But wait... there's less!

Even if things are wonderful, we don't have to buy them. The pregnancy dress In the Minimalism movie , one woman tells a story of needing a nice-looking dress to wear to an event (while very pregnant). She had pregnancy clothes and nice clothes, but nothing that was both. Rather than buy something (for a one-time wear) she called up a few friends and borrowed a dress. She avoided a pointless purchase and hours in a shopping mall and instead spent time with her friend. The travel pack Amongst holiday stories, my sister-in-law mentioned her handy mesh travel bags. You can categorise and separate your items within your suitcase while still seeing what is where. No more rummaging through the whole suitcase to find one particular item. They sounded very helpful. For her next trip my wife, rather than buy another set, borrowed her sister's collection. Triple benefits There's three reasons this turned out to be a great move. Shop-free - We didn't have to go to sh...

Streetbank is designed to allow neighbours to borrow things from each other. It's so much better than buying a bunch of things you rarely (or never) use again. It's also a great way to give away items you no longer need to someone else who would appreciate them. The obvious side benefit of all of this is that you also get to meet your neighbours. Recently some students made some short films to promote the Streetbank idea . The Skate Escape looks at it from the perspective of unused items. The Ribbons film looks more at the community aspect. Share is a shorter film, and reminds us that sharing is something we teach our kids from a very young age.

At the moment my wife is practising a song. She'll be performing it on piano at the upcoming wedding of a friend. She wants to do lots of practice so it can be just great for the day. But we don't own a piano. At this point the material world says "Well, go out and buy one". But these days there are many more options. After a couple of practices on a friend's piano we put out the call on Streetbank - a community site for people to share things with their neighbours. Within a day we had a couple of offers of a keyboard to borrow. It's a great solution as it was free for us, and made use of keyboards that were just sitting around unused. One was so unused that the owner said he would test if it still worked before he lent it to us. I'm told that Aristotle once said that joy was in use not in ownership. I think this is a good example of that philosophy in action. Although sometimes I question if it's "joy" to hear the same song pract...