it. That book’s now been turned into a book published earlier this month: “The 100 Thing Challenge: How I Got Rid of Almost Everything, Remade My Life, and Regained My Soul.”

Now, before you get too excited, Dave’s 100 things didn’t count up a lot of objects that you and I may consider individual things. For one, the guy lives with his wife and two daughters — and anything that could be construed as shared property, be it the bed or eating utensils, were not entered into the count. Then he counted whole groups of items — most notably, books — as a single object.

That meant Dave’s 100 things mostly consisted of adventure gear for surfing, hiking, and camping — plus his everyday clothes. Considering the fact that the guy didn’t seem to have a fashion addiction to begin with, the 100 Thing Challenge seems rather skewed towards counting up the things Dave already had little of — while glossing over many of the problem areas that got Dave to start the 100 Thing Challenge in the first place, like the kitchen drawer full of knicknacks or the family’s holiday decorations in the garage, all considered community property and uncounted towards the challenge.

Of course, Dave may have tackled some of the community clutter without mentioning it in the book. And in a sense, Dave’s decision about communal property points to a good rule of thumb to follow: If you want to take up a radical, self-imposed challenge, don’t impose it on the people you live with, lest they end up not wanting to live with you anymore.

In any case, Dave’s choices for his 100 Thing Challenge made his challenge seem rather like simple, normal living, at least on a visible level — so normal, in fact, that Dave says TV stations initially interested in capturing his story changed their minds after realizing the challenge didn’t make for much dramatic footage. That sense of normalcy, however, is exactly what Dave says was a surprising delight about the 100 Thing Challenge.

“Life is just about the same without an abundance of stuff — shhshh, quiet now — except without all that crap, there’s more room for living life to the fullest,” Dave writes. In one chapter, he describes a near-perfect day he had — which was filled with the simple joys of living: A decent day at work, a little surfing, and date night with his wife when his in-laws offered to babysit. “What more could a person on this earth want than a beautiful place to live, a connection with nature, a stable job, a healthy family, kind in-laws, a loving spouse, Mexican food, and sex?”

Your list of perfect-day necessities may differ a bit from Dave’s, but Dave does point out that joy and contentment require relatively few things — 20, to be exact, in Dave’s case — if you live in Southern California. Oddly, Dave’s list of 20 doesn’t include a toothbrush, which made me wonder if Dave’s wife considered Dave’s almost-perfect day to be a near-perfect one for her too….

Downsizing an overstuffed closet or reining in the desire for the latest tech gadgets may be the big de-stuff-ing challenges for many Americans, but for Dave, the main challenge seems to have been letting go of hobbies he wasn’t pursuing. From collecting pens to woodworking to building toy train tracks, Dave apparently started a lot of hobbies — and bought all the accouterments for those hobbies — and then didn’t put them to much use. Dave muses philosophically about this tendency of his, concluding that a consumer culture often leads people to believe that they can achieve goals — whether physical or emotional, specific or nebulous — by buying things:

Often I have grabbed hold of my possessions and started hammering. Somehow I have thought that fancy pens could knock away at my circumstances and shape me into a rough-and-tumble businessman. Or toy trains could refashion my youth. Or gear and adventuring could chip away until a perfectly content and secure soul took form. Or woodworking tools could manufacture a life of confidence. Maybe my sculpting handiwork could turn me into someone bigger and more competent than I am. Someone who could grasp at things beyond my reach.

Though “The 100 Thing Challenge” can read a bit like too much navel-gazing at times — and though atheists like myself will no doubt be annoyed by Dave’s frequent references to the Christian god — the book provides a lot of food for thought. We’re so often led to believe that money — and the stuff it can buy — is what stands between us and our goals and desires. Dave’s project aims to prove that wrong. Read about it by picking up a copy of “The 100 Thing Challenge” — and follow Dave’s continued uncluttered journey at his blog, guy named dave.

Earlier:
>> Project 333: Dress yourself with just 33 items for the next 3 months
>> Book review: The Thoreau You Don’t Know
>> An Anti-capitalist video guide to happiness
>> Book Review: Get Satisfied — with simply enough
>> 5 Simple living bloggers show downsizing can be smart-sizing

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