Stuff - Dealing with it All (Part 3)

Okay, so thinking about where an entire society got the habits of collecting stuff was too much fun, but what does it all mean?  Honestly.  You know as well as I do that you can read book after book about clutter and organizing, clearly understand the situation needs to change, and still be living with the effects of too much stuff. 

Just like an overweight person who has read every diet book known to man, but is still overweight. 

Knowledge isn't the issue when dealing with too much stuff.  While they're fun to see, those before and after transformations that we watched on shows like Clean Sweep, I really don't think that anything truly changes for those people.  Why?  Because it seems to me that all that work just gave them new space to fill.  One or two afternoons of introspection does not create a lifelong behavioral transformation.

So, what is it?  Why can't we take what we know and apply to our own lives?  In order to solve the problem, we have to look at what the stuff IS and is NOT.  Specifically, too much stuff.

Too much Stuff is:   Inanimate.  Overwhelming.  Taking up space in your mind and your home.  A source of conflict between who you want to be and how you want to live and who you actually are and how you actually live.  A source of guilt, embarrassment, and frustration.  Not useful in your life.

Too much Stuff is NOT:  Possessing of feelings.  Judgmental.  The definition of your worth.  Proof of love. 

But, you know this.  None of this earth shattering.  None this is a surprise to you.  Just like the perpetual dieter, it hasn't changed your reality.  Why?  What is holding people back from clearing it out?  Being done with it all?  Living within their spacial, their economic, and their mental means?

I asked around.  I talked with friends.  I've received all kinds of off-line emails since I started this topic and I think I've figured out a way to quantify it...to put it into terms that are simple enough that we can all start chipping away.  No, I don't have a system for you to follow.  No, I don't have a 10-step fly-lady type of schedule for you.  Instead, I have a new way of telling you what I believe to be the simple key and, if people are interested, some of the things that have worked for me along the way.  No miracles.  (But, it is easier than dieting!)

So, here it is:

We hold on to stuff that is no longer useful or acquire more stuff than we need because it is our way of insulating or protecting ourselves from perceived possible future emotions.  Think about it:  possible future emotions.

Let me explain:

My sister, who knows I'm going to use this example and won't kill me for this, has four sets of china.  FOUR sets of china for a married couple with a household of exactly two two-legged beings.  She has her wedding china, her Christmas china, her mother's china, and her mother's friend's china.  She doesn't want four sets of china.  She can't use four sets of china and yet, she holds on to all four sets of china.  Why?  In our discussions, we talk about how much her mother loved her own set of china.  How she collected it over 30+ years of marriage.  How much my sister doesn't particularly care for the pattern.  (Oh, there is nothing wrong with it...it is lovely; she just doesn't care for it.)  Let's not even get into the mother's friend's china.  So, let's recap:  Both women for whom this china was so special have died.  The china is a source of duty and guilt for my sister.  Why doesn't she get rid of it?  Because she's afraid of the disappointment she imagines her mother would have felt at knowing she got rid of the china.  So, duty and guilt are warring with perceived future disappointment. 

Let's be clear here:  My sister's mother has passed away.  My half-brothers and their wives don't want the china.  There is no one to express this anticipated disappointment and yet it is powerful.  Then there is the loyalty the mother and the friend felt for each other and my sister is tackling feelings of disloyalty by not perpetuating that bond between those two women in her own mind.

Let me give you a different example:  I wrote about my dilemma with my scrapbooking supplies.  It seemed so silly, but I was really agonizing over the disposition of my scrapbooking stuff.  So why couldn't I just make a decision about it?  Because I was anticipating my own feelings of failure or inadequacy if I failed to follow through with a project I anticipated completely.  By holding on to the items, the potential for the paper to be used, the scrapbooks to be completed (or at least show progress) remained.  I didn't have to deal with or acknowledge the reality that they weren't getting done and, most likely, wouldn't get done.  I was protecting myself from future possible feelings of failure or inadequacy.  Let's go further with my example:  What if I found time to scrapbook?  I might have future need of the stuff!  I was protecting myself from the possibility that I would not, in the future, be able to replace the things I got rid of.  Again, perceived future emotions are making decisions for me right now.

That is it.  That is my miracle epiphany.  You are holding on to stuff that no longer "fits" your life or never did "fit" your life as a way to protect yourself from future possible emotions.

