What does it mean to live more with less? I'm Katie Wells and welcome to the Maximized Minimalist

podcast. If you found yourself caught up in the hamster wheel of modern day motherhood and want to

rewrite the script, congratulations you're in the right place. I'm here to be your guide and help you take

back your motherhood

and achieve a simpler, more joy-filled life. Cheers to being a maximized minimalist. Enjoy the show.

So what do you think? Do you think that we are hardwired toward and to accumulate stuff?

Here's the thing. I've been doing so much pondering over

this thought and topic recently. I just decided to do a brain dump into a podcast and before this

did some good research and found a lot of articles that will help us answer this question today. And I don't find

it to be a coincidence that clutter is a near universal issue for so many people. And recently,

these studies have been reading all suggest the same thing. And that is that the human impulse to acquire isn't

entirely our fault. And that after hundreds of thousands of years spent living with scarcity,

we are predisposed to accumulate. That's the truth of it. The evidence is all around us.

Overflowing closets,

toy rooms, pantries and garages so full that a quarter of Americans report they can't even

fit one car into the garage. I'm raising my hand here because this was me and my family too.

I had so much stuff in my garage and gosh, did it feel like such freedom to be able

to let that go and use my garage what it's intended to be used for to put a car in it. So clutter

and this overabundance of stuff. It's driving us nuts. It's stressing us out and it's draining our

bank accounts. So why do we keep doing this? Why do we keep

buying stuff if we know it's not what we want to do? Partly because the dopamine boost we get from

buying something, it makes us feel good. And I was telling my husband this the other day.

...