Stuff
Sharon November 19th, 2008
Once I finally get through the holidays and the latest book, my next project is major cleaning, sorting and organizing of my home. That is, it is time to come bang up against the real question of what I need, what I don’t, and how to manage my life.
Now I have a very ambivalent relationship to the question of stuff. On the one hand, I’m not a big fan of consumption, and I recognize it as a major potential issue. I buy most of my possessions used, and as a consumer, well, I’m one of those people dragging the economy down 
.
On the other hand, for someone who is hostile to consumption, I have, well, a lot of stuff. You all know I live in a big old farmhouse – well, that farmhouse is full of stuff. I’m not really sure how to resolve this contradiction, or how I feel about it.
Part of the issue is that I live in two worlds – I am living now in a high energy society, that makes use of a lot of high energy tools that cost a lot of money. While I minimize my use of some of these, I also depend upon them – for example, my computer. In order for me to do my job, I need a computer, a phone line and the money to keep up an internet connection.
Beyond that minimum, there are things I use because I do this other work – for example, I could hand wash all my laundry, but then I probably would have less time for the blog. There may come a time when I think that trade off is reasonable, but for now, the washing machine is a necessity.
Then there are things I have because for most of us, not having them is unacceptable to our society – for example, once upon a time, kids wore their playclothes for long periods, and it was not unusual to see kids rewearing fairly dirty clothes when at play. I live in a society where dirt is perceive as a sign of neglect, so my kids need to have many more clothes than are actually essential, so that they can be seen mostly in clean clothing, while still going out and getting dirty.
Then there are parts of high energy culture that I really value - I have many thousands of books, and I read and re-read them, refer to them in my writings and enjoy having them. I realize that the author Chaucer died with fewer than 50 books (a mammoth library by the standards of the day), but I’m simply not prepared to do without mine, at least as long as I live fairly far from a good library. I don’t find cheap printing or the ability to get to hear long-ago recordings of classical music along with my hip hop at all bad uses of our energy abundance, and even if I should, I don’t feel terribly inclined to go down to a handful of CDs or books.
At the same time, I also live a low energy lifestyle, and am anticipating a much lower energy one. This also requires equipment. For example, I grind my own grain, which means finding space on the counter for a grain grinder. I have more than 700 canning jars, which I fill with things, but then which gradually empty out and must be stored. Besides our CD player and CDs, we have a piano and other instruments, since my husband makes acoustic music. We have two woodstoves, which necessitate a large supply of wood and tools for the stove, wood chopping and managing wood.
Now sometimes I can manage these two lives by choosing to prioritize one – for example, I can decide that I’m going to get rid of the food processor to make space for the grain grinder, or to replace one of our vehicles with a bike and trailer. The clothesline has replaced the dryer, the freezer and natural cooling our fridge, solar charged batteries our old one-use kind.
But often, I’m struggling to balance the requirements of both lives. For example, several times a year we visit family in Boston or New York City. When we do this, it is awfully convenient to have a furnace to be kept at a very low temperature, to keep the pipes from freezing. If we don’t do this, we have to drain the pipes and shut off the water, which means that whoever cares for our animals has to haul water from the pump outside. So fr now, we have both a furnace and woodstoves. We have bikes and a car. We have a water pump and running water. We’re trying, as best we can, to balance and compromise.
I try very hard to make sure that when I acquire a lower-energy tool, I do make use of it – that it doesn’t just sit around for an emergency that may or may not come. Thus, we do cook quite a lot in our solar oven – but I can’t say that it has totally replaced my electric stove in summer.
And it all adds up to a lot of stuff. Then add in the other stuff. The kids’s toys. The clothes. The tools. The books. The music. The pots and pans, the furniture and books we’ve stored for other people, the stuff we inherited from Eric’s grandparents and don’t have time to get rid of….oy vey! Even though we do try to manage it well and to limit our consumption, it adds up to well, too much. We have fewer space constraints than most people, but maybe more chaos constraints – that is, we’re running a farm, both of us work (although I do from home and so does Eric part of the time), we homeschool, we have kids whose full time project is to create messes – generally speaking, time for management is at a premium and things get well…chaotic.
