Living with Less

I recently read an article in TIME magazine titled “The Joy of Less”. It discusses the culture of consumption, its ill effects, and the counter-culture that is starting to take place. The hoarders are hiring the junk removers. Professional organizing is apparently a growing business. The Art of Zen is permeating Consumer America.

The article traced the history of how easy it has become to purchase merchandise. The first such general catalog was printed by Montgomery Ward in 1872 and Sears published a 500-page version before the turn of the century. But it would take some time to order and buy an item. Then physical department stores started opening so they could show and sell their products in the same location. You could see something and bring it home the same day. The article goes on to argue that post World War II, “a new generation of appliances, furniture and household goods became available” and the idea of “planned obsolence became popular”. Develop a new upgraded model every year and entice people to buy it!

Today we have low-cost retail and Amazon 1-Click ordering that makes it exceedingly easy to buy, buy, buy. And you feel like you ‘re getting such a good deal out of it – I suppose that’s what Retail Therapy is about. The fact that Public Storage facilities have become ubiquitous, and that 87% in the U.S. are currently rented according to the article (I don’t know how true that is and I’m slightly skeptical of the number), seems downright crazy especially given that the homes here are bigger than in most other countries. Heck, everything is bigger in America!

In a recent big move a couple of years ago, we downsized our home significantly, selling or giving away much of our possessions. I have to say that this felt really good! Our realtor had told us what we needed to remove from the premises to show our home when we put it on the market. Instead of sticking it in storage (okay, I confess I did put a few things in the garage), we decided to shed many of our possessions. (Our house sold very efficiently!) We’re glad to be living in a smaller place now with fewer possessions and living a more minimalistic lifestyle. After this, if I visited a home that was full of “stuff”, I would actually feel slightly oppressed by all the things around me.

If only we could cast magical spells such as evanesco (the vanishing spell from the Harry Potter books) and then have the appropriate spell that conjured up the item you wanted when you needed it. I’m not sure how this physically would work. It seems somewhat complicated. (Can’t help it – that’s how my mind works as a scientist.) An alternative is to have a magical bag like the one Hermione had in Book 7 (which I hope to re-read soon!) where she could simply store a lot of objects. I vaguely recall that the more stuff she put in the heavier it got? Maybe I’m misremembering. Maybe the mass is reduced proportionally in some way in the magical bag. (Oops, there I go again.) Hermione, of course, carried lots of books – something you’d expect the quintessential academic would need. (Although nowadays we can just store all our documents electronically – scientists rarely use old books nowadays).

This past December I read Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. This is described as a “mystical” book by the TIME magazine article. It really does have mystical overtones, but it seemed to also make very good practical sense. In January I decided to take the first step in the KonMarie method and “keep only the things that spark joy” while discarding the rest. You have to collect and lay out all your items of a particular category in one place. Then you have to individually go through every item (you must touch/handle the item). If you choose to discard something that has served you well, you thank the item for its service. Kondo actually suggests a particular order in which you choose the categories and the items. The first category is Clothes, so that’s what I started with. I must say that I’m very pleased with the results! Following her method of folding and storing my remaining clothes, I found that everything is accessible and gets more use.

But I have not progressed since. The second category in Kondo’s method is Books. Being an academic I have a lot of books. Not as many as my Humanities colleagues, but my books are heavy. I shed a number of books in my first downsizing a couple of years ago, but I have accumulated some more since. My present excuse is that I’m only just recovering from lower back pain – it was bad for most of March. But my excuses are running out. As the semester winds down in mid-May, I really should take a stab at the books. I’m hoping that writing this in the blog will help motivate me to clean up. Hopefully in a couple of months you’ll see a blog post about this!