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The Things We Carry

About four months ago I decided to move from my sunny apartment in San Francisco back to my seaside Maine homeland.

Over the course of a month I packed up a life I’d created for myself and shipped it to the other side of the continent. During the packing process I went through a major cleanse. I donated 12 bags of clothes to Goodwill, I sold furniture and I left furniture on the street (fun fact: If you put anything on the street in San Francisco it will disappear before you turn around. It’s like magic).

The end result was 18 medium sized boxes of items I thought I could not live without. 18 boxes of clothes and dishes and memories that seemed essentially to me being me; my life in 18 boxes.

In the three months since, I’ve left those boxes packed. I’ve lived out of two suitcases and it’s been fine. Are my clothing choices slightly more limited? Yes. Does it really matter? No.

Next week, when I move into my new apartment, I’ll be reunited with those 18 boxes. In the time that’s passed, I’ve forgotten what they contain (except for my ruby red Kitchen Aid and my tea cups. I have vivid dreams about being reunited with my tea cups and food processor).

Part of me wants to leave those boxes locked away in my parents’ garage for a little bit longer. I’m tempted to start over with fewer things and just see what happens. I want to leave those 18 boxes tucked away and go back to them in a few years and review what they contain (this would also satisfy my childhood dreams of becoming an archeologist). I probably won’t end up doing this (mainly because my dad is pretty eager to get his garage back) and next week I may write you a post all about how wonderful it is to be reunited with what you’ve (temporarily) lost.

I know I should use this time with you gorgeous feministe readers to talk about gender and sexuality and, well, feminism. But today my contribution is a question about stuff. And what we think we need versus what are just items we’ve collected. Perhaps we all need to be prompted to get rid of the things that don’t actually matter and just see what happens.

Except your ruby red Kitchen Aids. Never part with those.


40 thoughts on The Things We Carry

  1. That’s a good way to start a topic. My parent’s house burnt down (when I was living there) and all of our stuff, obviously, gone, made me think about why do we need stuff? Does stuff make us who we are? In way, may-haps. For me that was somewhat true. My stuff, my L Word DVDs, my Goth pants, and Pagan books and Altar were destroyed, therefore a little of myself. I put myself in my stuff, maybe that is when things begin to own you.

  2. I try to follow the Testimony of Simplicity, and like you, I have moved frequently, so I don’t have a whole lot of things. But I have never felt like having stuff has ever made me feel better, so I usually don’t worry about it.

    There are a few things here and there that might make my life better, but thinking about them doesn’t keep me up at night, either.

  3. People keep telling me that this is true, that if I left stuff in a box for three months, or a year, and I didn’t feel the need for it, then I could have gotten rid of it.

    This isn’t true at *all*. Not for me.

    For five years I was pretty well unconcerned as to the fate of my dolls’ clothing, hidden in the garage somewhere. Then I found an old picture of my dolls, and when I could not find the clothes in the garage after extensive searching, I was compelled to go buy all the dolls again on eBay. (I also tried to buy new clothes for the existing dolls, but it’s really hard to find clothes for 11 inch Effanbee dolls from the 1970’s — all the 11 inch doll clothes are cut for a Barbie, and all the Effanbee clothes are either for the new models or the vintage baby dolls.) I forgot about a CD I owned from Japan thoroughly enough that I think I left it at my ex-boyfriend’s house and never noticed it missing when I moved out, but when I realized the loss, I mourned it so intensely that I ended up buying the album on vinyl, even though that means I may have to pay to get it converted to MP3 somehow because I don’t have a turntable, because it was the only way I could replace it.

    I circle back. Nothing I have ever cared about is something I will ever cease to care about forever. Even if I forget for a time, eventually I will remember. And when I remember, it *hurts* so profoundly to have lost those things that I end up spending money or time I don’t have to recover them, and if I can’t recover them, it just hurts.

