Can you imagine getting rid of all your possessions? This writer did...

When friends drop by my flat they ask, ‘Is this it?’ Answer: yes. It is all I need.

Ten years ago I owned a three-bedroom house in Shepherd’s Bush. I sold it and rented a good-sized flat in central London. Then I gave that up and moved and moved again, each time to slightly smaller, neater version until I ended up in the place in which I’m typing this now, with big windows on to the street and not much more in it. Each time I up sticks, I shed a few more possessions until I am down to a core of furniture, an electric piano for guests to play, a few prints that I love, three shelves of books, an almost empty kitchen and a workhorse of a laptop. I leave the house with just a wallet, phone and keys and walk. My London life has become simplicity itself.

We are told a story about how our lives should unfold: as you grow up, so, too, should your life expand. You acquire more things — some that you need, many that you don’t — you should aspire to owning a house, and then a bigger one in which to put your growing pile of possessions and perhaps family, too, one to match your status and ego. And you get stronger locks on your doors to protect it all.

It was a narrative I believed until about nine years ago when a quiet rebellion began within me. I was reminded of it when the Swedish music streaming company Spotify floated on the New York Stock Exchange earlier this month for $25 billion. My marriage had long since ended; the house was a hangover from it. I had everything one could want and yet felt empty. Spotify filled the silence through the speakers of my laptop. I began wandering down the roads of music collections I could never own, tracing songs through cover versions and rooting around in history without obligation. No more paying for iTunes. But it did something else: it changed my physical world. The drawers in my living room, which had been stuffed full of cassettes and CDs, became irrelevant and went unopened.

So, too, did other drawers. The paper copies of bank documents I’d filed and kept meticulously were now online. My child spent more time on an iPad, on the BBC’s recently launched iPlayer, than watching the stack of videos around the TV. We had become digital. Streaming had streamlined our lives.

And once one room became minimal, the other rooms in my three-bedroom house where I lived with my child and my husband, replaced later by a lodger, began to seem overweight. Cupboards seemed repositories of the shame of not having thought about what I acquired over the years. The cellar was a hell of unused things.

Tyler Durden said in Fight Club, after an explosion in the narrator’s apartment: ‘It’s only after you’ve lost everything that you’re free to do anything.’ I wasn’t going to go that far but it slowly dawned on me that ownership was a mental trap and I was going to liberate myself.

Shortly afterwards I decided to put the house up for sale. I lined the street outside with pots and pans and books and furniture for the neighbours to take, which they did, hungrily. I ditched the car. With every act of discarding I just became a little lighter in my soul. The house over the following weeks returned to the state in which I’d loved it most: the day I’d moved in when there was nothing there. Friends who hungered for my middle-class existence were astonished. They fell out of my phone book. There’s not much space for entertaining in my new flat.

How and why did we become so acquisitive? Of the few books that have travelled with me are those of Bruce Chatwin, the Sotheby’s art expert who, struck by temporary blindness, was told by his doctor that the cure was possibly less examination of small objects and more distant horizons. Chatwin set off on his travels through Asia, Australia and South America, writing all the way. In one series of jottings he meditates on what happens when we civilise: our nomadic forebears had only what they could carry about their person, on their pack animals and in their minds. When nomads stop walking and began to build villages, towns and cities, they acquired possessions as a substitute for the experiences granted by movement that had previously filled the mind.