10 thoughts on “Reducing a lifetime’s stash of stuff”

1. Patty March 23, 2015 at 9:43 am

   I relate so well to this dilemma. I have my mothers saved items. My daughter has my antique furniture etc. that was in storage after I sold my home, downsizing. She shipped all to her home in Florida. When I visited, she asked me to sort. I began, but couldn’t complete, ” This my life”, I explained. I left it to her to sort and I won’t ask questions.

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2. cwd March 23, 2015 at 9:46 am

   I toss every three or four years because there’s no one else who wants any of The Stuff.

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3. maunawilimac March 23, 2015 at 10:18 am

   But what will the archeologists of the future have to piece together the threads of our previous existence?

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4. Tony March 23, 2015 at 11:36 am

   For some family heirloom items or non-valuable but sentimental items (high school sports trophies) I take a photo of them before discarding or donating. I keep a momento book of these photos.

   I keep the memory, but in a way that is much easier to physically store!

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5. Richard Gozinya March 23, 2015 at 12:20 pm

   It’s even tougher when a spouse has a different level of pack rat-ness. Then you get into endless discussions about the metaphysical value of Stuff.

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6. Old Native March 23, 2015 at 3:16 pm

   I think that the guilt component is very real.

   I have the decision on whether to save framed photos of unknown relatives that were of importance to my father. They have no meaning to me but there is a guilt factor in just chucking them in the trash.

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7. Wailau March 23, 2015 at 4:29 pm

   As E. B. White wrote, “The trouble with worldly possessions is their reluctance to return to the world.” Documents and photos can at least be scanned which solves the space problem if not the attachment one.

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8. Shannon March 23, 2015 at 6:50 pm

   We moved last year, downsized our home from 2000 sq ft to 1000 sq ft. The question I asked over and over was, is this (the object,) worth it to pay to move it. Almost everything was donate, donate, donate.
   It’s astounding how much stuff we collect, that seemed so important at the time of purchase, that we forget we even have!
   Thanks for bringing this up…I think I’ll schedule a closet purge tomorrow.

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9. shirley March 23, 2015 at 9:56 pm

   Have been working at downsizing physical stuff for a while now. At an old age, I look at all the things our sons will have to sort through and I’m trying to make decisions so they won’t have to. How many photos of our twin grandkids in their darling Christmas outfits are needed for anyones remembrance…..certainly not the 20 grandma took! I’m getting more heartless by the day.

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10. compare and decode April 7, 2015 at 9:22 pm

    On the out-of-control cost of children’s kindergarten birthday parties:

    http://www.bbc.com/news/business-32116506

    There is a connection between rampant consumerism and child-rearing practices. On how spoiled little children have taken over American society:

    http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/07/02/spoiled-rotten

    One of the offshoots of the L.A. family study is a new book, “Life at Home in the Twenty-First Century” (Cotsen Institute of Archaeology), which its authors—the anthropologists Jeanne Arnold, of U.C.L.A., Anthony Graesch, of Connecticut College, and Elinor Ochs—describe as a “visual ethnography of middle-class American households.” Lavishly illustrated with photographs (by Enzo Ragazzini) of the families’ houses and yards, the book offers an intimate glimpse into the crap-strewn core of American culture.

    “After a few short years,” the text notes, many families amass more objects “than their houses can hold.” The result is garages given over to old furniture and unused sports equipment, home offices given over to boxes of stuff that haven’t yet been stuck in the garage, and, in one particularly jam-packed house, a shower stall given over to storing dirty laundry.

    Children, according to “Life at Home,” are disproportionate generators of clutter: “Each new child in a household leads to a 30 percent increase in a family’s inventory of possessions during the preschool years alone.” Many of the kids’ rooms pictured are so crowded with clothes and toys, so many of which have been tossed on the floor, that there is no path to the bed. (One little girl’s room contains, by the authors’ count, two hundred and forty-eight dolls, including a hundred and sixty-five Beanie Babies.) The kids’ possessions, not to mention their dioramas and their T-ball trophies, spill out into other rooms, giving the houses what the authors call “a very child-centered look.”