    I realize this makes me vulnerable — I carry such a huge amount of stuff around with me in life, stuff I feel I can’t sacrifice, that my response to anything like an evacuation would be sluggish enough that it could kill me. I don’t know what I’d do in the event of fire. But I cannot voluntarily give these things up. I don’t *want* to voluntarily give these things up, and when I imagine hiring someone like one of those de-clutterers on the cleaning DIY shows who comes in and badgers you into throwing everything you own out, I feel like, if someone did that to me it would be like killing my pets. And I get very, very defensive every time my mother or my husband says “You have too much stuff”, because the amount of stuff I had was just fine when I lived alone, but now that I’ve got kids and a husband I’m expected to give up my stuff to make more room for their stuff? Screw that.

    (To be fair, I also feel, very strongly, that my kids don’t have too much stuff — they have too little space to put their stuff in, too little organizational structure for their stuff, and too weak of organizational skills to keep their stuff from making a mess, but they don’t have too *much.*)

    I get rid of what I can. You can digitize CDs at full quality, so I’ve been ripping my CD collection to MP3 and then selling the CDs on Amazon. I try to scan my documents so I don’t need to keep the paper copies. I’m working on ripping all the DVDs in the house to DivX formats so the actual DVDs can be put in storage and we can just summon up whatever we want to watch from the terabyte drives on the file server. I paid for about half the dolls I bought by selling several of them (since I was seeking to buy specific dolls, I ended up having to buy ones that were thrown into the same lot that I didn’t actually want, and then by selling those I made back about half the money I spent on the dolls in the first place.) I’ve donated thousands of dollars worth of my old skinny clothes and my babies’ clothes to Goodwill.

    But the metric of “if you can put it in a box and not need it for months, you don’t need it at all” doesn’t work for me. And at age 40, I’m pretty sure it never will. It hurts too badly to lose the things I loved once, even if I lost them by not remembering I had them for a few years at a time.

  4. I left home for college carrying one large suitcase and when I finally returned home, ten years of my life fit neatly into back of a SUV.

    You see all the books, clothes, photos and odds and ends I had collected during my years in NYC went up in flames few years ago. One would think I would have been devastated, but no. It turns out I didn’t need those things to remember all the fun I had.. just the friends. We are still having a blast creating new fun memories and I may snap a photo here and there.. buy a trinket here and there.. but in the end, the friends you carry with you in life are more important than anything you can buy.

    I do sometimes go crazy looking for things I lost in the fire ” I could have sworn I have a blue sweater ?!”

    p.s. stuff also disappears quickly when you put them out on the street in NYC 🙂

  5. Going to college has made me realize how much stuff I have. I now have to basically move my entire life halfway across the country twice a year, flying no less. Yes, I did store a couple medium boxes at school for the summer and left a bit at my parent’s house, but the past year has taught me exactly how much stuff I don’t need in my daily life. I’m a huge fan of simplicity, and I’m trying to pare down the amount that I call ‘mine’ so that I can make that move and not be tied down by the things I carry.

  6. Coming to “the simple life” from a place of privilege and plenty is absolutely nothing like the experience of beginning in a place where money and possessions are in short supply. Economic privilege is not simply about what one owns at this very moment, or how much money one has in the bank. It is a lifelong process by which, layer by layer, one accumulates assumptions about how the world works, a sense of what is normal and natural, and such intangible qualities as confidence, security, and a sense of belonging.
    from here

  7. When my hubby and I moved to Dallas from Southern Utah shortly before our first son was born we shipped most of our things rather than rent a truck. Our small apartment was scantly decorated and it was nice. After our things arrived we suddenly had a very crowded living space! It really stressed me out! Now that we are in a bigger house we have accumulated lots and lots of stuff. The two things that take the most space are books and tchotchkes. I can’t believe how many books we have, its amazing. And why do we need these books!? My husband and I rarely have time to read with two boys and full time jobs. I dunno. Maybe I will get rid of them and go sit at the library a few times a week.

    I think about moving and I think it would be liberating to leave everything behind and start over, Ikea style.

  8. I’ve always considered myself someone who didn’t acquire a lot of stuff, but then when I went to college, it would constantly surprise me at how much stuff I had acquired by the time I moved out.

    Moves are always a good time to get rid of stuff….but I also think it’s good to continue to use your old stuff instead of getting new stuff. Because, I feel, even if you decide to live more simply, you might find yourself just acquiring more stuff.

