Having That Kind of Stuff
I accept as well much stuff. Near people in America do. In fact, the poorer people are, the more stuff they seem to have. Hardly anyone is and so poor that they can't afford a front thou total of old cars.
It wasn't e'er this way. Stuff used to be rare and valuable. You can withal see testify of that if you await for information technology. For example, in my house in Cambridge, which was built in 1876, the bedrooms don't take closets. In those days people'due south stuff fit in a chest of drawers. Even as recently as a few decades ago there was a lot less stuff. When I await back at photos from the 1970s, I'thou surprised how empty houses expect. As a kid I had what I thought was a huge fleet of toy cars, merely they'd be dwarfed by the number of toys my nephews have. All together my Matchboxes and Corgis took up nearly a third of the surface of my bed. In my nephews' rooms the bed is the merely articulate space.
Stuff has gotten a lot cheaper, but our attitudes toward information technology 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, and then nearly instinctively I accumulated it. Friends would go out something behind when they moved, or I'd see something as I was walking downward the street on trash dark (beware of annihilation yous detect yourself describing as "perfectly good"), or I'd observe something in most new status for a 10th its retail cost at a garage sale. And pow, more stuff.
In fact these free or nearly free things weren't bargains, because they were worth fifty-fifty less than they cost. Nearly 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 conquering 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 take some plan for selling that valuable affair you lot got and so cheaply, what difference does it make what information technology's "worth?" The only way y'all're ever going to extract any value from it is to use it. And if you don't take any immediate use for it, you lot probably never volition.
Companies that sell stuff have spent huge sums training us to retrieve stuff is withal valuable. Merely it would exist closer to the truth to care for stuff as worthless.
In fact, worse than worthless, because once you've accumulated a sure amount of stuff, information technology starts to own yous rather than the other way around. I know of one couple who couldn't retire to the boondocks they preferred because they couldn't afford a place at that place big enough for all their stuff. Their firm isn't theirs; it's their stuff'southward.
And unless you're extremely organized, a firm total of stuff tin be very depressing. A chaotic room saps one'due south spirits. One reason, obviously, is that there's less room for people in a room full of stuff. Merely there'due south more going on than that. I think humans constantly scan their environment to build a mental model of what'due south around them. And the harder a scene is to parse, the less energy you have left for witting thoughts. A cluttered room is literally exhausting.
(This could explain why clutter doesn't seem to carp 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 yr. All I took with me was one large backpack of stuff. The rest of my stuff I left in my landlady's cranium back in the United states. And you know what? All I missed were some of the books. Past the end of the year I couldn't fifty-fifty retrieve what else I had stored in that attic.
And yet when I got back I didn't discard so much as a box of information technology. Throw away a perfectly proficient rotary phone? I might need that one day.
The actually painful thing to recall is not just that I accumulated all this useless stuff, but that I frequently spent coin I desperately needed on stuff that I didn't.
Why would I do that? Considering the people whose job is to sell you stuff are really, actually good at it. The average 25 year old is no match for companies that have spent years figuring out how to go you to spend coin on stuff. They brand 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 matter that might work is to inquire yourself, before ownership something, "is this going to brand my life noticeably amend?"
A friend of mine cured herself of a clothes buying addiction by asking herself before she bought anything "Am I going to wear this all the fourth dimension?" If she couldn't convince herself that something she was thinking of buying would become ane of those few things she wore all the time, she wouldn't purchase it. I call back that would piece of work for any kind of purchase. Before you buy anything, ask yourself: will this be something I use constantly? Or is it merely something overnice? Or worse nevertheless, a mere bargain?
The worst stuff in this respect may be stuff y'all don't use much considering information technology's too adept. Nothing owns you like fragile stuff. For example, the "good china" so many households have, and whose defining quality is non so much that it'southward fun to use, but that one must be especially careful not to break it.
Another way to resist acquiring stuff is to retrieve of the overall cost of owning information technology. The purchase price is just the first. You're going to accept to think about that thing for years—perhaps for the residue of your life. Every thing you ain takes energy away from you. Some requite more than than they take. Those are the only things worth having.
I've at present stopped accumulating stuff. Except books—but books are unlike. Books are more like a fluid than private objects. Information technology's not peculiarly inconvenient to ain 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 care for, I'll take
I'm not challenge this is because I've accomplished some kind of zenlike detachment from textile things. I'm talking virtually something more mundane. A historical change has taken identify, and I've at present realized it. Stuff used to be valuable, and at present it's not.
In industrialized countries the aforementioned thing happened with food in the middle of the twentieth century. As food got cheaper (or nosotros got richer; they're duplicate), eating too much started to exist a bigger danger than eating likewise little. Nosotros've now reached that point with stuff. For nigh people, rich or poor, stuff has become a brunt.
The good news is, if you're carrying a burden without knowing it, your life could be better than you realize. Imagine walking effectually for years with five pound ankle weights, so suddenly having them removed.
Source: http://paulgraham.com/stuff.html
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