This decluttering thing must be a real phenomenon since even I've heard of it. My circle includes a number of people who are roundly outraged about the suggestion that you shouldn't have more than thirty books, and only those which 'spark joy.' (The philosophers in particular are put out with the idea that you shouldn't own books that should provoke serious thoughts but not joy, such as histories of totalitarianism or meditations on genocide.) I'm guessing you will all get the popular culture if I do, since I am about as removed from the stuff as it is possible to be without eliminating electricity or the internet.
It's a fad, and a boon to public libraries and various charities. If people want to divest themselves of their worldly possessions in this way, I say let them.
ReplyDeleteLink doesn't work.
ReplyDeleteMy son and I shared an Amtrak dining table with a black minister while crossing Texas, and brought up the do-it-now guy who was briefly popular around 2012. He looked at us wryly and said "You have to be rich to live simply."
Not quite 100% true, but there's a lot to it, much more than to our opposite assumption. The poor tend to keep every scrap that comes their way, because when they need it they will not be able to easily replace it. Relatedly, those who have had few objects in their lives because of eviction, homelessness, and insecurity also tend to cling to what the acquire, even if it's not much good, for years after. Depression-era children kept shelves of canned goods in their basements for decades after.
That's true. It's not our rich neighbors who have every car they ever owned parked outside, just in case they need parts off it to fix the one that's still running.
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De-cluttering is not new. It happens every time you move from one home to another.
ReplyDeleteMy wife begs to disagree with you, to the occasional intense pleasure of Uhaul.
ReplyDeleteThere is a huge difference between what "consumers" think of as useless junk, and what creative people see. Some people fill their homes with cheap plastic trinkets and think it wealth. Some are surrounded by cast iron and pipe and see potential. Each sees a junk pile in the others collection.
ReplyDeleteI stayed in a home once, expensive place, lots of stuff- electronics, toys,fad of the moment gew gaws, but not one tool , weapon, supply of raw materiel's or food. It was a desert. An entire existence dangling from a thread of external support.
My wife begs to disagree with you....
ReplyDeleteIndeed. When we moved from Las Cruces to Ames, IA, all our stuff fit into a 15' U-Haul. When we moved back, it took an 18' U-Haul. Then it took a 21-footer to move from Las Cruces to Plano.
[sigh]
Eric Hines
You have my envy. When we moved back South from Virginia, I rented a 21' U-Haul, and two-thirds of it was stuffed with my wife's garden. There were shelves for plants tied to the walls, ropes hung across from which to float hanging pots, and of course plants on the floor as well.
ReplyDeleteWhen we moved again three years later, I needed two 26' trucks.
This last move it was three 26' trucks, plus a trailer, plus a 16' shipping container, plus any number of additional pickup truck loads.
"This last move it was three 26' trucks, plus a trailer, plus a 16' shipping container, plus any number of additional pickup truck loads."
ReplyDeleteStill for the garden? gives a new meaning to the term "truck garden!"
There was a lot of garden. But there's also just a lot more. Partly it was that my father died, and we were helping my mother clear out her house and move at the same time. The wife decided many of the things mom wanted to give away should come and live with us.
ReplyDeleteI'm glad that whole experience is over.
I've been on a decluttering jihad lately, enjoying some success. The mess and accumulation were getting me down far in excess of any pleasure or satisfaction I could take in preserving some things "just in case." I'm getting in the habit of enjoying turning loose of things I really don't need, knowing that my local thrift store will put them in the hands of someone who can be using them for the next few years. Even if it turns out later I could have used them, it's not that likely, and this way they're at least useful to someone in the interim. I would do better to plan to replace them if absolutely necessary someday. It's not as though I'll need to replace ALL of this stuff, perhaps none or only a tiny fraction. I'll keep it if it's fairly easy to store, would be very difficult to replace, and is highly likely to become useful again in the foreseeable future.
ReplyDeleteThere are a few areas of my house that are much easier to keep clean now.
When it comes to books, I used to keep them all. Obviously that got out of hand. In recent years I've taken to going through them periodically and asking myself whether I can imagine re-reading them. I still keep a lot that way, but it's also led to the disposal of quite a few that I started and didn't enjoy enough to finish. Time to quit pretending I might get back to them one day. Still, I do re-read some books more or less endlessly. Reference books, of course, meet a different standard, but it remains important to be realistic about the future need to look anything up in them. My husband really will. I likely won't.
ReplyDeleteBooks are more compact than plants. And I will not toss books that I acquire; although I'll toss most anything else. Books are treasure; they're all my wife and I have of any value to leave our kids and grandkids.
ReplyDeleteAnd they made useful ballast for each of those U-Hauls.
Eric Hines
It is counter materialism, partially imported from Japanese novels about wabi sabi. It has been Americanized or perhaps Westernized, becoming its own extremist thing.
ReplyDeleteSpace itself has value. An un-encumbered work flow may have more value than all the odds and ends stored in it. We generate a lot of fine quality wood scrap, too small to use, too good to throw away- as soon as the pile gets beyond being able to find a piece immediately, the local toy/guitar/craft people get called and it goes to a new home. Or the woodstove, although that is the lowest value second use.
ReplyDelete"Space itself has value."
ReplyDeleteThat's the truth. Defending that principle has been the source of a certain amount of stress in my life, but it's worth defending.