  9. I don’t know…there’s this strong ethics discourse about stuff, how less is always better, stuff gets in the way of the “real”, etc etc.

    I have a lot of stuff–and tend to have to purge it regularly–but I’m not especially sorry. I can give wonderful presents from my hoard of random thrifted and inherited objects; if you need a vintage dress to auction for charity, I’ve got it; I’ve got an endless assortment of things to lend and give away as needed, and this is a tremendous pleasure.

    I also have a ton of books, and it’s really fun to read an obscure reference on a history website and realize that I picked up the now-almost-unobtainable copy of Pandemonium for five dollars on a remainder table in 1997, or to read a footnote and remember that I have the original paperback of Black Power from the thrift store. I haven’t read all my books yet, but it’s great to be able to read the whole original text of an old book, to see how it was laid out, to be able to consult it at any time.

    And honestly, I grew up wearing my mother’s hand-me-downs, clothes she’d bought ten years before. I like my varied and large assortment of clothes that fit and that say what I want to say about myself.

    Plus, I’m fat and genderqueer. The clothes and shoes I’ve accumulated don’t make me feel stupid, like most of the clothes available to me new off the rack. I don’t want to purge my men’s sweaters or my scarves or my large collection of dandyish boots. They’re not very replaceable, and I can tell you from personal experience that wearing a frilled blouse with cap sleeves because it’s what you have is not especially comfortable. I also rely on my clothes to reinforce my presence in the world–people don’t fuck with me (except to yell occasional insults from cars) because I have a coherent, slightly intimidating, competent physical presence. My clothes are part of what create that. It’s how I get through the day. If I had a more gender-conforming body, if I were thin, if I met beauty standards–maybe I could rely on whatever clothes and shoes I found and still feel safe, valued, comfortable.

  10. I’ve been kind of going through the same thing–we got the keys to our new house in June, and we’re still unpacking boxes. Until we moved in, I’d been more-or-less living out of a suitcase for several months at the boyfriend’s house in preparation for this move, and it feels embarrassingly good to be reunited with my crap from storage. It was also embarrassing how much “extra” there was–we have a whole stack of boxes set aside for yard sale/donation. And as I’ve moved house every one or two years since graduation, that’s a whole lot of stuff that I’ve been moving around half a dozen times and never needing or really using.

    One of the only real arguments we’ve had with the move is my impatience to get things set up so I can get the rest of my stuff out of storage. After living for months in a house with two guys and all of their stuff, with my only real presence being my clothes and a few books, I want to be around my stuff again. My stuff defines my space as my own. And the boyfriend is completely right in telling me that I need to be able to separate myself from that and be comfortable with my own presence and what-the-hell-ever–I shouldn’t need material goods to define my space. But I’m just not that mature and enlightened, and I want my bookcase and my bedspread and the other things I’ve worked to acquire through my adult life.

  11. My mom and one of my sisters aren’t exactly hoarders, but they have alot of stuff and don’t purge/clear out regularly. I do, so I don’t end up with too much stuff. I think that’s more because I like organization and neatness, and I don’t have alot of space so I try not to keep too much stuff.

    I do have things that i won’t get rid of. Things that are sentimental to me, like jewelry given to me by special people in my life and family heirlooms that I will pass down. And a few things that I have found during one of my bargain hunting/thrift rummaging trips. If it was socially acceptable, I would pare my wardrobe down to about 5 pieces. Honestly, if it was acceptable, I would not have clothes at all. I would wear nothing more than jewelry and lipgloss 🙂

    Slightly off topic- (except to yell occasional insults from cars)
    I’m sorry for this. Shit like this makes me so mad.

  12. In the past 15 years, I’ve moved 12 times. My stuff is pared down as much as I am comfortable with, but it’s way more than 18 boxes. I am, like Alara, very much attached to the stuff I’ve chosen to keep. I tend to live in the present, and keeping things that are associated with good memories bring those memories flooding back when I run across them, much like Proust and his madeleine.

