The New York Times-20080126-The Stuff Pack Rats Are Made Of
Return to: The_New_York_Times-20080126
The Stuff Pack Rats Are Made Of
Full Text (716 words)EVER since we moved to our new home last month, I have been obsessed with the cost of clutter.
There is nothing like being forced to pack up every last thing you own, load it onto a truck, and unload and unpack it on the other end to make you question the true value of all that stuff. You find yourself wondering not only why you bought it, why you kept it, why it's so hard to get rid of it -- but why on earth you will undoubtedly buy more of it.
As George Carlin quipped in his monologue A Place for My Stuff!, That's all your house is, it's a place to keep your stuff while you go out and get -- more stuff.
Some of our stuff can be explained. When two adult households join in the sacrament of marriage, duplicates of dishes, wine glasses, pots and digital alarm clocks can be expected.
The real puzzle was why my husband and I had held onto so many things we no longer used, or why we subsequently bought things that were often not so different from those we already owned -- like several handbags I unearthed in our teeming garage.
There were boxes that hadn't been opened in years containing things we'd forgotten that we even owned. Here was not one hallway runner, not two, but three! What had we spent on those? Here were the $150 shoes I once splurged on, seven years ago, when I was living in San Francisco.
In our confusion about what to do with all our excess, my husband and I hauled it all to the new place. It could have been worse. We could have rented a storage unit. But I fear paying yet another monthly charge -- for anything, really.
The very existence of the multibillion-dollar storage industry is particularly unsettling to me because it speaks to the binge-purge aspect of our society. We try to get rid of what we've already consumed in order to go out and buy more. Or we spend money trying to contain our stuff before we store it. Americans spent close to $600 million at the Container Store alone last year, up from $283 million five years ago, according to the company. I was one of them.
As nifty, and helpful, as all those crisp-looking bins, boxes and shelves may be, they won't solve your stuff overload, says Peter Walsh, the professional organizer who wrote It's All Too Much (Simon & Schuster). I was listening to his CD as I unpacked, and I decided he is a genius -- because he forces you to re-examine the underlying value of the possessions that clutter your life.
We invest our hopes and dreams and imagined futures in the stuff that we buy, Mr. Walsh said on the telephone. People buy into this promise, and they fill their homes with stuff that never delivers on the promise, so they go back for more.
ECONOMISTS call that trap the hedonic treadmill. It can be hard to see the pattern in your own life until you're trying to dig yourself out from under an avalanche of boxes of things you own but wish you didn't, because the L. L. Bean Home Catalog has some cute things you secretly want to buy.
Mr. Walsh, who was the decluttering drill sergeant on the cable show Clean Sweep, offers an exit ramp from that treadmill. Most people, he said, look at their home and ask, What do I want to put in it? Questions like this are likely to lead you straight to your favorite furniture store.
Instead, he suggests: Ask what you want from the different spaces in your home. Do you want peace and harmony? Do you want intimacy, an exciting entertainment area, a haven?
Viewing your belongings -- or clutter -- from this quality-of-life perspective makes it easier to pare them, according to Mr. Walsh. Yes, it's painful to throw or give away things you've spent good money on. But again, what's the real worth of those items in the context of your life?
As George Carlin put it in his Stuff routine, you don't want to end up feeling, That's all your house is, it's a pile of stuff with a cover on it.
