The War Against Stuff

Two or so years into our marriage, Jenn and I realized that we had somehow become, or maybe always had been, packrats. We were iving in a smallish house and surrounded by Stuff. As in the stuff you keep in the basement, the stuff at the back of your closet, the stuff that’s stuffed into one of those bottom drawers that you haven’t opened in years. All that stuff. How did this happen?

First, there’s a tendency to think that whatever we already own needs to be replaced or upgraded or swapped for a more trendy color. So we buy another TV, better speakers, more shoes, another suit, a second car, a new set of dishes, more towels, plus that boat we’ve always wanted — without stopping to consider if it was necessary, if we could afford it, and what it would really cost us

In part, this is about living beyond our means, and in part it’s about not being able to distinguish between what we want and what we need. It is about the affliction of our age: SDA.

Gopal Ahluwalia, director of research for the National Association of Home Builders, says all this stuff is costing us quite a bit in storage alone. Since 1970, the size of the average house has increased nearly 40%, from about 1,500 square feet to 2,300 — and that’s despite an overall decline in family size. In addition, he says, we’re building new homes with bigger kitchens and more bedrooms, bathrooms and closets than ever before. “Every master bedroom usually has at least one walk-in closet these days,” Ahluwalia says, “often two: his and hers.”

When you buy a bigger home to accommodate your stuff, you pay higher taxes, higher heating bills, bigger cooling bills, a bigger mortgage, plus whatever the upkeep costs are for the stuff itself. But we don’t think about these costs, we succumb to SDA and squander money on temporary pleasures without thinking about what, really, we’re investing our money in — and the fact that our money would almost certainly be better employed elsewhere.

So, what were we to do? Maybe it was time to hire an organizer. Or maybe we needed to dig deeper and peer into our very souls. We took a long hard look, not at our stuff, but at ourselves, and came to the following conclusions:

• We’re accumulating so fast, without thinking through whether we really need it or have the space and time to manage it.
• We’re human. We get attached to stuff.
• ‘The clarity of external spaces reinforces the clarity of internal space’
• For a right-brained person (both of us) , clutter can be energizing. For that person, clutter is abundance. A cluttered desk can be a smorgasbord, rich with opportunity.

In our efforts to build a deliberate, contemplative way of living, we have tried several times to deal with the problem of how much stuff we own. We have tried organizing more and more effectively, but organizing has actually obstructed the letting go process by giving us a way to put off getting rid of stuff as we endlessly putter with your clutter and providing us with a good excuse to buy more stuff (disguised as `organizing supplies’). Obviously, ‘organizing’ wasn’t working. We thought long and hard about it, and decided that what we needed was, imagine this; less stuff! So began the War Against Stuff.

The War Against Stuff is our shorthand for this deliberate paring down of our possessions, eliminating unused, broken, duplicate or just outright useless items that we have collected. As a (hopefully permanent) object lesson to ourselves, we decided not to throw away any of the things we have chosen to eliminate in The War Against Stuff until the war is won. As we emptied the house of it, we collected it all in one place, our garage.

With a garage full of junk, we were able to enjoy our suddenly spacious house. When you make an effort to minimize the amount of stuff you have, it is amazing how big 950 square feet can be…