So my goal is to try and bring order to the chaos. But that means figuring out not just what I really need now, but what I’m likely to need in a future when going out and buying things isn’t as common. There’s a tendency, I think, to hoard uncritically – to see everything as potentially necessary, and sometimes that’s followed by a desire to get rid of things that is also uncritical, or at least has been for me – finding a graceful way to navigate through our stuff and make our life better organized and a bit smaller is going to be a project. I’ll be updating you on the chaos and whether any progress is made.
So how are you doing this? What worlds are you living in? How are you managing these issues?
Sharon
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Sharon, about the time thing – you said above that the chaos steals time, too. It really does. In my experience, piecemeal decluttering only adds maybe 5-10% to cleaning time when you’re doing it, and it saves a lot of time later. Especially for you, since you’re so far from town.
If when I’m cleaning I’m also looking critically at things, and putting some of them in the giveaway or recycling box by the back door (or in the “needs to be returned to owner” or “regifting” boxes in the closet), then next time I’m cleaning I either have more “away” places to put the things we do keep, or less stuff to dust/wipe cat puke off/pick up to sweep under.
Big decluttering projects take real time – I cleaned out our garage last year, so we could rent it out to a friend who needed car storage, and it took a week of day work and the cost of a dumpster. On the other hand, I made some money renting out the space and now our friend has gotten rid of the car so this winter our car can be in the garage, which will save me 15-20 minutes of scraping on the one or two days a week I drive – that’s a lot of time, over a six month winter.
One more argument in favor of making time to declutter – unless you’re planning on moving soon, the space you have is the space you’re going to have. But your interests are going to get bigger; your library is going to get bigger; your kids are going to get bigger; your social circle keeps getting bigger; your responsibilities may get bigger too. Making room for all of those things by getting rid of what you don’t love and organizing what you do is honorable work.
I cut down to under 300 books, not counting cookbooks or books at work (though I still have a couple of hundred to get rid of in a garage sale). The last cut was well over 500 books. Doing it was really meaningful to me; it helped me to recognize which novels I really loved and which reference books were superfluous (though the hubby keeps adding more garage-sale gardening books, argh!). Moreover, I learned that there were some books I had never used much and secretly wanted to be liberated from. As long as the Japanese grammar book sat on my shelf, I could tell myself I would really learn Japanese grammar someday (and beat myself up for not having done so yet). By limiting myself to a certain amount of shelf space, I forced myself to admit that I was unlikely ever to do it, because other uses of my leisure time, and books related to those uses, seemed more valuable. Having sold the book, I’m under no more pressure!
Interestingly, I think I could still apply the 80-20 rule to what is left. If I had to go live in a hut in the woods, I could pick 60 that would serve most of my real needs (although it would be agonizing, because I’d have to give up almost all the fantasy novels). Even that would be a bigger library than most private homes enjoyed not that many generations ago.
For another take on the specter of stuff, specifically how the enemy is trying to use it to prevent a withdrawal from Iraq, check out this Tom Engelhardt piece, “Stuff Happens”.
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175005/a_consumer_s_paradise_of_war
Ha! Dewey, I ditched almost a linear foot of Japanese books – the dictionaries & texts found a good home but the workbooks just got recycled.
That’s another one of those ideals I just had to give up on. I have lost what little Japanese I ever had and there is absolutely zero chance I’ll ever pick it back up again.
My husband and I have been talking a lot about this recently. I’ve had many “lives” that have required entirely different tools and libraries- the classical singer’s tome of scores and cds, then the counseling/arts therapy grad student tome of psychology and arts, then the new mom’s collection of parenting/baby books, and now, since I learned about peak oil, all sorts of preparedness/gardening/cooking, etc books. Not to mention the storing of food and the buying of tools and massive amounts of projects. Oh yes, and the baby stuff, which even though we’re fairly minimalist, adds quite an imprint even if it’s all second-hand.