Let me give you another example:

I had a friend who asked me to come over to help her organize and rearrange her family room.  In her room was a big square wooden cube that was open at one end.  It was probably 3' x 3' and beat up but good.  I asked her about it, asked if we had to decorate around it.  She said absolutely.  What?  It turned out that the cube was an empty speaker from 1970.  Her uncle had given it to her years ago and she just couldn't get rid of it because he gave it to her and he'd be so disappointed in her.  He had died 10 years before and had gotten rid of his speakers five years before that, but that had no relevance to her.  Here she was, trying to decorate around an empty speaker cube.  She was unshakable.  I couldn't get her to budge on it.

Holding on to something that someone gave you, especially a hand-me-down, protects you from the feelings that you've somehow been disloyal or unworthy because you didn't want whatever the item was.  The thing is NOT the person, but the thing allows you to keep yourself from disappointing someone.  Holding on to the item allows you to put off the feelings.

But what about people who just buy too much stuff?  People who keep bringing stuff into their homes long after their homes are full?  People who are paying money to rent homes for their stuff?  What?  You don't think of it that way but whether you have rooms full to the brim or you pay for a storage unit, you are paying money to avoid feeling things. 

What?!  You don't have sentiment attached to all that stuff.  No one gave it to you.  You just got a good deal or thought you'd do something amazing with it or some other amazingly valid reason it came into your home.  Guess what?  If you didn't do the project or the good deal didn't match your home or the gift was never given and you still have this stuff, you're protecting yourself from future feelings, too.  You are...they're just different feelings. 

Remember I said that your stuff did NOT validate you, did NOT define you, and did NOT prove your are loved.  Yet, buying stuff can make you feel like you're different than you are...you hold on to the feelings those intentions create.  Want to see yourself as creative, generous, wealthy, elite?  In our world, it is easy to try to create at facade that would seem to perpetuate those things.  So, if you are always buying potential gifts, but don't always get around to giving them away, you can't get rid of the stuff or you'll have to admit you didn't gift those things and you will have to own that.  All those craft supplies?  If you give them away, you're having to admit you're not as crafty as you'd like to think of yourself as being.  Expensive clothes, decor items, electronics?  If they don't fit, you can't afford them, or you don't use them, getting rid of them would force you to be honest about yourself and deal with the secret feelings of inadequacy you are running from.

You know it.  You know all of it and you don't want to deal with it.  So you don't.  You put it into some inaccessible areas in your home and your mind.  Maybe you just have a couple of "bad" rooms.  Maybe it is your deep dark secret and you all storage units full of stuff.  You tell yourself it doesn't matter...because you are protecting yourself from future possible emotions.

So, I'll leave you with this:  Your stuff doesn't define you.  Your stuff doesn't love you.  Your stuff doesn't prove you're worthwhile.  Your stuff is simply inanimate objects that is designed to provide usefulness and convenience to your life.  It is not supposed to be a burden, a duty, or a source of shame or guilt.  It has no feelings and is not the repository for your memories...for that, you have a heart. 

Think about it.

Stuff - Part 2

Stuff...continued...

In my previous post I touched on the following points:

1)  We ALL have more stuff than we NEED.

2)  Most of us were not raised by parents who had any idea a) how easily stuff was going to be acquired, b) how quickly technology was going to change, c) how shopping would become a MAIN SOURCE of ENTERTAINMENT for people, and d) how easy credit was going to transform our reality and our perception of NEED.  Therefore, very few of us were raised with the skills we'd need to manage the onslaught of stuff, the consumer-driven economy, and the overwhelming pressure to acquire we all face.  (To those of you who were raised to resist, go hug your parents.)


3) Acquiring things feels good, at first.

So, where does that leave us?  What is the point of all this?

Well, let me take a step backwards for a minute and tell you why I'm thinking about this at all.  I recently had the opportunity to help out some friends who were in the process of moving.  They really needed help packing, so some of us got together to help.

Packing someone else's stuff is really quite interesting, because you have absolutely no emotional attachment to the stuff you're packing.  Instead, you consider each and every item based on its intrinsic value, not some emotional value assigned to the item.  My friends had a lot of stuff to be packed.  Seriously.  A lot of stuff.  Frankly, I found it overwhelming when I paused to see just how much stuff we were talking about.  (Don't worry, they know I feel this way...I told them.)  Here is the thing:  They were overwhelmed by their stuff, too.

So, as I was packing (and packing and packing), I started thinking about my own life, my friends, our society and our relationship to our stuff.   I thought about the causes of our consumption (above) and then I thought about the end result of acquiring all this stuff.