  13. You had a sunny San Francisco apartment? Wow. I mean, the bay area is so beautiful, but I don’t remember a whole lot of sun lasting for any appreciable amount of time. And if I moved around, I was always stumbling into another microclimate.

  14. Wow. 18 boxes wouldn’t even cover my father’s books. And then there are his paintings. He was a color field artist so most of them are quite large. Needless to say, I have a lot of stuff. And by far the hardest stuff to part with is the stuff your parent leaves behind. For me, at least, it was a brutal and painful process. I refused to go through his books for five years and only went through them because we were moving and I had to. It took weeks, and even after I gave away more than half of them, I still have probably a thousand left. The new house will have custom built-in library shelves just for dad’s books. Fortunately, it has lots and lots of wall space for his paintings. And then there are the photographs.

  15. This is why a (very small) part of me likes moving; the sense of shedding what I don’t need. Last time we moved we took four car-loads to Goodwill. It’s very freeing.

  16. @Theresa — I did have a sunny apartment. Well, it was sunny most days. Or perhaps it’s just that my memory of it was really sunny. I tend to do that with memories, I turn even some of the rainiest days into moments filled with sun.

  17. Well, I was briefly homeless last March, and I found that all of my essentials could fit into a rental car.

    TBH, I think most people hoard too much; most people own so much stuff they’ll never use.

  18. So many thoughtful comments 🙂

    All I have to say is that I share your lust for red kitchen appliances – I consider it a mark of excellent character.

  19. We just moved too, and we’re trying to purge stuff that we don’t use. But I feel like there’s a decent amount of privilege in that kind of purging. I think it comes from a general understanding that stuff is replaceable. Like Frowner, I’m fat, and I’m tremendously protective of my clothing. Because it’s REALLY not easy to replace. I learned how to mend clothes and I have clothing that’s been around since high school. I mourned for my cute, turquoise shirt that cost $6 at Kohls because finding another cute, inexpensive top that FITS is so freaking difficult that it makes me want to scream (note, if you like clothing, don’t wear it while playing with pH 13 solutions).

    There’s also cultural factors at play. I got rid of almost all of my stuff when I left college, but I had 10 boxes of books. That I shipped cross-country. Thank God for media-rate shipping. I grew up with books everywhere, as did my husband. Right now, we’ve got two stuffed bookshelves and are talking about getting a third. Pretty much all of our belongings are clothes (because people get angry if you wear the same thing every day), books, and kitchen supplies (because we’re both way into cooking). I mean, of course I could do without a waffle iron, but yum, waffles. And that waffle iron pays for itself pretty quickly, when you can make them from flour, milk, and eggs, instead of buying them frozen. Mmmm…waffles.

  20. I just moved into a little one bedroom apartment with my boyfriend. For the past few years, both of us have had a luxury of living in spacious homes with basement storage. We knew we’d have to get rid of some of our things, but we didn’t realize how much downsizing we would have to do until we saw the boxes piled on boxes in our new apartment. It took four solid days of unpacking before it felt like an apartment.

    This killed me. I have this dream of being able to move cross-country some day and knowing that I have a ridiculous amount of stuff crushed that dream.

    During the purging process I came face to face with my biggest problem: what should become of the half-finished projects I have? A lot of it just went in the trash.

  21. my personal truth is that stuff ends up owning me and i’m not cool with it. I have played the game “if there was an emergency and I had to leave immediately, what would I grab?” and realized I wouldn’t grab too much stuff. My list is: my cats, my passport and/or birth certificate, laptop, purse. The last three on the list are for practical purposes only. If i have time, some cat food for when I’m at a shelter after the disaster. I would be bummed my photo’s were lost, but I don’t really look at my photo’s too often so no biggie. Everything else is replaceable or not really worth having.

  22. it’s actually empire red, not ruby red. and i’m soooo pedantic, but i don’t even want to begin to picture my life without my kitchenaid! 🙂 i painted my kitchen to match my small appliances.

    as for “stuff”, i’m thinking a lot about that right now myself, but i haven’t formulated any meaningful ideas yet. between watching my deceased grandmother’s apartment being cleaned out and struggling to support a family of four on an income that’s not remotely livable, “stuff” is foremost in my thoughts a lot these days, particularly the idea that “stuff” is intrinsically tied into worth and class and morality and environmentalism and… everything. so, definitely thanks for your own thoughts and musings.

