ON STUFF
Christopher Nyerges
[Nyerges is the author of 22 books and the co-founder of School of Self-Reliance. Among other things, he teaches his students how to do more with less, and how frugality is a fulfilling lifestyle. He has authored “Extreme Simplicity,” “Self-Sufficient Home,” “Urban Survival Guide,” and other books. More information at www.SchoolofSelf-Reliance.com]
Yesterday in Highland Park there was a sweep of a homeless area, where they all had to move their tents and stuff, and the sanitation department’s large crew filled trucks with junk and cleaned the sidewalk. Before their work, you could smell the area from 200 feet away. At least 15 police officers stood by because some of the homeless camped there got angry. At least a few shouted violent accusations towards the officers. When it was nearly over, I walked right through the thick of it to see the stuff that homeless people collect. My eyes saw some useful daily life objects, but mostly junk and trinkets. My mind was spinning.
Then, I could not help but contemplate the vast amounts of worthless material stuff that so many people accumulate. The difference is that housed people can hide their stuff in garages, back rooms, and rental units.
We all accumulate these things, thinking they are valuable, and we keep these objects, believing that they will impart something special, or that they will appreciate in dollar value, or even in some spiritual or esoteric way. But it is all material stuff.
Here are a few reasons why I have become very minimalist in my approach to the collection of physical stuff.
First, when I began getting interested in survival skills, I realized the great value of storing enough food at your home that will get you through an emergency. Like maybe a few weeks, even a few months’ worth of food. That’s not especially what I call hoarding. One of my initial purchases of wheat was so large that I had an entire wall in a back room full of buckets of wheat. A year later I realized I rarely eat wheat, and slowly gave away and sold most of them.
Then I considered being prepared for blackouts and other emergencies, and realized the great value of having certain extra clothing, blankets, manual tools, knives, those sorts of things. Yes, you could say I was starting to collect. And from there, it just goes on an on.
Should you store all the wood you find so that you can have a fire in the fireplace every night for the next year? Should you collect all tools and lumber you find so you can build a shed or chicken coop in your back yard without going to the lumber yard? And should you collect all that lumber even if you’re not actually making such a shed or chicken coop? That’s how you get into the collection of stuff.
It’s all really good useful stuff that you might use in an emergency. Before you know it, you’re at yard sales and thrift stores, buying things at ridiculously low prices that you know you might use one day. Or, you tell yourself, you could sell it to make extra cash. But you don’t sell it, because the retail price for your object – despite its inherent usefulness – is little more than you originally paid for it.
I’ve gotten to this point. I had plenty of stuff to survive the next apocalypse, but I wasn’t really using most of it. And I had to have shed after shed after paid storage unit to store all these really good things. Before you know it, your living space is crammed full of stuff that you never use, but which is –you’ve convinced yourself – very very valuable.
It’s a big trap. In the past 20+ years, I moved a few times, and carefully looked at all the very good material things that I collected. I realized that much of it I never used. Never. So I decided to “bite the bullet” and clean house. I was not willing to move truckloads of stuff to my new place. My criteria was that if I had not actually used the object – despite my having determined that it was “very valuable” – in the last 10 years, then I got rid of it. I gave dozens of boxes of goods to a Boy Scout leader to give outdoor gear to low-income scouts. I gave a truckload of wood and bone and rock and other natural materials to native American friends to use in art projects. I made many boxload donations to Salvation Army and Goodwill. And I filled my blue recycling bin about a dozen times, and filled the black trash can many times as well. Yes, I sold some things, but selling takes time, and you rarely get back what you paid, especially not when you have a time crunch.
And I never regretted shedding my life of the material baggage. I found that the world still had lots of hardware stores and grocery stores and art supply stores, and that if I was actually doing and using a product, I could just go get it. And if it was truly unavailable, I realized it would not be the end of the world. I could do without. I learned to be rich in the degree to which I could do without stuff.
That’s not to say that I have no supplies or boxes of stuff. I do. But I regularly check what I have and give away what I do not need. I do not wait for Christmas or birthdays – I just give away when I realize I have been serving the object and not the other way around.
I had a dream that helped me to realize the wisdom of this choice. At a time when my wife and I decided to live separately, I moved out. But because I had so much stuff in the place we’d been living for nearly 20 years, it took a while for me to clean it out. In my dream, I was dead, and I was looking into the window of my old office. My wife was there with helpers and they were discarding most of my stuff. I was horrified at first, but then realized that the stuff they were throwing away had little or no monetary value, and no sentimental value to them. It had some value to me only because it was something I collected, or used in a class, or used for research. And I helplessly watched the junk that I thought was valuable – but after I was dead, it wasn’t! I never forgot that dream, telling me that maybe, just maybe, all the junk that I have collected really is of little to no value to anyone!
Of course, stuff is useful in life. We use stuff all the time, for all our activities. But it is SO easy to get inundated in stuff and miss what life is all about. We forget that our feeling of accomplishment and fulfilment is an interior something, not a thing that is the result of accumulation.
What then must we do? That is, what must we do if we wish to alter this stuff-accumulation pattern. (If you don’t think it’s a problem, you don’t have to do a thing).
How about not buying something in the first place? You know what I mean – you’re standing there salivating about some piece of clothing or art piece or knife or whatever, and you know you don’t really need it, but you want it, and you’re slowly convincing yourself that it’s a great bargain! You probably don’t need it, and your life will go on quite well without it. Remember, do your very best to separate need from want in your life. If you already have a lot of the item, and it’s sitting in your garage or cluttering up your living space, or worse, you’re paying for a storage unit, then, YOU DO NOT NEED IT! Don’t buy it. That’s the simple part, if you can do it. Just don’t buy the stuff in the first place.
OK, so, perhaps that’s not the option. You’re going to make a purchase. Find one that will not cost you more money as time goes on. You know what I mean, a product that uses odd-size batteries that are not cheap. Or those coffee makers that require you to buy the little cups that fill up landfills. You can always choose a long-lasting ecological product, more or less. If you really work at it, you can make your buying choices support the products that we should all be using, and not junk that clutters up your life.
I also ask myself when I obtain something new: Can I ever sell this for even close to what I paid for it? Or, can I sell it for more than I paid? Will it appreciate in value? Or is it something that no one in their right mind would pay anything for next month?
I also ask myself if the product will materially improve my life, and make me a better person, and more self-reliant. Most stuff will not do that, let’s be real. But sometimes a product can be life enhancing, and it’s really great to have.
Anyway, you get the idea. Your life will be better without junk. You are rich in the degree that you can do without something. Get rid of your clutter.