The causes might be interesting, but the end result of having all this stuff is what we're dealing with.  Seriously.  I'm not a big believer in wallowing in the past trying to come to the roots of a problem.  I think you can get lost in the past instead of ever fixing the present.  Look back a little, say "hmmm" and move right along.

So, the problem:  Too much stuff.  The symptoms:

Anxiety:  How am I supposed to take care of this stuff?  Store this stuff?  Pay for this stuff?

Guilt:  I don't even like this stuff, but it was a gift.  I don't even want this stuff, but X does and doesn't want to let it go.  I paid X for this stuff, so I have to keep it.  I haven't even paid off this stuff, so how can I possibly get rid of it?

Shame:  What if someone sees how much stuff I have?  What if someone knows how I can't manage the stuff I have?  What if someone becomes aware of the debt I incurred to get this stuff?
 (For a little bit of transparency, I confess to being in the "debt for stuff" group.  I tend not to have too much stuff, but I have not always paid for my stuff wisely.)

If you're a repeat offender, like I am, what you really need is a new way of thinking about stuff.  A new way of understanding the stuff you bring into your house and the stuff you keep in your house.  But what?  How to change the way you think about stuff, acquire stuff, and manage stuff?

What we really need is a new way of owning our actions.  Shame, Guilt, and Anxiety are passive ways of thinking/feeling.  As if we're victims of circumstance, victims of our stuff, if you will, rather than co-conspirators.  Make no mistake.  We did this to ourselves regardless of the outside forces encouraging us and we have the ultimate responsibility for resolving the situation. 

What we need to do is change the manner in which we acquire things.  All things.  Big things.  Little things.  We need to have a way of being deliberate as we acquire stuff.  Notice I'm not telling you not get stuff.  Life changes, your needs change, you'll need stuff.  Instead, I'm telling you we need to be deliberate about how stuff enters our homes.   We need to think it through.  But how?  Everyone has different circumstances, different wants and needs, and different thresholds for "clutter" (mine, I can tell you, is very low; my sister says hers, in contrast, is very high).

Whatever we do has to be simple and universal.  It has to be quick, too.  It has to be something you can do wherever you are, whether you're shopping at Target, Nordstrom, Wal-Mart, online, at a garage-sale, or face-to-face with some well-meaning friend or relative trying to gift you with something.

As I was thinking about this, I thought of getting pets.  How often we say decline to accept pets, even free pets!  And I got it...


What if every single time you think of buying something, accepting something, of keeping something you already own, you acted as if that something were alive, like a pet? Living things need obvious care and maintenance, but so do possessions.  At minimum they need to be stored and cleaned.  They need a specific home.  Each and every item you bring into your home requires a home and maintenance and some will even require "feeding" (ie., ancillary equipment or materials to keep them running).  Given these realities, what if you asked yourself these questions every time you consider adding stuff to your household?:

1)  Where will this stuff  live? Think about it for a second.  If you buy that cute little end table because it is such a deal or it is just so beautiful, where EXACTLY will you put it?  If you buy that absolutely sublime sweater, will it fit in your sweater drawer?  If your brother and sister want you to take Aunt Edna's china, where will you put it?

2)  What is involved in caring for this new item?  Is it going to need "feeding", special arrangements, a combination of things, just to keep it minimally functional? When Superman and I bought this house, it came with a hot tub and an above-ground pool.  Superman was thrilled.  So, was I, at first.  Then came the maintenance:  filters, heaters, chemicals, water testing, covers (oh, and let's not mention gas bills).  With our really hard water, it was pretty much impossible to keep our water stable.  We were constantly having to test the water and even the pool people were struggling to help us keep it clear and clean.  It was a LOT of work.

3)  Will you be glad to put energy into care for this stuff?  Remember, you'll be spending time caring for this item instead of other items.  Back to my pool/hot tub example.  We worked our butts off to keep the pool clear and the hot tub clear.  All this for a swimming season that barely last three months.   I quickly determined I hated the pool.  I wasn't grateful for it.  I resented the time, energy, and money it took to keep it up.  The hot tub?  I didn't hate it, but I didn't like it.  I resented the time, energy, and money it took to keep up, but not as much, at first.