But beyond all these things, the strongest “living in two worlds” space needed is, for us, the mental gymnastics efforts needed to reconcile living in one world while preparing for another. How do I talk honestly to friends about my fears for my child when, for example, they’re expecting their first and I don’t want to scare them? I mean, I don’t _know_ that this will happen and if I proclaim I do I sure sound like a nutjob. But it’s pretty isolating to feel like you can’t talk to people about what’s really going on in your life when they ask you, “So, what’s new?” Although at least we live in earthquake country, so I can get away with limiting it to saying I’m doing emergency preparedness. ;P
And I mean seriously, how crazy is it to go from buying 25 lb bags of food and reading about how to compost human poo, to then going to work singing in a fancy shmancy opera house? Especially when you’re getting dressed up (by dressers, no less) as a russian peasant and singing about starving. It’s just totally surreal.
And how to decide where to invest our finite time and energy- which world? do I try to expand my vocal studio, learn new music, make a website? Try to find a mft internship and work on getting my hours? Or do I buy seeds and make yogurt, learn to make recycled wool longies and how to take care of chickens? Oy vey. “My brain hurts”, as Michael Palin said…
I was, in many ways, fortunate in that I was forced to reduce. In August, after seeing how bad the economy was getting, I moved from New York to North Dakota, where I already had a house paid for. I figured there was no sense in paying an extra $2,000-3,000 a month to live in New York since it has such a high cost of living.
Plus, I was starting to struggle to make ends meet. Because of that, I didn’t have much money to ship my stuff back. I moved to New York just a couple years before in a 24 foot U-Haul towing my overly stuffed SUV. I moved from New York with just what I could stuff in my car and sending around 40 boxes through the mail. While I miss a lot of things – like furniture and my washer and dryer – I have the most important thing – a house that’s paid for. I’m very grateful for that.
Shoshana, I hear you! My mother recently mentioned that she supposed she might pass on all the baby clothing of mine she’d saved as well as some toys. I have four children, the youngest of which is 2. Why didn’t she think of this a decade ago?! I suppose I can save it all for MY grandchildren.
One of my grandmothers, however, has had a steady plan of giving her things away as she aged. Everything of value in her home has a little label on it, indicating who is should be given to after her death. She downsized from the home she raised her sons in to a smaller home then again to a condo after my grandfather died. She has a very neat and cozy home but not cluttered with stuff she doesn’t need.
In contrast, my other grandmother is drowning in stuff. She could never move because she could never move all her stuff. My mother goes to visit once a week to help her catalog just the photo collection. She became the archive of the family history. I love my family and geneaology is interesting…but even I don’t think she should have to preserve all that forever.
The balance between wanting to declutter and hanging onto something because it might be useful (really useful, like life or death useful) SOMEDAY is difficult to find. Sometimes letting go of things means you are trusting that in the future somebody will help take care of you and your needs. Hard to do–but you can’t prepare for everything.
I think the amount of stuff we all have is a very clear indication of how safe, stable, and prosperous our society is. It is pretty hard to accumulate much stuff when you are running from the cossacks with only what you can carry and the clothes on your back. How many of us have a relative who remembers doing that? When you are constantly being burned out, flooded out, or chased out; well you sure don’t acquire three complete sets of dishes each a service for 12. Too much stuff is (unless you have a mental illness of compulsive hoarding) a problem of wealth and not of poverty.
Sharon, I’ve been thinking about this ever since you posted it, and it’s a problem I wrestle with myself a lot – I’m thinking this is an insoluble problem, like Leila said, because your mindset doesn’t match the culture.
A lot of the people who get diagnosed as having hoarding disorders are people who lived through the Depression and can’t adjust to the constant stream of incoming stuff. You’re living with your head in a future Depression, pretty much – but your community is still in the cheap-energy present.
If you really want to declutter, but feel that a lot of what you have is going to be necessary and irreplaceable in the future, maybe the answer is to organize a community group (library, tool library, skill-sharing workshop space) to take on those functions so you don’t have to do them yourself? For a while we had a Pagan library here, and what it did was take many, many unread books from people’s living rooms and put them into another room where people who hadn’t read them had access to them. Ditto the community bike-fixing shop – it’s everybody’s heap of bike parts in one place, where the chances of someone actually needing the part are greater.
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