How would YOU cope if you had to live without all your possessions?
Including – eek! – your clothes. These guinea pigs tried it for a fascinating TV experiment
TRY TO imagine living without your duvet. Or your mascara. Or your underwear. Or even your vegetable peeler. Just try to imagine a life stripped of every single possession you own — of all the ‘stuff’ that dominates your home.
This is the challenge undertaken by a group of hardy souls for a new Channel 4 documentary.
The results, in fact, are strangely inspiring. A manifesto, of sorts, for the benefits of a pareddown life.
After all, as a nation we are utterly drowning in clutter, whether it’s the wardrobe full of clothes never worn or the piles of cookbooks that haven’t yielded more than a handful of successful recipes.
Without possessions and freed from the tyranny of pointless stuff, the participants in this unusual experiment rediscovered simple pleasures: good conversation, playing the piano, the joy of making a new friend
For the programme, five people in different parts of the country agreed to eschew every piece of furniture, every kitchen utensil, every decorative object, creature comfort and item of clothing in their possession. Stark naked, without so much as a bedsheet or curtain to cover their modesty, participants could only watch as their belongings were boxed up and taken by a removal van to a storage unit, leaving them without ovens, mobile phones, clothing or even a bar of soap.
Heating, hot water and toilet roll was all that remained, along with some non-perishable foods like cereal — although they had to be eaten straight from the box, as all cutlery had been removed too.
So how does it feel to watch all your possessions vanish?
It’s ‘unnerving’, says 29-year-old fashion designer Heidi May, from east London. ‘My stomach dropped when I saw the van coming down the road. It really hit me then: all my stuff is going.’
Heidi allowed the programme-makers to remove all her possessions for three weeks. During that time, she and her fellow guinea pigs were allowed to choose one item per day to be returned.
Buying or borrowing things, apart from food, was forbidden. And throughout the experiment, they had to go about their daily business, working and socialising as usual.
Bubbly blonde Heidi would once have found such an undertaking impossible. Raised with her brother Leon in rural Norfolk by her mother Linda, a teacher, and father Vince, an air emissions tester, she confesses that her happy childhood was marked by her early materialistic streak.
‘We didn’t have a lot of money, and I remember my friends having things like designer trainers and wanting what they had,’ she recalls. ‘From the age of 11, I started doing small jobs so I could buy myself new stuff. ‘I guess I felt it gave me status.’ It’s a feeling that continued into adulthood, and Heidi had begun to believe that her ‘stuff’ defined her. By the time Channel 4 arrived to remove her possessions, she had accrued a whopping 1,027 items.
‘It was a massive shock when I realised exactly how much I had,’ she says. ‘It made me feel a bit sick. I had 30 bikinis alone. There were bags of things I kept under my bed for no reason whatsoever. I felt greedy.’
It was much the same story over in Cardiff, where Tom Hunter-Smith, a 26-year-old data scientist, had also decided to see what a stripped-back life would be like.
He took the plunge alongside his fellow housemates: Georgia, a nurse, and call centre worker Andrew.
The eldest of four brothers, Tom grew up in the Highlands with his mum Gill, a primary school teacher, and his dad Robert, an electrical engineer.
‘I actually didn’t consider myself a materialistic person,’ he says. ‘I thought I could get by without very much.’
All the same, he had 700 items to be boxed up, including his mobile phone — the item that, back in London, Heidi most feared losing.
A self-confessed social media addict, she acknowledges her phone was permanently attached to her hand. ‘I honestly didn’t know how I would survive without it,’ she admits.
ASIDe from being forcibly removed from their gadgets, all participants had to first endure a night without a stitch to cover them: totally naked, with no bed, mattress or cover.
Shivering with cold and desperately trying to get comfortable on the scratchy carpet of his bedroom, Tom began to have second thoughts. He did not sleep at all that first night.
Heidi was equally perturbed. ‘My hip-bones were hurting after just ten minutes [of trying to lie down on the bare floor]. And I was so cold. In the end, I had six baths and 15 showers that first night just to pass the time. It was horrible.’
More humiliations were to come. The next morning, they made a 500metre dash — still naked — to their nearby storage unit to retrieve the first of their items. ‘The nudity did give me second thoughts,’ Heidi admits. ‘But without it, I would never truly know how it felt to have absolutely nothing.’
And so the discomforts of the previous night paled into insignificance as she made that excruciating trip to her storage unit stark-naked.
‘Opening my front door naked was one of the most terrifying things I’ve ever done, something I never want to repeat,’ says Heidi. ‘All I could do was run as fast as I could.’
Then came the big decision: what to take as her first permitted item.
Initially flummoxed, Heidi finally alighted on a 15-metre roll of fabric she had purchased months earlier. ‘I went into survival mode,’ she recalls. ‘I knew I could do so much with it.’
even without scissors, Heidi managed to rip the material and fashion a makeshift dress to conceal her modesty for the trip home.
Then, with the aid of nails left in her wall from pictures that had been hung there, she ripped the material into smaller pieces to make some underwear — and even, courtesy of some artful knotting, something approaching shoes.