Can you imagine if you asked yourself these three questions every time you bought something?    Think about it.  I know it sounds weird, but seriously.  When your child (or your spouse) says, Oh, please, can we have a kitten, puppy, rabbit, or whatever? do you just say sure, throw it in the cart?  Of course not.  You are very clearly able to stop and think about the responsibility for caring for the animal that would be introduced into your home.  You make a determination as to whether or not you can care for said living thing and, the vast majority of times, you decline to bring a new pet into your home.  Yet, when it comes to more stuff, we don't stop to think of the maintenance involved in adding more stuff to our homes.

And we should.

Every item we bring into our homes should be deliberate.  It would make our lives so much richer, because we would have clearly chosen, not just impulsively accepted the stuff in our lives. 
Are you consciously accepting the work that bringing MORE into your house will require?

Just because something is a good deal, doesn't mean it has a place in your home.  Just because something looks really handy, doesn't mean it will work well in your life.  Cute isn't very cute when it is covered with dust or in the back of a closet.  Just because you already have something, doesn't mean you need to keep it. 


As for Superman and me?   We realized we felt burdened by the pool and I realized we were burdened by the hot tub.  We sold the pool and six months later we sold the hot tub.  Superman agreed immediately to me selling the pool and, after more persuasion, grudgingly said if I found a buyer for the hot tub, he'd agree to it leaving, too.  Well, I did (oh, please, did he really think I wouldn't?).  And you know what?  The second that hot tub left was loaded onto the buyers trailer, he felt a sense of relief that was so strong, he was amazed.  He didn't realize how much pressure he was feeling to maintain that thing.  (Oh, and we're chipping away at our debt and not incurring any more debt...finally learning life lessons that have vexed us for years.)

(To be continued...Part 3 - the emotional baggage associated with our stuff.)

Stuff…Part One

We ALL have more than we need and, in most cases, that excess is a source of anxiety, not pleasure for us.

 

(Picture credit: http://360digest.com/wp-content/uploads/Vintage9.jpg)

It is no secret that I'm in the midst of simplifying my life and redefining my priorities. Here I wrote about our now-almost-three year journey of unloading stuff from our lives and here I shared with you the difficulty making the decision to let go of something can be.

 
The past few weeks have been tremendously helpful to me as they've helped me focus in my feelings on the topic of STUFF. I've talked with friends who've confessed to the inability to get rid of stuff because of the emotions they've attached to the stuff. I talked with friends who feel their anxiety levels rise as soon as they think of dealing with their stuff. I talked with friends who've put blinders on so they no longer see all their stuff. In every case, this stuff that they've brought into their lives has become a source of stress and instead of pleasure.


 Let me be very clear here. It doesn't matter if the stuff came from Nordstrom or Wal-Mart or Target or a garage sale or Craigslist or a friend. It doesn't matter if the stuff is worth a lot of money or is virtually worthless. It doesn't matter if it is clothing, farm equipment, scrap-booking stuff, or furniture. The stories I was hearing (and my own experiences) were all the same. Our stuff is creating stress in our daily lives.

 
So, what gives? What is going on here? My friends are representative of various socio-economic and political positions and with kids of all different ages, yet they all share the same story: I'm over-whelmed when I think of dealing with my stuff. I'm stressed when I try to tackle it. I just can't deal with it.

 
This is serious stuff. There have been tears, drugs, and guilt.

 
So, I've been thinking about it. I've been letting it bounce around in my head. I've thought about all I've learned in the past six years, as I've worked so hard to simplify our family's life and I've come to a few conclusions.

 
First, our parents couldn't have prepared us to deal with this stuff because there wasn't this MUCH stuff when they were raising us. The television your parents had when you were six was probably the same television your parents had when you graduated high school. The princess phone you got when you were 16 still worked well when you were 26. Cell phones, DVDs, CDs, Sony Walkman, personal computers, video game systems, laptops, didn't exist in our parent's era. (CDs were introduced to the public in 1982…the year AFTER I graduated high school.) They had no way to prepare us for the onslaught to come.

 
What about clothing? It wasn't until the late 70s that real branding of clothing hit the mainstream. Remember Polo shirts, Calvin Klein, etc. Before that, clothes had to last the entire school year, so we changed into play clothes after school. Suddenly, clothes weren't enough…they had to be the right clothes and what was right changed every 3 months.



When I was growing up, "cheap Chinese imports" were a bad thing. Not only were people aware we were destroying our manufacturing base and putting people in our own country out of work, but the quality of the products was, well, terrible. People weren't willing to buy junk just to save a little cash. Whatever they bought, they bought to last. Now, our belongings are disposable and our parents couldn't prepare us for this.