  23. You know, maybe I’m imagining it, but I often feel like I hear a tone of smugness, or shaming, in these kinds of conversations.

    “I live out of a box! I’m not attached to material things! Most people are greedy hoarders who hold onto all kinds of useless stuff they don’t need, but I’m special because I’m free of connections to material goods!”

    I don’t know if anyone *means* that tone, or not, especially on a blog like this one (I absolutely think people mean it when it appears on, say, the comments responding to a news article on how to de-clutter your house), but I feel like it’s there. Because we’re not supposed to be attached to *stuff*. Because if we’re lefty progressives, then the fact that we had enough privilege and wealth that we accumulated stuff in the first place is supposed to shame us, because what about all the people with no stuff? And every major religion goes on about detaching yourself from the love of the material. You’re not supposed to be really attached to your stuff.

    Of course, most of us are — especially white middle-class Americans who may have had money at some point in their lives — so it’s like fat shaming people over eating something that’s tasty versus something that’s culturally constructed as “good for you”. “Oh, you ate the cheesecake? Well, *I* just had the salad.” Translation: I’m better than you. I’m not a greedy fat slob like you. And in the context of *this* conversation, the “Oh, *I* don’t hoard stuff, unlike some people” sounds like “I’m not a greedy shallow person like you.”

    You know what? I like my things. I recognize that they are a weakness. I recognize that I have to spend money on storage because I can’t fit all my stuff into the smallish house I was able to afford. I recognize that in fact, mixed in with the stuff I love and wouldn’t want to do without, I probably have a good bit of crap that I *don’t* want and I’m holding onto only because it’s so much effort to separate it out from the things I want. But if it’s a weakness, it’s a weakness that’s part of who I am. Why would it be any more appropriate for people to say, essentially, “Well, you’re a greedy hoarder, but I live a lean, pared-down, simple life” than it is to say “Well, you’re a fat pig, but I’m slim and attractive because I don’t stuff my face with food like you do?”

    We don’t tolerate shaming (or trying to shame) people because they are overweight, here. We don’t tolerate shaming, or trying to shame, people because they love sex and enjoy kinks, or multiple partners, or both. Should we tolerate trying to shame people because they “have too much stuff?”

    Let me clarify: if the reason you have too much stuff is that you, personally, have knowingly exploited people to get rich so you could have stuff, that’s bad. But it’s not bad because of the stuff, it’s bad because you did bad things to people. If the reason you have too much stuff is that your dad exploited people… well, you’re not a bad person, you don’t inherit the sins of your father, but for gods’ sake you better realize that inheriting stuff from a guy who exploited others doesn’t make you *better* than the people he exploited, either, and you need to watch your privilege. For that matter, if you have stuff at all, probably at some point your ancestors exploited someone (if you’re a white American, unless you’re a second generation immigrant it’s almost certain that your ancestors exploited someone), and that doesn’t make you or your stuff bad but it does mean you should watch your privilege. Be aware why you were able to have that stuff.

    But, you know, we’re all aware that people are starving, and that *still* doesn’t mean it’s appropriate to shame people for using their privilege as Westerners to access enough cheap food that they can become overweight. Buying stuff does not make you a bad person; keeping the stuff you’ve had since you were young for 30 years does not make you a bad person. Being emotionally attached to stuff does not make you a bad person.

    Being *not* attached to stuff doesn’t make you a bad person, either, and for all the people who are just sharing their personal feelings about their stuff, without judging others or moralizing about how it’s better for people to get along without much stuff, I don’t have any problem with that. Want to keep stuff, can do without stuff, whatever, we’re all people in the end and the choice of “stuff or no stuff” is just personal. But (in part because the larger culture is so consumerist) there’s a very strong streak in progressivism of “attachment to material goods is a moral weakness”, and I am hearing that in some of these posts.

