July 2007I have too much stuff. Most people in America do. In fact, thepoorer people are, the more stuff they seem to have. Hardly anyoneis so poor that they can't afford a front yard full of old cars.It wasn't always this way. Stuff used to be rare and valuable.You can still see evidence of that if you look for it. For example,in my house in Cambridge, which was built in 1876, the bedroomsdon't have closets. In those days people's stuff fit in a chestof drawers. Even as recently as a few decades ago there was a lotless stuff. When I look back at photos from the 1970s, I'm surprisedhow empty houses look. As a kid I had what I thought was a hugefleet of toy cars, but they'd be dwarfed by the number of toys mynephews have. All together my Matchboxes and Corgis took up abouta third of the surface of my bed. In my nephews' rooms the bed isthe only clear space.Stuff has gotten a lot cheaper, but our attitudes toward it haven'tchanged correspondingly. We overvalue stuff.That was a big problemfor me when I had no money. I felt poor, and stuff seemed valuable,so almost instinctively I accumulated it. Friends would leavesomething behind when they moved, or I'd see something as I waswalking down the street on trash night (beware of anything you findyourself describing as "perfectly good"), or I'd find something inalmost new condition for a tenth its retail price at a garage sale.And pow, more stuff.In fact these free or nearly free things weren't bargains, becausethey were worth even less than they cost. Most of the stuff Iaccumulated was worthless, because I didn't need it.What I didn't understand was that the value of some new acquisitionwasn't the difference between its retail price and what I paid forit. It was the value I derived from it. Stuff is an extremelyilliquid asset. Unless you have some plan for selling that valuablething you got so cheaply, what difference does it make what it's"worth?" The only way you're ever going to extract any value fromit is to use it. And if you don't have any immediate use for it,you probably never will.Companies that sell stuff have spent huge sums training us to thinkstuff is still valuable. But it would be closer to the truth totreat stuff as worthless.In fact, worse than worthless, because once you've accumulated acertain amount of stuff, it starts to own you rather than the otherway around. I know of one couple who couldn't retire to the townthey preferred because they couldn't afford a place there big enoughfor all their stuff. Their house isn't theirs; it's their stuff's.And unless you're extremely organized, a house full of stuff canbe very depressing. A cluttered room saps one's spirits. Onereason, obviously, is that there's less room for people in a roomfull of stuff. But there's more going on than that. I think humansconstantly scan their environment to build a mental model of what'saround them. And the harder a scene is to parse, the less energyyou have left for conscious thoughts. A cluttered room is literallyexhausting.(This could explain why clutter doesn't seem to bother kids as muchas adults. Kids are less perceptive. They build a coarser modelof their surroundings, and this consumes less energy.)I first realized the worthlessness of stuff when I lived in Italyfor a year. All I took with me was one large backpack of stuff.The rest of my stuff I left in my landlady's attic back in the US.And you know what? All I missed were some of the books. By theend of the year I couldn't even remember what else I had stored inthat attic.And yet when I got back I didn't discard so much as a box of it.Throw away a perfectly good rotary telephone? I might need thatone day.The really painful thing to recall is not just that I accumulatedall this useless stuff, but that I often spent money I desperatelyneeded on stuff that I didn't.Why would I do that? Because the people whose job is to sell youstuff are really, really good at it. The average 25 year old isno match for companies that have spent years figuring out how toget you to spend money on stuff. They make the experience of buyingstuff so pleasant that "shopping" becomes a leisure activity.How do you protect yourself from these people? It can't be easy.I'm a fairly skeptical person, and their tricks worked on me wellinto my thirties. But one thing that might work is to ask yourself,before buying something, "is this going to make my life noticeablybetter?"A friend of mine cured herself of a clothes buying habit by askingherself before she bought anything "Am I going to wear this all thetime?" If she couldn't convince herself that something she wasthinking of buying would become one of those few things she woreall the time, she wouldn't buy it. I think that would work for anykind of purchase. Before you buy anything, ask yourself: will thisbe something I use constantly? Or is it just something nice? Orworse still, a mere bargain?The worst stuff in this respect may be stuff you don't use muchbecause it's too good. Nothing owns you like fragile stuff. Forexample, the "good china" so many households have, and whose definingquality is not so much that it's fun to use, but that one must beespecially careful not to break it.Another way to resist acquiring stuff is to think of the overallcost of owning it. The purchase price is just the beginning. You'regoing to have to think about that thing for years—perhaps forthe rest of your life. Every thing you own takes energy away fromyou. Some give more than they take. Those are the only thingsworth having.I've now stopped accumulating stuff. Except books—but books aredifferent. Books are more like a fluid than individual objects.It's not especially inconvenient to own several thousand books,whereas if you owned several thousand random possessions you'd bea local celebrity. But except for books, I now actively avoidstuff. If I want to spend money on some kind of treat, I'll takeservices over goods any day.I'm not claiming this is because I've achieved some kind of zenlikedetachment from material things. I'm talking about something moremundane. A historical change has taken place, and I've now realizedit. Stuff used to be valuable, and now it's not.In industrialized countries the same thing happened with food inthe middle of the twentieth century. As food got cheaper (or wegot richer; they're indistinguishable), eating too much started tobe a bigger danger than eating too little. We've now reached thatpoint with stuff. For most people, rich or poor, stuff has becomea burden.The good news is, if you're carrying a burden without knowing it,your life could be better than you realize. Imagine walking aroundfor years with five pound ankle weights, then suddenly having themremoved.
