Grant
FRIEND
At Work.....
I found this online the other day and while cleaning out my office today I could not stop thinking about it so I decided to post it. Be forewarned, if you have a lot of stuff you'll be inclined to throw it away when you finish reading this.
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I have too much stuff. Most people in America do. In fact, the poorer
people are, the more stuff they seem to have. Hardly anyone is so poor
that they can't afford a front yard full of old cars.
It wasn't always this way. Stuff used to be rare and valuable. You can
still see evidence of that if you look for it. For example, in my
house in Cambridge, which was built in 1876, the bedrooms don't have
closets. In those days people's stuff fit in a chest of drawers. Even
as recently as a few decades ago there was a lot less stuff. When I
look back at photos from the 1970s, I'm surprised how empty houses
look. As a kid I had what I thought was a huge fleet of toy cars, but
they'd be dwarfed by the number of toys my nephews have. All together
my Matchboxes and Corgis took up about a third of the surface of my
bed. In my nephews' rooms the bed is the only clear space.
Stuff has gotten a lot cheaper, but our attitudes toward it haven't
changed correspondingly. We overvalue stuff.
That was a big problem for me when I had no money. I felt poor, and
stuff seemed valuable, so almost instinctively I accumulated it.
Friends would leave something behind when they moved, or I'd see
something as I was walking down the street on trash night (beware of
anything you find yourself describing as "perfectly good"), or I'd
find something in almost new condition for a tenth its retail price at
a garage sale. And pow, more stuff.
In fact these free or nearly free things weren't bargains, because
they were worth even less than they cost. Most of the stuff I
accumulated was worthless, because I didn't need it.
What I didn't understand was that the value of some new acquisition
wasn't the difference between its retail price and what I paid for it.
It was the value I derived from it. Stuff is an extremely illiquid
asset. Unless you have some plan for selling that valuable thing you
got so cheaply, what difference does it make what it's "worth?" The
only way you're ever going to extract any value from it is to use it.
And if you don't have any immediate use for it, you probably never
will.
Companies that sell stuff have spent huge sums training us to think
stuff is still valuable. But it would be closer to the truth to treat
stuff as worthless.
In fact, worse than worthless, because once you've accumulated a
certain amount of stuff, it starts to own you rather than the other
way around. I know of one couple who couldn't retire to the town they
preferred because they couldn't afford a place there big enough for
all their stuff. Their house isn't theirs; it's their stuff's.
And unless you're extremely organized, a house full of stuff can be
very depressing. A cluttered room saps one's spirits. One reason,
obviously, is that there's less room for people in a room full of
stuff. But there's more going on than that. I think humans constantly
scan their environment to build a mental model of what's around them.
And the harder a scene is to parse, the less energy you have left for
conscious thoughts. A cluttered room is literally exhausting.
(This could explain why clutter doesn't seem to bother kids as much as
adults. Kids are less perceptive. They build a coarser model of their
surroundings, and this consumes less energy.)
I first realized the worthlessness of stuff when I lived in Italy for
a year. All I took with me was one large backpack of stuff. The rest
of my stuff I left in my landlady's attic back in the US. And you know
what? All I missed were some of the books. By the end of the year I
couldn't even remember what else I had stored in that attic.
And yet when I got back I didn't discard so much as a box of it. Throw
away a perfectly good rotary telephone? I might need that one day.
The really painful thing to recall is not just that I accumulated all
this useless stuff, but that I often spent money I desperately needed
on stuff that I didn't.
Why would I do that? Because the people whose job is to sell you stuff
are really, really good at it. The average 25 year old is no match for
companies that have spent years figuring out how to get you to spend
money on stuff. They make the experience of buying stuff so pleasant
that "shopping" becomes a leisure activity.
How do you protect yourself from these people? It can't be easy. I'm a
fairly skeptical person, and their tricks worked on me well into my
thirties. But one thing that might work is to ask yourself, before
buying something, "is this going to make my life noticeably better?"
A friend of mine cured herself of a clothes buying habit by asking
herself before she bought anything "Am I going to wear this all the
time?" If she couldn't convince herself that something she was
thinking of buying would become one of those few things she wore all
the time, she wouldn't buy it. I think that would work for any kind of
purchase. Before you buy anything, ask yourself: will this be
something I use constantly? Or is it just something nice? Or worse
still, a mere bargain?
The worst stuff in this respect may be stuff you don't use much
because it's too good. Nothing owns you like fragile stuff. For
example, the "good china" so many households have, and whose defining
quality is not so much that it's fun to use, but that one must be
especially careful not to break it.
Another way to resist acquiring stuff is to think of the overall cost
of owning it. The purchase price is just the beginning. You're going
to have to think about that thing for years—perhaps for the rest of
your life. Every thing you own takes energy away from you. Some give
more than they take. Those are the only things worth having.
I've now stopped accumulating stuff. Except books—but books are
different. Books are more like a fluid than individual objects. It's
not especially inconvenient to own several thousand books, whereas if
you owned several thousand random possessions you'd be a local
celebrity. But except for books, I now actively avoid stuff. If I want
to spend money on some kind of treat, I'll take services over goods
any day.
I'm not claiming this is because I've achieved some kind of zenlike
detachment from material things. I'm talking about something more
mundane. A historical change has taken place, and I've now realized
it. Stuff used to be valuable, and now it's not.
In industrialized countries the same thing happened with food in the
middle of the twentieth century. As food got cheaper (or we got
richer; they're indistinguishable), eating too much started to be a
bigger danger than eating too little. We've now reached that point
with stuff. For most people, rich or poor, stuff has become a burden.