    If you feel like it’s comfortable for you to live lean, and you really don’t feel like you need to be encumbered with stuff, well, I kind of envy you because you don’t have to drag this weight around with you wherever you move… but I’m me, not you, and I couldn’t be you, and I don’t want to be. As long as you’re just saying “This is me, these are my feelings” then I’m fine with that, but if you start introducing that tone of “The way I live is the way everyone should”, you’re trying to shame people. And there is no more moral value to “holding on to every stupid hand-me-down your mom and aunt pass off on you because maybe it might be useful someday” versus purging than there is to being fat versus being thin. We (progressive feminists) work to overcome shaming people over their weight; can we work to overcome shaming people over how much stuff is crammed into their closets?

    1. Alara I’m sorry if you’re feeling attacked by the comments. It was not my intention to cast judgment on those who have a lot of things or don’t have a lot of things. While I have lived without these boxes for the last few months, I’m excited about rediscovering what’s in them (though perhaps a little intimidated by the unpacking process). They are pieces connected to my life and they are a part of what makes me who I am. It sounds to me that you carry a lot of memories with you and I wouldn’t want anyone to attack you for that.

  24. Alara Rogers: I’m working on ripping all the DVDs in the house to DivX formats so the actual DVDs can be put in storage and we can just summon up whatever we want to watch from the terabyte drives on the file server.

    I want to do this too, so badly. I have no idea how, though.

  25. I think about gift-giving when I think about stuff. I love giving gifts, although I’m lucky if I’ll find the “right” gift for any given loved one more than once every three or four years. But, oh, how I love to give gifts when they’re good ones. I always worry, though, about cluttering other people’s lives, which is why it will often take me years to find something worth cluttering for. At my grandmother’s 80th, she remarked (thoughtfully rather than ungratefully) on how much she wished that fewer of the scores of lovely people had come to celebrate with her had given her things – non-perishable, space-eating stuff – when she is currently trying to reverse the accumulation process.

    I’ve got a few things stored in boxes of my own that were gifts that have become just clutter, but also gifts and things that maybe ought to be clutter but are instead completely precious, with which I would not part on pain of death.

    stellans:
    I want to do this too, so badly. I have no idea how, though.  

    DVD Shrink is a free and fairly good DVD ripping program.

  26. Hm…I do know I have a lot of things I could do without, but at the same time, I think it’s part of where and how you’re living. I’ve lived at two different colleges (one of which required us to move out EVERY SUMMER and return to a different room each year), a small room in my parents’ house, and four months overseas, in the past six years. And each time I settled down, I acquired stuff that I got rid of quite easily when I had to pack up. But that’s because to feel comfortable in my environment, it had to become my environment. Which meant I bought posters and stuffed animals and lamps instead of peeing on the walls. A lot of it is inexpensive and can easily be given away or trashed. I know that trashing items is bad environmentally, but I also know that if I don’t make a welcome space for myself, I’ll get super “homesick” (not sick for where I grew up, but for a place where I belong). I have been collecting drawings my artist friends make for me, so it’s become less of a problem since most of these are on paper and can be easily and lightly packed away in a folder.

    Being a college student, the one thing I do not collect a lot of is books (or at least, not as much as my other friends and family) because I have access to great libraries, and books are heavy. I feel like when/if I settle in someplace for more than five years, I’ll have a lot more books by far, but that my territory stuff collection will greatly diminish as my home becomes more mine in different ways.

  27. Alara Rogers: I get rid of what I can. You can digitize CDs at full quality, so I’ve been ripping my CD collection to MP3 and then selling the CDs on Amazon. I try to scan my documents so I don’t need to keep the paper copies. I’m working on ripping all the DVDs in the house to DivX formats so the actual DVDs can be put in storage and we can just summon up whatever we want to watch from the terabyte drives on the file server.

    I’ve done this as well. I’m in the process of scanning all of my academic notes since the dawn of time (okay it only feels like that), my teaching plans, and research. Moving into a smaller house is a pain in the ass. Also, I’ve completely switched to ebooks (which I realize doesn’t work for a lot of people). I went from having a room full of books to having maybe 20 books with special meaning or irreplaceable references that I hope to scan. As the family historian I have thousands of photos but I actually sent them off to be professionally scanned and restored. Technology is awesome but redundant backups are something I do worry about.

