What do you love now, that you hated when you were younger?
When I was younger, more seemed better.
I loved to read, and building a library was something I valued. Book by book, shelf by shelf, I watched the collection grow. There was satisfaction in it. A growing library felt like a sign of curiosity, seriousness, and perhaps even identity. It said something about what I cared about.
Now I am shedding books. I still love to read, but I no longer need to own physical copies of everything I read. That is the important shift. I have not stopped loving books. I have simply stopped needing so many of them to be mine. Reading matters more than possession.
The same is true of music. When I was younger, I loved building a record collection. Later it became CDs. There are albums that have stood the test of time and still carry the memory of particular seasons in my life. But now I prefer to stream. I love the ease of it. More importantly, I love the surprise of stumbling across something new. I love the joy of discovering an artist or song for the first time without needing to add another object to a shelf.
Even my relationship with transport has changed. My first car felt like a major achievement. It was a visible sign of adulthood, independence, and freedom. It meant I had arrived at a new stage of life. Now I love to walk. I am happy with public transport. There is a different kind of freedom in not always needing to drive, park, maintain, insure, and manage another thing. Walking slows me down in the best possible way. It reconnects me with the world around me.
I am not losing the things I loved. I am learning to love them without needing to own them. That feels like one of the gifts of getting older. The things themselves are not the problem. Books, music, cars, collections, and possessions can all carry meaning. But there comes a time when accumulation begins to feel heavy. More things mean more things to store, move, clean, repair, organise, and worry about.
Less feels spacious. Fewer things to manage. Fewer distractions. More attention for what actually matters. A simpler life is what I desire more than anything now. Not an empty life. Not a life stripped of beauty, memory, or pleasure. A simpler life is one with room in it. Room to read. Room to listen. Room to walk. Room to notice. Room to be present.
When I was younger, I thought more would make life richer. Now I am learning that richness often comes through having less.
The Afterword 
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