Or to put a positive spin on it -- Simplifying your Life!
Even when you do your best to live a life devoid of materialism, somehow you manage to collect all manner of things best described as, well, crap. The problem comes when you own a house and there is plenty of room in which to stash all of your crap and forget about it. Even with the best of intentions, it can be hard to get rid of any of it. I tried numerous times to whittle away at it, but every time I did there would be a new influx of items inherited by family members who had passed away, or by the incessant red tide of Christmas. You may start the day with plenty of impetus to divulge yourself of it all, but as you sort through it you may find that each item carries some psychological weight to it -- whether it was given to you by a family member or a friend, or whether it reminds you of a different time period in your life. It can be exhausting work. Most likely you, like me, avoid those things like the plauge and let them sit festering in the basement.
One day you wake up and realize it is time to move away from the home you love, and possibly even downsize. If you are lucky, you see this coming and prepare, but even then you will never have the same motivation to tackle the crap in your basement until you only have 10 days to do it in (along with everything else you need to do to get your house on the market). Suddenly, cutting the cord seems perfectly simple and rational, well o.k. maybe not for EVERY item. There are those items where all logic fails you and you end up keeping something you'll never use, or probably ever even look at again.
I don't think my husband and I are alone in this. Otherwise there would be no need for the Got Junk? business. What frustrates me the most is that a lot of our clutter could either be recycled or re-used, but we were short on time to deal with it all properly. Our recycle bin filled pretty quickly and we packed a mid-sized car with donatable items, but beyond endorsing the "Got Junk?" folks, our real estate agent offered no helpful suggestions on responsibly re-allocating all of our stuff in a timely manner. We had some help from family members and friends, so we were able to spare the landfill for the most part. If you are reading this and you think it might be time to simplify your own life I would recommend starting yesterday. Here are some helpful tips for commiting to the decision to live simply every day.
For all of the heart-ache of divesting oneself of artifacts from one's past, it feels really good to know there isn't anything haunting me in the basement. Uh, except there are a few things haunting me from our new storage locker. . .
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You're definitely not alone!
We are constantly fighting the same battle of ever-increasing amounts of "stuff". I've moved around 20 times since college, which gave me great motivation each to purge my collections, but I swear the pile nearly doubles every time.
What has helped in some of the latest sortings is to consider the true long-term usefulness of an item. Especially considering Peak Oil. Such as: is my kid really going to use this old decrepit videocam from my first computer? Out it goes. Or, are we really going to need all these dozens of shot glasses in the future? Well...I suppose that one's a maybe :)
ROFL
Yeah, I just wrapped ours up and put them in the attic, without a second thought. But now that you mention it, some day it may be that we'll use them to drink vodka made from our potato crop, in lieu of the fine red wine we'd rather be drinking. In which case, what are we going to do with all those nice wine glasses?
The hardest things to get rid of -- and honestly I haven't gotten rid of them yet -- are the college texts. Some of them I will keep, because I might reference them, but the others I know I only keep "just in case" I decide to go back to school, or for sentimental reasons. How is it that I'm sentimentally attached to a physical chemistry text book????
Something I should have added here is that at least right now you can probably find people to buy most of your junk. In a few years it might get harder to find people willing to throw money at useless objects.
Books
I've been making it a point to not get rid of any books, as any such information will be priceless in the future. If there no longer exist bookstores, libraries, and commercial printing presses, what happens to our knowledge? I used to sell a lot of my textbooks at the end of the semester, but I now I cringe when I wonder how interested students in my community will be able to learn differential equations, engineering mechanics, or the principles (and perils) of economics?
Fortunately, I was always a bit of a packrat when it comes to books, so I have most of them. My wife is the same way and we thus have entire walls filled with books. When we make our move to our homestead location, I plan to hoard books like a madman along with all our other supplies. Without sources of knowledge like books, I worry what the future might look like for the world...
I've begun aiming to not use
I've begun aiming to not use something that I can't build myself and recycle myself, or with help of people I don't have to pay, friends. This means I have to become a big-time overachiever, compared to most in our populace willing just to learn one role they can play as an automatron in a corporate pyramid. Freedom today takes enormous knowledge, with homesteading opportunities few and far between. I'm in the middle of the spectrum as far as utopians; I'm not a hippy who believes nature is perfect, and I'm not nerd who believes technology is better than nature, I'm an appropriate technologist, technology where it truly makes life better.
One reason why "stuff" floods the market is because the degree to which nature has been claimed by mankind as its own. As primitive hunter gatherers, we pretty much never had need to make stuff. A fire and some tools and we were set. But when someone decided they owned the land where are our food and materials resided, we became traders, and so we would bake them a cherry pie in exchange for picking from our old cherry tree. It's a shame other cultures have to build stuff to give to us to receive their basic needs. We long ago acquired the oil wells and the water wells and the lush fields for ourselves, and if they wanted to feed their people instead of letting Dole feed us tropical fruit in the dead of winter, they had a rude awakening in store. We'd be sure to give them the opportunity to knit us sweaters so they could afford to eat their country's food.
It's all 'stuff'!
Since discovering peak oil, I sometimes sit and think about what is really important to me, often in the context of what would I take with me if I had 5 minutes to grab stuff out of my house. My conclusion is that my wife & our dogs are the things I would take first. (We don't have kids, so we're not abandoning them!) I might grab some 'how-to' books if I had the time, but everything else is just 'stuff'. Even family pictures and heirlooms fall in the category of 'stuff'.
What matters most are people & relationships, as well as the knowledge and memories walking around in my head.
I'm amazed at the value that people around me place in their possessions. The more stuff they have, the unhappier they seem to be. I read stories of how little so many people in the world have, and then I look around me at America. We're possession rich, but morally bankrupt. It will be interesting to watch America deal with peak oil and the resulting chaos....
I wonder
I wonder if the reason for the inverse relationship between stuff and happiness has to do with guilt. Guilt in the knowledge that so many people around the world have so much less. Of course, it's almost certainly not a conscious thing as few people I know express such a sentiment -- but I do see this clear relationship you mentioned.