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.

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.

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.

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…

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.

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175005/a_consumer_s_paradise_of_war