Discardia_ More Life, Less Stuff - Dinah Sanders [51]
When you hang onto something with a particular future intention, make sure to attach a “Do By” date label. For example, I had a bunch of goofy old things that I thought would be fun surprise presents for a Pirate Gift Exchange (in which participants on their turn either open a wrapped present or steal from another player). I held onto that box of random weirdness for years without ever throwing that party, and finally wound up giving the stuff to charity. I should have donated it much earlier or been forced by a scheduled deadline into having the party. Replace that nebulous “someday” with a specific plan for the not-too-distant future … or decide now.
Symptom #19: Clutter Everywhere
Solution #19: You Need What You Need, but You Don’t Need Much More Than You Need
How terrible would it be if you needed a glass jar and didn’t have one?
—Gretchen Rubin, author
So much stuff
If you combine mass production and rising standards of living over the past century, pretty much anyone outside the Third World can have more belongings than they’ll ever need—and more than their homes can accommodate. This reality reached a fever pitch after the 1960s as real disposable personal income per capita in the United States grew and spending increased while prices for most goods dropped dramatically. By the 1990s, heftily squatting on the scales opposite voluntary simplicity and similar movements, the average American family had twice as many possessions as their counterpart 25 years prior, according to a September 2009 article by Jon Mooallem in The New York Times, “The Self-Storage Self - Storing All the Stuff We Accumulate.”
You don’t need to turn to the most extreme cases—illustrated in lurid detail in the TV series Hoarders, for instance—to see that we all have examples of this cultural dysfunction impacting our lives. So much stuff. So constant a habit of acquisition with little or no corresponding habit of shedding the excess. Little wonder that focusing your attention on things with which you’ve surrounded yourself can feel like emerging from a long-term drug or alcohol haze. We wake from our collective bender and groan at the weight of our gluttony.
This may not seem like that big a deal—why not keep that box of clothes you wore in college or your thrashed childhood skateboard?—but it’s an enormous problem. Writer and thoughtful consumer Cynthia Friedlob cut to the heart of it: “Clutter doesn't just crowd your home, it crowds your life. It prevents you from living fully in the moment, from feeling comfortable in your surroundings, from using your time to do the meaningful things that would bring you happiness.”
More than just a personal issue that everyone needs to examine in their own lives, it’s also a cultural issue on a massive scale. Mooallem also noted that the United States now has 2.3 billion square feet of self-storage space—more than seven square feet for every man, woman, and child in the country—despite the size of the average American home almost doubling in the past 50 years.
Non-Americans: Don’t look smug. As Boris Johnson pointed out in 2009, Europe has started to follow the same path: “If the self-storage industry keeps growing at this rate, the day is not far off when we will all be Tutankhamuns, trying to cheat death with a secret funerary display of all the things that are most personally suggestive, most symbolic of our lives, and the things we couldn’t bear to chuck.”
Ten percent of households in the U.S. have a self-storage unit, according to the Self Storage Association, a nonprofit trade group, and as cited by Mooallem. That means that one in 10 households pays money every month to put things they that don’t want in their homes into a place where they can delay deciding what to do about them.
Read that again: Lots of people pay extra to keep things they’re pretty sure they don’t need.
Decide! In or out!