Wrestling With Stuff

What I watched: How Many Towels Do You Need? Delivered at TEDxDayton by Rose Lounsbury. Posted December 5, 2018.

For the past few months, I’ve been on a quest to purge my possessions. I’ve been only modestly successful in that endeavor. Now that I’ve recently ended my 24-year job at my former corporate work home, I should have more time to dedicate to getting rid of all the physical stuff that’s accumulated in my life. That’s the plan anyway.

There was a time I lived what many today would call a minimalist lifestyle. However, I considered it simply living a simple life within my means. Small apartments, mostly studios. Little furniture. Small wardrobe. Few kitchen items. I lived an extremely stripped-down life and I was entirely happy. That lasted throughout my early adulthood in Chicago to my time in New York and throughout my move to Los Angeles and the first few years living in Los Angeles. Then something happened.

I started to accumulate stuff. I’m not sure how or why, but I abandoned my comfortable and easy-going life of minimal stuff and ended up with lots of stuff. It crept up on me. I eventually bought into the American home dream and felt obligated to buy a house and I began to fill up what was now two residences, San Francisco and Palm Springs. Only a modicum of that stuff actually brought me the level of joy worthy of the cost outlay, but I did it anyway.

Eventually I sold the house in Palm Springs, but the furniture and other items it contained lived in a storage unit in San Francisco for more than four years. For four years I paid lots of money to store stuff I never used or even looked at. At least I finally emptied and abandoned that storage unit. I consider storage unit services to be mostly a terrible side effect of our rabid consumerism.

Fast forward to today and I live in an apartment, still with too much stuff, and a garage stacked with boxes and other crap, much of it that I haven’t looked at in years. I identified a box the other day that I determined hadn’t been opened in more than 20 years.

I’ve begun to purge my stuff for real now. It’s going slowly. Hopefully I’ll pick up speed. I try to follow the guidance that each day I eliminate at least some of the stuff in my life. I’ve pondered the goal of having my life as streamlined as possible by year’s end. We’ll see how well that goes. Regardless, I will absolutely reduce my possessions footprint to a small, manageable size soon.

So, I’ve been wrestling with my stuff in my head and in real time for a while and I’m committed to finally doing something about it.

I don’t consider myself a minimalist. I know it’s a trendy term and life strategy. That’s fine. I just fear that if I wrap my own thinking into a trend it will fall away like so many trends do and I’ll be back to square one. I’ll continue to think of the life I want as being simple and easy to manage, which I believe requires having far less stuff than I do.

For whatever reason, when I stumbled on this video, it gave me yet another perspective about minimalism that I rather enjoyed. The way Rose Lounsbury explains her own way of thinking about minimalism resonated. Unlike me, Lounsbury does consider herself a minimalist.

Lounsbury’s self-questioning about her relationship to her stuff started with the question “How many towels do you need?” The answer she decided was two per person, far fewer than most of us likely have in our linen closets. She was struggling with all of the stuff in her life, even considering buying a bigger house in which to store it all. But a friend suggested what turned out to be a better idea – minimalism.

So, this early venture into minimalism taught me two very clear things. One, I can live with a lot less than I think I can. And two, I can definitely live with a lot less than society tells me I should.

Minimalism isn’t about selling everything you own and living out of a backpack. Although if you want to do that, go for it. It’s not about never accepting gifts. Instead, Lounsbury offers one of the better definitions of minimalism I’ve heard from the 19th century designer William Morris.

Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.

It’s the words useful and beautiful that Lounsbury now uses as checkpoints when deciding whether or not items are welcome in her home. Those are pretty good guidelines.

Lounsbury also offers a fantastic suggestion about receiving gifts you don’t want. And let’s face it, we’ve all gotten gifts from people we didn’t want. Many of us struggle with how to handle this situation. I’ve struggled with this often because in my mind my simplicity-loving hamster wheel of a brain immediately wonders how I can cram one more thing into my life, but I don’t want to insult the gift giver.

I'd like to teach you two words that will help you in any gift giving situation. You might be familiar with them. When someone gives you a gift, say thank you. Once you've done that, your obligation to the gift and the giver is done. It's now yours. If it's useful or beautiful to you, by all means keep it. And if it's not, well, for Pete's sake, let it go so it could be useful or beautiful to someone else.

For Lounsbury, the benefits of minimalism have nothing to do with the way her house looks. Instead, it has everything to do with the way she feels. More free time to read for pleasure instead of picking up stuff. Peace of mind knowing friends can stop by anytime and the house will be welcoming and ready. Clarity, the mental space to think, dream, and do things she never would have in her previously cluttered life.

One thing Lounsbury said stood out for me. She said she believes the physical state of our homes mirrors our mental state. Full home, full head. Cluttered home, cluttered head. Thing rings resoundingly true, at least for me.

Another video crossed my path soon after watching Lounsbury’s talk. It was “Is your stuff stopping you?” delivered at TEDxUniversityofEdinburgh by Elizabeth Dulemba in March 2016.

