Decluttering Is Like Thinning Your Deck
Sometimes playing board games gives me an insight I can use in everyday life. The one that recently clicked for me was about decluttering.
It came from playing deck-building games, such as Dominion and Slay the Spire.
In these games, removing weak cards you used early on is just as important as adding powerful cards to your deck.
Reducing the number of weak cards makes your deck more consistent and lets you use the strong cards more often.
This is called deck thinning.
Too many unwanted cards also make bad draws more likely: you fail to draw the cards you need when you need them. If you’ve played Slay the Spire, you’ll probably recognize the cover image as a spectacularly bad hand from a run where I didn’t get around to thinning my deck. 🤣
Something similar happens in real life. When you have too much stuff you don’t need, the things you do need get buried in clutter, and managing everything gradually eats up your time.
Deck Thinning and Decluttering
I started thinking that removing things we no longer need matters in everyday life in much the same way. If unnecessary things disappear from both our surroundings and our thoughts, couldn’t that help us spend our time more fully on what matters to us?
I’ve always been quite attached to things and haven’t been good at decluttering.
I couldn’t throw things away because I thought, “I might use it someday,” or “That would be a waste.” Playing these games has gradually loosened that way of thinking.
Copper in Dominion and Strike in Slay the Spire aren’t useless cards. In fact, you rely on them when you first start a game.
But as your deck gets stronger, although they’re still somewhat useful, they become relatively weak and take away opportunities to draw the cards you actually want. Something you once relied on starts getting in the way when you look at the deck as a whole.
I thought this had something in common with the feeling that throwing something away is wasteful because you used to use it.
Remembering that you once used or wanted something makes it hard to discard. But whether you need it now is a separate question.
Looking at it this way, I came to see decluttering as taking things you once thought you needed out of your deck to suit who you are now.
Since I started seeing it that way, getting rid of things has become much easier.
Is There Any Point in Playing Games?
I sometimes hear people ask whether playing games has any meaning.
For me, at least, experiences like this—ones that shift how I see everyday life or give me a model for understanding it—make it worthwhile.