A few months ago, I moved - by myself - to a two-bedroom apartment. I sleep in one bedroom, of course, but I don’t have a spare bed in the other for overnight guests; I have books. Then there’s the usual living room furniture, though I still need a couch. (Gotta have a couch, don’t I? That’s what you put in living rooms, right?)
Kitchen, bathroom, bedroom - all fairly standard. But still, I feel that I’ve got too much stuff.
It is, after all, just me. How much do I reasonably need collecting dust?
That is what most of it does most of the time, anyhow. Like pretty much everyone else, I lug around items of “sentimental value,” though I have to wonder how sentimental I am if I keep them in box in a closet and only see them when I’m moving them from one apartment to another. Other things might be used once a year, or even less frequently, like the tent bagged up in my closet.
I can’t help thinking of the cases I’ve read, or people I’ve known personally, who have let the comforting feel of acquisition run wild. They turned into hoarders, people psychologically unable to let go of a single thing, sure they’d better hang onto those Taco Bell plastic cups because someone will need a stack of cups someday and they’d better keep those old convenience store receipts because you never know when you’ll need them for some tax reason and of course keep those 15 packs of tube socks they bought on sale five years ago because ... in short, they’ve lost all perspective on items’ real usefulness, and are unable to assign relative value.
Those are extreme cases, of course, but I wonder how close many of us might be to a similar but socially accepted form of the condition.
I’ve heard the term “shopping therapy” to describe the soothing feeling of acquiring ever more stuff. But that reassurance comes from the getting and having, not the use. As I look around my apartment, I realize that out of all my stuff, I can only use a few things at any given time: I can sit in a chair while watching a DVD on TV, or lie on the bed and read a book while listening to music, or maybe even use the stove, sink, counter, refrigerator and utensils all at once - but that still leaves most things unused, making them items with only potential value. How much of that potential is ever realized? Is there a point - undoubtedly subjective and individual, if it exists - where even the most useful item’s price exceeds its value? That’s a judgment we make subconsciously with every buying decision; but how often do we decide in favor of something that’s very close to the line?
To some extent, that tipping point will vary with how much trouble an item is to care for, use or carry around. Advancing technology abets that choice to acquire; my living room has a four-foot wooden rack that holds close to 300 CDs, bought over many years, and playable on several devices. But now the same amount of music - which is, after all, the reason for having a CD - can fit in a pocket-sized MP3 player. My roomful of books can be similarly compressed onto a computer hard drive - more trouble to read, but no trouble to store and carry. Does that change my computation of their worth?
That internal calculation is to a large extent driven by what we see as necessities - but “necessity” usually means what we consider socially necessary, or required to move in our familiar society.
We’ve created a highly technological environment to serve our needs, ostensibly to make our lives easier.
In many ways, we have, with ease of travel, better health, physical security and comfort. But achieving that ease has paradoxically created new burdens, requiring cumbersome housing, vehicles, a commitment to massive infrastructure, and any number of fashionable tweaks and personalized comforts.
Photographer Peter Menzel’s 1994 book “Material World: A Global Family Portrait” showed “average” families from countries around the world outside their homes, with all their worldly possessions lined up. The poorest, by our reckoning, was probably from Bhutan, a small Himalayan kingdom. Its representatives lived in a mud-brick shack with a few bowls and a couple of changes of clothes. That was about it.
The richest, by far, was a Texas family with several vehicles, racks of clothes, an assortment of furniture and boxes more of stuff, stuff, stuff. Most other countries’ residents were closer to the low end of those extremes, yet all considered their lives fairly normal.
Within the United States itself, the disparity of wealth is at least as great as at any time in history. Even in times and places where political participation depended on property qualifications, those in power often had just a few times the wealth of those who were excluded. Now a few thousand “super-rich” each have thousands of times what the bottom 100 million Americans do. That concentration is and has been accelerating, with the greatest gains going to those already the richest, according to “Perfectly Legal,” journalist David Cay Johnston’s award-winning study of the American tax system.
Yet that disparity is no longer necessarily visible, as I mentioned regarding music and books. Raw wealth must no longer be a display of solid assets, such as gold or property; all of wealth’s potential can be carried in a few plastic rectangles. Now even Bill Gates can look almost ascetic by carrying a few slim high-tech devices that provide instant knowledge, communication and enough money to buy any food, clothing or shelter.
When it comes to true asceticism, even our concept of that has been warped by our experience. In “Empire of the Soul,” Paul William Roberts wrote that hippies of the late 1960s and early 1970s - with whom he belonged at the time - had a great shock when pursuing spirituality in India. Rejecting Western materialism sounded OK from the perspective of suburbia, but they found what gurus called “materialism” was abject poverty by American standards. To people already on the lower rungs of the material ladder, rejecting materialism meant living with a robe, a stick, a bowl and nothing else.
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