As part of my commitment to cut down on the stuff I own, I went through a lot of paperwork which no longer had value to me or made no sense keeping. I had endless piles of credit card slips, cell phone bills, bank transaction records, official letters sent to me for various reasons and a whole lot of other paperwork I for some reason thought I needed to keep. There was a lot of it there in the boxes and since all those papers bore some form of personally identifiable information, I couldn’t just dump it in the garbage bin. So chunk after chunk, I would be taking a stack of paper with me to work, I would purposefully stay overtime, waiting for everyone to leave and then I’d proceed to occupy the shredder for an hour to shred all this paper I had brought. I kept doing this for a few weeks, day after day until all of the papers I no longer needed was gone. I have literally shredded my life away but it felt good. I have already been liberated from possessions, I just needed to take it a step further and liberate myself from paperwork.
Because of high volume of paper I had to shred, I had to split it into several days because the shredder would get filled up every day upon my use. I was hoping it would go without someone becoming too suspicious but luckily it went with no bigger issues. My life was shredded away. I was yet another step closer to becoming free. I have followed up by calling all of the institutions I still deal with to quit sending my statements by mail and strictly stick to electronic communication only. For one this is an important environmentally friendly step and secondly – I was not gonna be here to empty my PO Box anyway so the less unnecessary stuff makes it there, the better.