‘That fabric was amazing,’ she recalls. ‘As well as clothes, I made a towel and even a sort of bag from it. It was a total lifesaver.’
For Tom, who initially felt liberated by his lack of possessions, a sleeping bag was the first item he retrieved.
‘At first I thought I’d get clothes, but once I saw all my stuff in front of me, all I could think about was sleep, so I hopped home in my sleeping bag.’
Over the next three weeks, the choices came thick and fast. When you are rebuilding your life one item at a time, just what do you choose?
FOR Heidi a mattress was second on the list, followed by her bankcard, then a kettle, trousers and trainers. For Tom, it was his dressing gown, followed by shoes, trousers, bankcard, jacket and socks.
But that’s still a week with barely any possessions to speak of — and no cosmetics or soap.
‘You feel disgusting,’ confesses Heidi. ‘Adrenaline got me through the first couple of days, but by day three I was desperate for shower gel. Without make-up, I just didn’t feel like me. I later chose a bottle of nail polish as my item of the day, just to make me feel a little more like myself.’
Throughout all these indignities, all this creative improvisation, normal life had to continue — which meant going to work.
With his car in storage, Tom tried to hitch a lift to his office ten miles away, wearing just his dressing gown and a pair of shoes.
‘I basically looked like I was mad,’ he says. ‘In the end, I just had to walk.
‘But I got there and I was able to do my job, even if I was wearing my dressing gown.’
Heidi, meanwhile, had to catch the train to central London clad in her homemade dress and shoes, without her usual styled hair and with her face bare of make-up. ‘I felt hugely selfconscious,’ she admits.
Nevertheless, she was beginning to view the world differently.
‘When I decided I wanted to get my mattress, I couldn’t carry it on my own so I had to get strangers to help me,’ she says. ‘I ended up randomly accosting two teenage girls.
‘Normally I wouldn’t speak to anyone, because I would be glued to my phone rather than noticing people around me. But we ended up having so much fun, and I realised that when you step out of your comfort zone, you can have some lovely experiences.’
Another lesson? That true deprivation breeds ingenuity.
‘When your back’s against the wall you certainly become more creative and resourceful,’ says Heidi. ‘I had a craving for scones and jam, which I could buy with my bankcard, but I had no cutlery, so I used lasagne sheets to cut the scones and spread the jam.
‘It became fun to see what I could come up with. I ended up using slices of lemon as a deodorant — although I wouldn’t say they worked well.’
And with no products to clean her house either, it soon became grimy – even with hardly anything in it.
Tom, meanwhile, attended a party in Aviemore — at which he promptly lost his shirt and his bankcard.
‘I had only about seven items in the world at that point, and I lost two of
them,’ he says. ‘But I honestly didn’t care. Losing all my possessions made me realise that what makes me happy is having people around.
‘That first week of the experiment is probably the week I laughed most in my life. With nothing to watch or distract us, I talked to my friends a lot more.’
And what Tom didn’t choose to have returned is as notable as what he did. He eschewed his mobile phone for the entire duration of the three-week experiment.
‘I thought the whole point was to reassess your relationship with the outside world — and the moment you get your phone, you’re back to who you were, as you can live your life through your phone these days,’ Tom says. Instead, as time rolled on, and with immediate essentials covered, he turned to more obscure items: a tagine for cooking, a keyboard to play and a book of music, and an economics text to read.
‘I thought I would use the time without a television to engage my brain a bit more,’ he says.
One rather unexpected item he begged to be returned was a teddy bear. ‘I’d had it a long time. It was a comfort thing,’ he explains. Heidi, meanwhile, succumbed to her mobile phone on day seven — but only, she insists, to make calls.
‘It was just so I could speak to people. Amazingly, from being a person who lived on social media, I didn’t miss it. And I realised most of the stuff I owned was just that: stuff. It was cluttering up my life.’
‘At the beginning, when I got something back, it was such a high. But the more stuff I got back the less happy I was.
‘As a society, we are so lucky — so wealthy and so privileged — yet we still think that we need more.’
As a result, when the experiment ended she sold half of her possessions at a car boot sale, the vast majority of them clothes, as well as accessories and mugs. ‘I realised I didn’t need ten mugs,’ she smiles.
Tom also had mixed feelings about the return of his items.
‘I felt guilty. I had all these things, half of which I didn’t need or use.’
He, too, sent a mountain of DVDs and clothes to a charity shop.
One item he did succumb to was the TV set. ‘It’s a shame, as the willpower not to watch it slowly diminishes, so I’ve been sucked back in.’
Nonetheless, he has made significant lifestyle tweaks.
‘I realised the stuff I have — the TV, the mobile phone — gets in the way of a better life. It’s far more rewarding to spend more time playing the piano or talking to friends.’
Heidi has found the experience even more transformative. ‘Doing this experiment has changed my life. I used to have panic attacks, but I haven’t had one since.
‘My friends and family say I seem much more comfortable in my own skin — and I honestly think that is to do with realising what’s truly important in life.’ Life Stripped Bare is on Channel 4 tonight at 9pm.