    But like you I have things I will never part with. When I was a small kid for a number of years we moved every single year and I was permitted one single file box of personal non-clothing items to take with me. I still have every single thing that went into that box and you would have to pry them out of my cold dead hands.

  28. I 100% agree with Alara Rogers @ 4. I am what I describe as a ‘nostalgia junkie’, and re-purchasing things lost (or buying my own versions of books that belonged to my parents, games that belonged to my grandma, etc.) is a habit I doubt I’ll ever shake! Having moved every year for the past 6 years, I’m more than proficient at carting around my clothes, books, and miscellany, despite my brother’s eye-rolling at moving yet more boxes!

    I also totally get Alara @ 24, too. Reading the other comments, I let myself feel half-guilty. But, then, during our last move, I offered to get rid of some books and my partner refused to allow it. They’re part of me. Plus, I think of myself very much as the ‘keeper’ of all family miscellany. Want to remember the name of Auntie Janet’s daughter-in-law’s cousin who works in finance? Come to me and I’ll find it on the family tree while telling you boring stories!

    I’m not American, but I am white, and my family shimmied their way into being middle class during my life-time. Those latter two things probably substantially affect my interest in ‘stuff’, particularly books (education is key, no?). It’s sort of weird when people get essentially too ‘educated’ (hip?) to accept that some things (books, family nostalgia, etc.) might be worth keeping.

    As for ‘technologising’ everything… Merh. I’m such an old fogey at heart! As long as my memory holds out and I can find everything (i.e. I don’t need a magical Mac search function for everything in life!), I’m not going to be persuaded by digital versions of most of my stuff, I don’t think, proved by the fact that I really just don’t use that Sony eReader my dad bought me because ‘it’s the next big thing’!

  29. Shoshie: But I feel like there’s a decent amount of privilege in that kind of purging.I think it comes from a general understanding that stuff is replaceable.

    This is one of my conundrums. I have too much stuff. I buy odd bits of fabric thinking of quilts I will make, or clothes I will sew. I have canning jars and make jam once a year and expect to do more, but I haven’t yet.

    Part of me wants to chuck it all. But part of me says, we won’t always be this well off, who knows what is going to happen with climate change, I should be preparing for the future, but my house is already full. AArgh.

    It is driving me crazy. What do you all think?

  30. I recently (as in, yesterday and today) packed up my apartment to go traveling. I threw away 4-5 trash bags of random crap. I donated 3 trash bags to the thrift store. I still feel like I have too much stuff that I can’t quite part with yet.

    Recently, my friend has been cleaning out her family’s house and documenting it at http://www.stuffproject.com/ It’s been making me think how valuing material things can be a self-destructive thing. Accumulating STUFF also means accumulating a lot of baggage that you don’t know how to get rid of…

  31. @Alara Rogers, yes, exactly. The food analogy makes a lot of sense to me. Because it’s no use to say “Look at me, I eat this moral and/or healthy food, and you should too” when some people can’t even get ENOUGH food. Similarly, some people would kill to have enough stuff that they actually had things to throw out and give away. That’s what I was trying to get at with my quote and link earlier, but I was in a hurry to get to work.

  32. I’m a college student; I have moved four times in three years and will probably be moving again in a year. Every time I move, my stuff weighs me down. It kind of embarrasses me, because as a Christian and an environmentalist, I believe that I shouldn’t have or need all that stuff. But I’m not embarrassed enough to get rid of it, though I have been going through my bookshelves and my clothes.

    I don’t know, exactly, why I keep all this stuff. Part of it is as a security blanket: if I die tonight, there will still be some reminder of my presence on earth. And I think I view my stuff as something that is “on my side” when the world gets tough. Part of it is that I haven’t outgrown my childhood’s subconscious belief that you have a responsibility to take care of your stuff and giving it away means you don’t love it any more. Part of it is sentimental value for some of the stuff.

    I think Alara Rogers is right in saying that we shouldn’t get rid of stuff that has sentimental value just for the sake of living a pared-down life. Yet much of my stuff doesn’t have much sentimental value, and I don’t know why I keep it. I’m working on it.