Second, shopping became an end in and of itself. When I was a little girl, shopping was something we did in August for Back-to-School. Other than that, we spun dreams via the Sears Christmas catalog. The rise of the mall gave us "shopping" as a thing to go do for entertainment, rather than something we do when we have a specific need to fill. By the time I was 11 or 12, we were "heading to the mall" to go "shopping". My friends and I were looking for stuff to buy, even if we didn't need anything. 20 years of that has had our society redefining "needs" faster than you can swipe a charge card through a reader.



And third…the rise of easy credit was the final straw. Suddenly, we didn't have to wait for anything. If we wanted it, we could buy it. No cooling off period, no saving until you could buy it. Nope. We just signed our names and that wonderful widget was ours…right then and there. We felt powerful, we felt grown-up, and we felt we had arrived. We liked that feeling, so we kept heading to the mall, buying things we didn't need to keep us feeling cool and powerful…at least until the next widget caught our eyes and before we knew it, we felt like we were falling behind if we weren't joining in.

 
(to be continued…)

Our “We Have Too Much Stuff” Journey…

Picture: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2008/05/five-ways-to-ma/

…has been a crazy one. We moved to this home in Sept. 2005, leaving the hustle and bustle of Southern California for the slower pace of Eastern Washington. The problem? We brought all our stuff with us. We filled up two PODS to do it. Seriously. Two years into our new life here, I found myself looking around and wondering to myself, why did we bring all this stuff with us ? What was I thinking? How could I have paid to move this stuff? What did I think I would do with it all? Those thoughts were quickly followed by questions about lifestyle patterns, value systems, and future goals. Why were we reinventing the life we'd been so eager to leave behind? Were we just following patterns we'd absorbed since childhood, without any deliberate plan? (Short answer: Yes!) Obviously, a change was needed. I started reading books and blogs on clutter and organization and living in small places (great sources for ideas about deliberate living) rededicating myself to the ideals I paid lip-service to. I think I sounded like a broken record a lot of the time.

Superman was slow to come around…holding on to things "just in case". Some of our oddest conversations involved things that came with the house: "Why do we have to keep the hot tub? We don't like the hot tub." "Can't we get rid of the above ground pool? The kids don't use it and it is a lot of work." His responses were varied, but adamant: he didn't want to get rid of them. They added "value" to the property. What? They didn't add value to our lives. They caused us tremendous stress…trying to keep the water levels properly adjusted, paying to keep the hot tub warm, getting the cover on and off the darned pool…they were not worth the energy they required. Honestly? I hated them. Finally, Superman wearied of the discussion and I sold the above ground pool to a family with younger children (look, teenagers don't want to play in 3.5 feet of water). With the departure of the pool, Superman saw the light. He was amazed how much lighter he felt without the worry of the pool. A few months later, the Jacuzzi was gone.

In the two and a half years since I had that epiphany, I've been off-loading belongings like crazy and, sadly, our house is NOT empty. Not even close. But I'm still chipping away, trying like heck to whittle down our belongings to those that a) we use all the time or b) we are passionately in love with. If an item doesn't meet either of those benchmarks, it is gone.

Now that Superman is living away from the family for a year, he's realized how burdened he's felt with the responsibility to maintain our "lifestyle" and how much of our lifestyle we fell into rather than deliberately created. (Yippee!) He's revisiting some of the ideas I presented to him when he wasn't so receptive. One of the most interesting articles I've found recently sums up so many of the things I've learned over the past two years…if you're at all interested in the topic, you should head over to Small Living Journal. This article on 10 Guidelines for Living Tiny written by Hillary at "thistinyhouse" was absolutely fabulous. No, I don't live small, but the guidelines are applicable to all of our lives.

Two Guidelines to whet your appetites:

"#1 – What you own, owns you." – think about it. Anything you own requires your attention, your thoughts. Once you get rid of it, the space in your mind that item took is free for other endeavors.

"#2 – What makes us feel liberated is not total freedom, but rather living in a set of limitations that we have created and prescribed for ourselves." – again, think about it. How much of what you do is because you've actually thought it out and decided that this is indeed the path for you and not because everyone else does it?

What is in store for the next year? Well, with Superman's blessings, more and more stuff is leaving our house. I don't need it, don't want it, and most of all, holding on to it doesn't make me use it, it just makes me responsible for it.

What about you? Am I the only one on this journey?