    If American children are more spoiled than other children, and American adults more immature, this could be part of a general historical process in which adulthood is delayed for greater periods in direct proportion to the sophistication of a species or a culture.

    As Melvin Konner, a psychiatrist and anthropologist at Emory University, points out in “The Evolution of Childhood” (Belknap), one of the defining characteristics of Homo sapiens is its “prolonged juvenile period.” Compared with other apes, humans are “altricial,” which is to say immature at birth. Chimpanzees, for instance, are born with brains half their adult size; the brains of human babies are only a third of their adult size. Chimps reach puberty shortly after they’re weaned; humans take another decade or so. No one knows when exactly in the process of hominid evolution juvenile development began to slow down, but even Homo ergaster, who evolved some 1.8 million years ago, seems to have enjoyed—if that’s the right word—a protracted childhood. It’s often argued by anthropologists that the drawn-out timetable is what made humans human in the first place. It’s the fact that we grow up slowly that makes acquiring language and building complicated social structures possible.

    The same trend that appears in human prehistory shows up in history as well. The farther back you look, the faster kids grew up. In medieval Europe, children from seven on were initiated into adult work. Compulsory schooling, introduced in the nineteenth century, pushed back the age of maturity to sixteen or so. By the middle of the twentieth century, college graduation seemed, at least in this country, to be the new dividing line. Now, if Judd Apatow is to be trusted, it’s possible to close in on forty without coming of age.

    Evolutionarily speaking, this added delay makes a certain amount of sense. In an increasingly complex and unstable world, it may be adaptive to put off maturity as long as possible. According to this way of thinking, staying forever young means always being ready for the next big thing (whatever that might be).

    Then again, perhaps not:

    Or adultesence might be just the opposite: not evidence of progress but another sign of a generalized regression. Letting things slide is always the easiest thing to do, in parenting no less than in banking, public education, and environmental protection. A lack of discipline is apparent these days in just about every aspect of American society. Why this should be is a much larger question, one to ponder as we take out the garbage and tie our kids’ shoes. ?

    The problem is democracy.

    Or at least the spirit of democracy.

    In 1776, British colonists in the New World declared independence from their home country. By 1777, their leaders had drafted the Articles of Confederation, which were ratified by all thirteen states by 1781.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Articles_of_Confederation

    This confederacy, however, with a very weak centralized government, proved to be unworkable and dysfunctional. In 1789, the Articles of Confederation were replaced by the Constitution of the United States. This represented a rejection of democracy and an embrace of republicanism.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republicanism_in_the_United_States

    Republicanism is the guiding political philosophy of the United States. It has been a major part of American civic thought since its founding. It stresses liberty and “unalienable” rights as central values, makes the people as a whole sovereign, rejects aristocracy and inherited political power, expects citizens to be independent in their performance of civic duties, and vilifies corruption. American republicanism was founded and first practiced by the Founding Fathers in the 18th century. For them, according to one team of historians, “republicanism represented more than a particular form of government. It was a way of life, a core ideology, an uncompromising commitment to liberty, and a total rejection of aristocracy.”

    Republicanism was based on Ancient Greco-Roman, Renaissance, and English models and ideas. It formed the basis for the American Revolution and the consequential Declaration of Independence (1776) and the Constitution (1787), as well as the Gettysburg Address (1863).
    Republicanism may be distinguished from other forms of democracy as it asserts that people have unalienable rights that cannot be voted away by a majority of voters. Alexis de Tocqueville warned about the “tyranny of the majority” in a democracy, and advocates of the rights of minorities have warned that the courts needed to protect those rights by reversing efforts by voters to terminate the rights of an unpopular minority.

    One issue in republicanism is the conflict between republican virtue and prosperity. Republicanism demanded austerity and self-sacrifice, as embodied in the ancient Greeks and, especially, the Romans. But the pursuit of self-interest was a basic liberty, as found in the classical liberalism of the Enlightenment. Financial institutions like banks were in particular objects of loathing to republicans.