The good news is, if you're carrying a burden without knowing it, your
life could be better than you realize. Imagine walking around for
years with five pound ankle weights, then suddenly having them
removed.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I have too much stuff. Most people in America do. In fact, the poorer
people are, the more stuff they seem to have. Hardly anyone is so poor
that they can't afford a front yard full of old cars.
It wasn't always this way. Stuff used to be rare and valuable. You can
still see evidence of that if you look for it. For example, in my
house in Cambridge, which was built in 1876, the bedrooms don't have
closets. In those days people's stuff fit in a chest of drawers. Even
as recently as a few decades ago there was a lot less stuff. When I
look back at photos from the 1970s, I'm surprised how empty houses
look. As a kid I had what I thought was a huge fleet of toy cars, but
they'd be dwarfed by the number of toys my nephews have. All together
my Matchboxes and Corgis took up about a third of the surface of my
bed. In my nephews' rooms the bed is the only clear space.
Stuff has gotten a lot cheaper, but our attitudes toward it haven't
changed correspondingly. We overvalue stuff.
That was a big problem for me when I had no money. I felt poor, and
stuff seemed valuable, so almost instinctively I accumulated it.
Friends would leave something behind when they moved, or I'd see
something as I was walking down the street on trash night (beware of
anything you find yourself describing as "perfectly good"), or I'd
find something in almost new condition for a tenth its retail price at
a garage sale. And pow, more stuff.
In fact these free or nearly free things weren't bargains, because
they were worth even less than they cost. Most of the stuff I
accumulated was worthless, because I didn't need it.
What I didn't understand was that the value of some new acquisition
wasn't the difference between its retail price and what I paid for it.
It was the value I derived from it. Stuff is an extremely illiquid
asset. Unless you have some plan for selling that valuable thing you
got so cheaply, what difference does it make what it's "worth?" The
only way you're ever going to extract any value from it is to use it.
And if you don't have any immediate use for it, you probably never
will.
Companies that sell stuff have spent huge sums training us to think
stuff is still valuable. But it would be closer to the truth to treat
stuff as worthless.
In fact, worse than worthless, because once you've accumulated a
certain amount of stuff, it starts to own you rather than the other
way around. I know of one couple who couldn't retire to the town they
preferred because they couldn't afford a place there big enough for
all their stuff. Their house isn't theirs; it's their stuff's.
And unless you're extremely organized, a house full of stuff can be
very depressing. A cluttered room saps one's spirits. One reason,
obviously, is that there's less room for people in a room full of
stuff. But there's more going on than that. I think humans constantly
scan their environment to build a mental model of what's around them.
And the harder a scene is to parse, the less energy you have left for
conscious thoughts. A cluttered room is literally exhausting.
(This could explain why clutter doesn't seem to bother kids as much as
adults. Kids are less perceptive. They build a coarser model of their
surroundings, and this consumes less energy.)
I first realized the worthlessness of stuff when I lived in Italy for
a year. All I took with me was one large backpack of stuff. The rest
of my stuff I left in my landlady's attic back in the US. And you know
what? All I missed were some of the books. By the end of the year I
couldn't even remember what else I had stored in that attic.
And yet when I got back I didn't discard so much as a box of it. Throw
away a perfectly good rotary telephone? I might need that one day.
The really painful thing to recall is not just that I accumulated all
this useless stuff, but that I often spent money I desperately needed
on stuff that I didn't.
Why would I do that? Because the people whose job is to sell you stuff
are really, really good at it. The average 25 year old is no match for
companies that have spent years figuring out how to get you to spend
money on stuff. They make the experience of buying stuff so pleasant
that "shopping" becomes a leisure activity.
How do you protect yourself from these people? It can't be easy. I'm a
fairly skeptical person, and their tricks worked on me well into my
thirties. But one thing that might work is to ask yourself, before
buying something, "is this going to make my life noticeably better?"
A friend of mine cured herself of a clothes buying habit by asking
herself before she bought anything "Am I going to wear this all the
time?" If she couldn't convince herself that something she was
thinking of buying would become one of those few things she wore all
the time, she wouldn't buy it. I think that would work for any kind of
purchase. Before you buy anything, ask yourself: will this be
something I use constantly? Or is it just something nice? Or worse
still, a mere bargain?
The worst stuff in this respect may be stuff you don't use much
because it's too good. Nothing owns you like fragile stuff. For
example, the "good china" so many households have, and whose defining
quality is not so much that it's fun to use, but that one must be
especially careful not to break it.
Another way to resist acquiring stuff is to think of the overall cost
of owning it. The purchase price is just the beginning. You're going
to have to think about that thing for years—perhaps for the rest of
your life. Every thing you own takes energy away from you. Some give
more than they take. Those are the only things worth having.
I've now stopped accumulating stuff. Except books—but books are
different. Books are more like a fluid than individual objects. It's
not especially inconvenient to own several thousand books, whereas if
you owned several thousand random possessions you'd be a local
celebrity. But except for books, I now actively avoid stuff. If I want
to spend money on some kind of treat, I'll take services over goods
any day.
I'm not claiming this is because I've achieved some kind of zenlike
detachment from material things. I'm talking about something more
mundane. A historical change has taken place, and I've now realized
it. Stuff used to be valuable, and now it's not.
In industrialized countries the same thing happened with food in the
middle of the twentieth century. As food got cheaper (or we got
richer; they're indistinguishable), eating too much started to be a
bigger danger than eating too little. We've now reached that point
with stuff. For most people, rich or poor, stuff has become a burden.
The good news is, if you're carrying a burden without knowing it, your
life could be better than you realize. Imagine walking around for
years with five pound ankle weights, then suddenly having them
removed.
