The Reason You Keep Wanting to Throw Out Everything You Own

Most of us have done the overhaul. New season, fresh start, clean slate, some new clothes, new aesthetic, maybe a Pinterest board to hold it all together. And then six months later, you hate everything you own and want to start over again. Payton Sartain has been there too, and in an episode of Note to Self, she gets into why it keeps happening. The stuff we surround ourselves with, wear, read, and watch often has nothing to do with us—it’s inherited from trends, maybe influencers. That’s not curation; that’s just consumption.

This episode is about learning the difference, and what it actually looks like to build a life that feels like yours.

Curating Your Wardrobe: How to Build a Curated Life That Actually Feels Like You

Why we keep starting over

Sartain opens with something a lot of us have felt but maybe haven’t named: that cycle of doing an identity overhaul and then six months later wanting to throw everything out and start again. “I need to stop doing that,” she says. “The consumption isn’t really curation. Consumption can feel good, it can be a dopamine hit, but I’m trying to get away from that.”

When your entire style is built from what an influencer wore or what the algorithm pushed or what a certain celebrity made cool this season, you’re not curating. It feels productive, it may even feel personal. But there’s no actual you in it, which is why it never quite settles.

The CBK paradox

The episode uses the Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy revival as a jumping-off point. Everyone’s trying to dress like CBK right now—quiet, minimal, that particular kind of effortless New York cool. But Sartain points out the irony: copying CBK’s aesthetic is sort of the least CBK thing you could do. What people are drawn to is that she looked so much like herself. Her style wasn’t a reference to anything, it just was her.

“The most CBK thing you could do is to be your personal self and have your own personal style,” Sartain says. The same logic applies to anyone you admire for their taste. It reads as personal because it is personal. You can’t reverse-engineer that by copying the surface.

Curation as self-knowledge

So what does actual curation look like? Sartain says it is an accumulation of self-knowledge over time—getting specific about what you actually like rather than what you think you should like, or what looks good on someone else.

She’s working on this across a few areas right now, namely her home, her wardrobe, what she reads, and her taste in film. And her approach is the same across all of them: slow down, source inward first, and stop expecting the internet to hand you a taste that feels like yours. “The more that you learn about yourself and the more you express yourself, the better you curate your life,” Sartain says.

For her wardrobe, that means shopping locally when she travels and treating pieces as things worth collecting, connected to a place or a moment. For books, she’s accepting that she doesn’t love the genre everyone else seems to love, and that’s fine. And for film, she’s a beginner who wants in, but finds the conversation around serious cinema kind of insufferable and is looking for a way in that doesn’t come with a superiority complex attached. Basically, she’s figuring out what she likes, not what she’s supposed to like.

Curating for an imagined audience

One of the more useful things Sartain names is the habit of curating for an imagined audience. Not your actual life, but a version of your life that performs well for people who may not even exist. You know you’re doing this when you put something on and feel like you’re wearing a costume. She uses the clean girl aesthetic as her example. She tried it, it never looked right, and she kept at it anyway. “I always felt like I was wearing a costume. If you’ve ever put an outfit on and you feel like you’re wearing a costume, you know you’re not curating something correctly,” she says.

The collector mindset

Think of what you keep as a collection, not a wardrobe or a bookshelf or a watch list. A collection has intention behind it. It says something about the person who built it. Sartain talks about her step-grandfather and his coins—obsessed, gets them from all over the world, knows everything about them. She’s wanted that for herself and is starting to find it: glassware, vintage pieces picked up while traveling, jewelry that marks a particular moment. “When I look at curation like that, it becomes a portrait of your life versus a performance of what is trendy or what we think will make us look cool,” she notes.

So how do you start?

Pick one corner of your life and get honest about whether it’s something you chose or something you inherited. Ask whether it actually reflects you or whether it’s just what was there when you were paying attention. If it’s inherited, figure out what to keep and what to replace. Slowly and preferably without a shopping spree.

And if you want somewhere to practice, find your niche. It doesn’t need to be impressive. It just needs to be yours.

To hear the full conversation on curation, listen to Note to Self wherever you get your podcasts.

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