More costs attention

Picture two rooms. One holds a bed, a chair, a lamp and a shelf of ten books. The other holds all that and three hundred more things: gadgets, clothes, boxes, cables. The second room looks richer. Each room also asks something of the person who lives in it.

Every thing a person owns asks something back. It has to be stored, found, cleaned, charged, updated, or decided about. An app asks for a tap. A subscription asks for a decision each month. A shelf of clutter asks to be looked at every time you pass. Each ask is a small switch, the kind lesson 1 counted.

A person buys a second phone, just for games. What has it added, apart from the games?

• Nothing. A phone just sits there until you pick it up.
• Asks: charging, updates, lights, a second thing to find and decide about.
• Only the cost of buying it.

A person has 40 apps, and each lights up once a day. They delete 30 of them. By lesson 1's count, how many switches a day have they bought back?

There is an old word for having little and keeping it bare: austere. It comes from a Greek word for a taste that dries the tongue, and for centuries it meant harsh or joyless. But the word hides two different situations. Less because you cannot have more, and less because you chose it.

So an austere room by choice is not a punishment. It is a decision about where attention goes. A person who keeps fewer things gives something up and gets something back: the asks those things would have made every day. Fewer things in the room means fewer asks in the day.

Each card is a person with little. Was the little forced, or chosen?

One card at a time. Tap the pile it belongs to.

Set how many things a person keeps against how much free attention they have in a day, and watch what is left for the things themselves. Made up to show the shape.

Move both controls.

A tidy, nearly empty flat is photographed for a magazine and called quiet luxury. Using this lesson, why can a nearly empty room be a sign of plenty and not of poverty?

• It cannot. An empty room always means the owner has nothing.
• Because the magazine says so.
• Because the owner could have filled it and chose not to, and the few things left ask little.