Quality Over Quantity
By Jane Ohlmuller
Long car rides are my worst enemy. I can never sit still and tend to get car sick, so when I had to drive home from Villanova for fall break I was not excited. I decided to try something new and listen to a podcast during the ride. I chose Emma Chamberlain’s podcast, “Anything Goes” with Emma Chamberlain, specifically the episode about quality over quantity. She explained that getting rid of excessiveness in one part of your life can help erase excessiveness in all aspects of your life. She used the example of clothes to demonstrate her point: by cleaning out her clothes and learning to have less of them, she learned to do the same with her decorations and furniture for her home. All of the decluttering of her material items also carried over to her relationships. She no longer put energy into people who were not creating joy for her, which helped her to put more time into relationships she truly loved and wanted in her life. Her words resonated with me and I would like to relay my interpretation of it to you.
I am a victim of wanting and following all the new trends. When Zara became popular, I practically cleared the store because I just wanted everything. It’s been a few months now and I wear maybe five of the items I bought regularly and the rest just sit in my closet. All of this clutter just takes up space in my life and causes more stress. Even worse, when scrunchies became popular again, I think I purchased every single kind possible and now have about fifty just sitting in a drawer at home. Buying these items provided me with about a minute of joy, certainly not worth the stress of all the clutter in my life. From Emma’s podcast, I learned that I need to stop my habit of buying excessive amounts of the new trend because it is not fulfilling in my life. I also believe this will translate to relationships in my life.
Being surrounded by social media, I feel like we all have this unspoken competition with everyone to look like we have the most friends or have the most followers on Instagram. I follow so many people who I do not know but have mutual friends with just because it is what everyone else does. This is not healthy. I often catch myself comparing myself to all these people I barely even know just because I see what they post or what others post with them. I waste time and energy from my own life analyzing their lives. I am actively trying to stop this by focusing on relationships I care about and that bring me joy. I practiced this over break by going on fun adventures with my mom and I seriously saw an increase in my happiness. I made an effort to be on my phone less and was thus able to be more present with my mom. I was not worrying about what others were doing; I simply focused on being my true self. I encourage you to maybe not buy that extra scrunchie and maybe in doing so you will be more relieved of stress in other aspects of life just like me :)