    Virtue vs. Commerce

    The open question, as Pocock suggested, of the conflict between personal economic interest (grounded in Lockean liberalism) and classical republicanism, troubled Americans. Jefferson and Madison roundly denounced the Federalists for creating a national bank as tending to corruption and monarchism; Alexander Hamilton staunchly defended his program, arguing that national economic strength was necessary for the protection of liberty. Jefferson never relented but by 1815 Madison switched and announced in favor of a national bank, which he set up in 1816.

    John Adams often pondered the issue of civic virtue. Writing Mercy Otis Warren in 1776, he agreed with the Greeks and the Romans, that, “Public Virtue cannot exist without private, and public Virtue is the only Foundation of Republics.” Adams insisted, “There must be a positive Passion for the public good, the public Interest, Honor, Power, and Glory, established in the Minds of the People, or there can be no Republican Government, nor any real Liberty. And this public Passion must be Superior to all private Passions. Men must be ready, they must pride themselves, and be happy to sacrifice their private Pleasures, Passions, and Interests, nay their private Friendships and dearest connections, when they Stand in Competition with the Rights of society.”

    Adams worried that a businessman might have financial interests that conflicted with republican duty; indeed, he was especially suspicious of banks. He decided that history taught that “the Spirit of Commerce … is incompatible with that purity of Heart, and Greatness of soul which is necessary for a happy Republic.” But so much of that spirit of commerce had infected America. In New England, Adams noted, “even the Farmers and Tradesmen are addicted to Commerce.” As a result, there was “a great Danger that a Republican Government would be very factious and turbulent there.”

    In the 1830s, and especially with the election of President Andrew Jackson, there was a shift toward the ethos of democracy, even while the institutions of American government remained republican (i.e., elected leaders rather than popular participation). The spoils system that he introduced was a big step toward corruption, what republics fear most (perhaps more than enemies). Likewise, whereas in a republic the role of government is seen as protecting minorities, Jackson signed and carried out the Indian Removal Act. Like a republican, however, Jackson was opposed to a national bank (the equivalent to the modern Federal Reserve); but his antipathy toward the national bank seems not to have been rooted in a republican disdain of commerce, but in anti-elitism.

    We still live in a Jacksonian country, with a republican form of government and a democratic ethos and identity. (In comparison with the British, it is said that the UK is a republic masquerading as a monarchy, whereas the US is a republic pretending to be a democracy.) And the legacy of this Jacksonian culture is vast wealth and power, in which ordinary people are ambitious and aggressive and dream great dreams, and in which vast energies are liberated and expended to the end of economic prosperity. Unfortunately, other people and nations can be seen in such a society as obstacles or distractions in the great drama of My Story of Success. There is a connection between how democratic a society is and how patriotic or nationalistic it is, and a connection between nationalism and ethnocentrism, and a connection between all of the above and imperialism. (The more democratic a society, the more imperialistic it supposedly is; e.g., when the Roman Empire transformed from a republic to a kingdom after Julius Caesar, its pace of expansion slowed.)

    What’s interesting is that this whole historical tension or debate between democracy and republicanism is alien to non-Western countries, but it is now seemingly alien to Americans.

    On the one hand, Americans seemingly have no interest in direct participatory democracy. In fact, interest in something like the town meeting was historically limited to New England. That is, it is impressive that the town meeting finds its roots in New England stretching back to 150 years prior to the American Revolution, but it really doesn’t seem to have taken root elsewhere in the US. It just never really caught on.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Town_meeting

    But Americans have little interest in the austerity and self-sacrifice required of republicanism. It seems alien, it seems to have died out two centuries ago.

    Anyway, I remember reading years ago when I was a kid (okay, decades ago) that one of the Founding Fathers asserted that children should be brought up in a state of deprivation to prepare them for the hard life of a citizen-soldier in a republic. He said that a child should have a favorite toy taken from him every day, or worse. Of course, that’s rather mild compared to child-rearing practices in ancient Sparta. But what could be more different from this society than deliberate austerity?

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