  33. Alara I agree. I didn’t really pick up on that tone here, but I have seen it other places. I’m not ashamed of the stuff I love. I try not to let my things own me but I don’t believe that you can’t cherish and appreciate things without them owning you. It’s not an either/or- either I hate my possessions or they own me.

    I purge my clothes, but that’s because I don’t really care much for most clothes anyway 🙂 If something is uncomfortable or doesn’t fit right or doesn’t look right, I won’t keep it because I hate being uncomfortable in clothes. To an almost bizarre degree. (Am I the only one?) I hate when my closet is disorganized and messy because of things I don’t wear. Same for my jewelry. I think it makes my anxiety worse.

    BUT I grew up with no money. I don’t have much now, but I’m not as bad off as I was before. So I have a strange relationship with stuff- I think I have to really love something to keep it because on some level I realize it could be gone at any moment. So I would rather love a few things than have alot. Maybe this plays more into my anxiety than I thought….

    This post gives me alot to think about. It’s a very interesting topic.

  34. This is interesting, and something I think about a lot when faced with the prospect of one day moving the ten bookcases of books I have in my apartment. But I’ve loved books for as long as I can remember, and they’re a part of me, and although they punish me every time I have to move (which has been many times, actually) in the end they’re worth it.

  35. Alara and Miss S….thanks.
    I am the original more-attached-to-things-than-people person. Kind of like a cat instead of a dog. Yet I have the smallest junk hoard of anyone in my family. I am currently trying to pare down what’s here, there is much I could spare, but some items I would die–or kill–to save/keep. Things I made, and some mementos of other things. {Yes, there are people–and cats–I care for too. Apples and oranges.]
    Agree 100% on the need to think out and understand why one feels one has to have or hold on to this or that. But I have done so, which is more than some folks can say–perhaps some of the same people who yap at me for not being as obviously social as they.
    I feel like having pared down so much already, having scrounged and made and thrift-gotten so much, kind of entitles me to have a few very nice things. Not the best logic around, I guess, but it works for now. I probably have a smaller ecological footprint than the others in my family, no car for instance, but this is partly from luck, and I know better than to feel superior to someone who has a medical need or something, for some item I don’t need. I am lucky I don’t have to be owned by a car.
    Every day I am thankful how fortunate I actually am compared to much of the world, for the good things and the freedoms I have–which I didn’t always have. And then I worry about how I will be able to hang onto them in decades to come.
    I wish I could make it so everyone could get and keep what they really, really care for.

  36. I’m looking to move soon.

    Earlier this year I took a week-long break with my boyfriend, which required me leaving behind my stuff – except for a luggage carrier worth of clothing and such. Even then, I packed light.

    And I was…
    Fine.

    I thought to myself at one point, “I could just stay here and leave everything behind and I would be comfortable with that.”

    Which surprised me. I’ve spent my whole life building up the stuff I have, and a lot of it is precious – either precious to me, or precious intrinsically. It may not all be worth much money wise, but I have some weird & unusual stuff that, to the right person, would be worth something. And a lot of it is a reflection of myself, my style, what I’m into.

    But the longer I stayed away from it, I didn’t really miss it. I was too happy being with a person instead of with my things.

    So when I move now, it’s going to be strange. I don’t own any furniture of my own, really, so that can all stay behind… I estimate I can dump 50% of my wardrobe because a lot of it is worn out anyway… That just leaves books, some electronics and decorative pieces.
    Stuff that will fit into, probably less than 18 boxes.

    But even when I ship it out to myself when I get it…
    Since none of it will be urgent how long am I going to let it sit, waiting to unpack it.

  37. i have a lot of stuff. and i have been chided for it for years. i have near 2000 books, but reread them regularly-how is it bad to keep things you keep using? i probably do have too many clothes now, but i recently lost ~30# and none of my old ones would fit, so i kept ordering more and more-a matter of security, since i have just started my first job in over a year. and honestly, if you can get by with a box and a bed, great-i can’t, and i won’t apologise for it.

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