I have had a few messages about John Freyer’s project.
I am not entirely sure that my project is very similar to John Freyer’s. I bought his book “All My Life For Sale” while doing some initial hunting around before launching into this. He sold items individually, on eBay, down to the smallest things he had, such as a pair of socks, sold for a final price of $2.62.
What I really liked about his sale was that he went and visited much of his stuff with it’s new owners. It was his comment about this particular pair of socks that really started me thinking about the things we own and the memories that are attached to them…
“I sold somebody else’s used socks. There were a few moments during this project that I stopped to think about what it was that I was doing. The day Jason bought my used socks was one such moment. They were just socks, right? i didn’t want to give them to him. i didn’t want to surrender the memory of where they came from. The simple thought of where they came from occured to me each and every time I put them on. I haven’t talked to Anna and Derrick in a year or two now, and over the last year I haven’t thought of them as much.”
This struck such a chord with me. How letting go of a pair of socks can mean that the trigger that makes you think of that time, or those people is gone. This can be a negative, as with John and his socks, or a positive, if you want to leave something painful behind.
I love John’s book, but I think we are doing very different things for very different reasons. I refer to his project in the FAQ page, under the topic “Has this been done before?”
