Downsizing for the Future - From the Compound to the World - CycleBlaze

May 9, 2022

Downsizing for the Future

By now it should clear that this lockdown is beyond anyone's worst nightmare.   It's not like you can just jump on a plane tomorrow and escape it, but guaranteed that is what many will do eventually when it ends.  Already the surveys indicate that nearly half the expats plan to leave China permanently and this lockdown was the last straw.

It's a little more difficult for me to just bounce because I have a wife and relatives here, not to mention how many years I've lived in China and the research needed to find a replacement destination etc...  The Shanghai we once knew and loved is finished, that much we know.

Whether I stay or leave here depends on being in a position to be able to do so.   The lockdown actually may have been a good thing because it laid the framework and the motivation to do planning and downsizing to leave China at some point in the future.  If life continued to be so great in China as it was before, then why would I consider leaving?  Now it's on my radar screen.  When life was good, I never really planned long-term.  I lived  through 20+ years in China by skimming the surface like a rock and hovering from one short-term plan, assignment, activity, tour, club, party, and/or project to the next.  That's how it is with expats here, locals too, as we all bounce around with constant interruptions, roadblocks, opportunities, and changes to plans.  So you can't really blame anyone for not making long-term plans.

But who knows, maybe you don't even have to.  Maybe you just simply walk away from it all and get on a bicycle to figure out the next moves.

The lockdown changes everything.  The time to make an exit plan is now and if you're still not doing it after all that has happened then there's something wrong with you.  Whether or not you actually carry out the plan is another story.  But the bottom line is this:  you have to be prepared to leave at some point.  As a friend wrote perfectly well in my chat group:

For years, expats have talked about Shanghai like it had some kind of special status and now everyone is shocked and outraged that the boot of Beijing is on our necks for once.  But that boot didn't come out of nowhere.  Most of us heard plenty of stories of its use on others.  It's like that old Italian American proverb:  'We love to eat sausage but we don't like seeing how it is made'

Right after covid struck in 2020, I assembled all the belongings that I had and put them in storage.  For over two years I've been slowly chipping away at a massively complex downsizing project to attain the bare minimum of stuff which ties me down.  Mostly it involved the following:

  • Ripping, downloading, and copying all old CDs and DVDs into digital files
  • Copying all contents from old computers and then giving them away
  • Scanning old books and papers into digital PDF files.   This was an enormous amount of work and used multiple photocopy guys.  What couldn't be scanned was manually copied into Word documents.
  • Downloading ebooks of what could be downloaded, then arranging a book sale of the hard copies
  • Assembling, selling, or giving away to charity a huge collection of random items and clothes
  • Taking pictures of albums, greeting cards, or any other memorabilia and tossing the originals.
  • Organizing all the photos and videos from various devices into a hyper-structure
  • Buying a 4TB hard drive, gathering all the digital files above onto such drive and then uploading the contents of this 'black box' to an online secure storage site.
Making awesome progress now. At this rate, when lockdown is over I'll have this all cleared out quickly and the storage no longer needed
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At the time when I started it, the project was intimidating and it seemed like there was no way I could make progress.  But there was major motivation because of the pandemic.  Even after days of hard work I didn't see any measurable results from looking at the storage room, and still had to face all the hassle in moving house with whatever belongings I had with me at the time.  But then I was reminded of what James Clear wrote in his famous book "Atomic Habits"

We convince ourselves that massive success requires massive action. Actually, the inverse is true: Small improvements accumulate into remarkable results.  Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement. The same way that money multiplies through compound interest, the effects of your habits multiply as you repeat them.  The effects of small habits compound over time They seem to make little difference on any given day and yet the impact they deliver over the months and years can be enormous. A slight change in your daily habits can guide your life to a very different destination. 

Making a choice that is 1% better or 1% worse seems insignificant in the moment, but over a lifetime these choices determine the difference between who you are and who you could be.  Goals are about the results you want to achieve. Systems are about the processes that lead to those results. Goals are good for setting a direction, but systems are best for making progress.

The purpose of setting goals is to win the game. The purpose of building systems is to continue playing the game.

Clear hit the money shot with that quote, and it changed the way I plan.  Instead of goal setting which is mainly short-term focused and what skimmed me through 20+ years in China, I've started to do more project-based planning.  

The lockdown is perfect for such planning because when you're stuck in the house for weeks on end, these drudgery tasks take on new meaning.  You can type for 2 hours a day copying journals for example and nothing gets done.  Repeat for the next few days.  Then a week later, you're shock when a huge amount of progress gets made seemingly out of nowhere.  This would be very difficult to persist with outside of a lockdown when the next distraction comes along and makes it so you just give up on the project.

Clear: Your habits can compound for or against you
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So in a strange way, the lockdown could be the best thing to have happened for my future because it motivated the crap out of me to make changes to leave China.

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Scott AndersonVery interesting post, and one it’s easy for me to relate to - both the planning and downsizing themes. We went through very similar downsizing activities when we dispensed with 95% of our belongings five years ago and went vagabond.
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1 year ago
Fit SteveThanks Scott, yes that's a similar direction I'm taking things here. I'm not normally one to do something like this, but the covid pandemic and all things China more or less made it necessary.
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1 year ago
Rachael AndersonAs Scott mentioned we went through major downsizing and I quickly realized that I didn’t need much at all. Because we didn’t have a home and we didn’t need much we didn’t get locked down during Covid although we came close. Of course, we were lucky to be in the right place at the right time and we’re flexible. Mind you we were very careful where we went and spent all our time bicycling and hiking and avoiding people. We also got our vaccines and boosters. Just remember the most important thing is you have a wonderful wife!
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1 year ago
Bruce LellmanI find this post of yours to be very informative/educational. I will now try to put some of this advice to use in my own life. Like you say, it's easy to just go with the flow of everyday life - one event (distraction) after another. But to make big-time progress you need to take a different tack.

Also, your post fits perfectly with the analogy of touring on a bicycle: Riding even a short distance every day will still get you far down the road after a few days.
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1 year ago
Fit SteveThanks very much Bruce, I'm glad this helped you. Yes the connection to bike touring is spot on.
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1 year ago