Hey and welcome to The Upgrade, a podcast from the team at Lifehacker, where we help you improve your life one week at a time.

I'm Jordan Calhoun, editor-in-chief of Lifehacker,

and joining me is LifeHacker's parenting editor, Megan Walberg. Hey, Megan. Hi, Jordan.

Megan, today we're learning to pare down, right? That's right. We're learning to live with less

with help from the Afro-minimalist Christine Platt. Everyone just wants to jump right in. They're like, I'm ready to go into my closet and I'm ready to find what sparks joy and

I'm getting rid of everything that doesn't, right?

But it's like until you understand why you have all those things that don't spark joy,

you run the risk of finding yourself in that same space over and over again.

In addition to being the Afro Minimalist Online, Pristine is also the managing director of the

Anti-Racist Research and Policy Center at American University.

She's also an accomplished author, having written over two dozen books for both children and

adults.

Her latest book is called The Afro-Minimalist Guide to Living with Less,

and she joined us this week to talk about how to approach a minimalist lifestyle.

Megan, have you taken a swing at being a minimalist? What's your relationship with clutter?

I feel like I'm a minimalist simply because of situationally. So I believe you could call me a pack rat in my

former life. I think that's the opposite of minimalism. It is. It is. When I was growing up,

like I'm picturing like my childhood bedroom and like just dozens of stuffed pigs. Like you don't need this many stuffed pigs, but like, I couldn't get rid of a stuffed pig.

So, but once I moved out and I'm, you know, living on my own, I've lived in a lot of places

where we've just been like super low on storage.

So, like, the home I live in now was built in 1925 when they did not believe in closets. And so because of that,

I've had to get better at trying to pare down. But there's definitely still some areas where I could

...