I really like Dulemba’s talk. It hit home for me just as much as Lounsbury’s talk. Perhaps I was simply ready to listen to what they had to say, but these two videos really struck a chord with me.

Dulemba mentions that comedian Steven Wright once said he had the world’s largest collection of seashells that he keeps scattered on beaches around the world. This served as an epiphany to Dulemba.

The idea that something could just be in the world and that that could be enough was radical to me. It changed my life, the idea that you didn't have to own something for it to have value to you.

I’ve said something similar many times. I’ve lived in major urban centers all my adult life. Outside my doorstep are great museums, beautiful parks, delicious restaurants, libraries, and so much more. I don’t need to own much because I can step out my door and enjoy so much that’s shared by everyone.

Dulemba had a few bucket list items she had an opportunity to check off, but they would require her drastically reducing her stuff to some bare essentials. She and her husband, who was ready to embark on a big adventure in another country with her, had to purge their large home to nothing but the few must haves.

Dulemba is clear she is not a minimalist, and this is perhaps why her talk made such an impact. I don’t consider myself a minimalist either. Many try to attach that label to me, but I resist it.

And I realized I had a big problem and all this stuff. Now my husband and I are not independently wealthy people, and we were not being sponsored by a company. So, there was no picking up our old life and moving it across the ocean to this new life. That was not feasible. If we were going to make this fly we were going to have to sell almost everything. And again, I told you I am not a minimalist. So how does somebody like me wrap their head around this idea? I had some wake-up calls.

One wake-up call she mentions has hit home for me a lot lately, a bad health scare. I’m fine. But so many people around me have gotten seriously sick or died. Many who have died were many years my junior. That’s been a wake-up call for me too. As Dulemba states, good health is not a given, but rather a gift. Life itself is a gift. Life is finite. For everyone. Accepting that finiteness is a gift. Check out my Your Life Will Be Absurdly Brief post for some thoughts about this.

Actor Tom Hiddleston’s quote on this topic highlights our finiteness well in a few words.

We all have two lives. The second one starts when we realize we only have one.

The crux of Dulemba’s talk comes down to the stuff versus experiences quandary. If you’re a person who loves stuff, great! Other people value experiences over stuff. But we live in a stuff-laden world in which marketing and advertising people work day in and day out to part us from our money to buy more stuff. But being an experience person stuck in a stuff-based lifestyle isn’t a fun way to live.

Science has repeatedly proven stuff does not make us happy.

Dr. Thomas Gilovich of Cornell University has been studying happiness for over 20 years. And he said it really comes down to this. We can surround ourselves with stuff and we can even identify ourselves with the stuff that we keep around us and think it's part of us, but it will always be separate from us. It is not truly a part of us. Whereas our experiences are a part of us. We become the sum total of our experiences.

I vote for experiences over stuff every time now, or at least I try to.

Why do we keep so much stuff. Dulemba articulates three reasons.

Stuff makes us feel safe. Our caveman era lizard brains have a natural predilection for accumulating stuff. The cave with the most stuff had the best chance of survival. That need doesn’t serve us so well today.

Stuff gives us the illusion of permanence. If we keep lots of stuff around, it’s not going anywhere and therefore we’re not either. Not true of course. None of us gets out of this thing called life alive. Nobody. Permanence is an illusion and lots of stuff can often be nothing more than a flawed coverup. Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the future. Climate change. Political upheaval. Vulnerable economic markets. Wars. So much can change our lives in an instant.

Stuff accumulates because the marketing machine tells us we need more stuff. We’re coerced into buying. When buying, we’re coerced into buying more or bigger. We’re encouraged to constantly replace what we already own. Marketing and advertising professionals and the companies behind them want us to be perpetually unhappy with what we have while delivering the usually false promise that if we just buy what they’re offering our lives will be better.

They have convinced us that our value to society is wrapped up in how much money we can pour back into it. I think we're worth more than that. They give us choices. So many choices. And they convince us that these choices represent freedom when really it's just a ploy to make us buy more stuff.

But ask yourself do you really care about what they want you to care about?

Henry David Thoreau said the price of anything is the amount of life we exchange for it. How much of your life have you exchanged for trying to figure out what they want you to care about instead of what you actually care about?

Another benefit Dulemba mentions about having less stuff is mobility, the ability to easily and quickly pick up and move. This is one of the main reasons I want to streamline my life. I want to be able to move easily, whether that’s simply to enjoy a new location for a while or because world situations make that advisable.

Dulemba offers some good advice on how to get rid of your stuff. She again makes it clear she’s not a minimalist and that one might not want to get rid of everything but rather maybe just streamline a little bit.

Let me end by offering one of my favorite videos about the stuff in our lives, The Story of Stuff. It’s directly pertinent to any discussion about stuff.

When you read this, I don’t want you to feel compelled to become a minimalist. I don’t even want to nudge you toward eliminating stuff in your life. But, if any of this makes sense for you, I hope you’ll consider the option of reducing your stuff, perhaps drastically. It might make you happier.

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