Often we think about the cost of something, we look at its price tag and say, this is $10. But it really isn’t a complete cost because you haven’t factored in the full cost of having to transport it, store it, manage it, organize it. “The cost of a thing,” Thoreau once wrote, “is the amount of life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.” We often ignore the long term maintenance cost–attention, time, and effort–of holding onto something we don’t need. The same can be said about the mental programming–engrained ideas installed by others–within us that we have had to carry around with us. Perhaps it’s the narrative that we must to be a certain person, behave in a certain way, or achieve certain milestones. All these also carry a real cost to our life.