on materialism

In the last three years, I have not lived in the same place for more than ten months on end. Blame it on high housing costs, blame it on the transitional nature of this area, blame it on the general instability of the single twentysomething who recently earned a liberal arts degree. I've moved from room to room in other people's houses, gathering up my little collection of stuff and setting it down again. I haven't loved this-- when my current living situation was threatened, a few months ago, I had a few nights of bitter tears. But it has certainly been effective in shaping my adult character, in a few particular ways that I'm glad of.

When we buy things, we generally consider two costs: the cost of purchasing, and the cost of maintaining. For most items, the cost of maintaining is zero (T-shirts, end tables, DVDs); for some it must be reckoned (cars, pets, musical instruments.) But all these items contain a third cost, not usually considered: the cost of having. Every item you possess costs you, at minimum, the area it takes up in your home. The cost doesn't usually translate into any extra expenditure of time or money, until moving day. Then every single thing you possess adds up, in tiny increments, to a very large cost in time, money, and (my personal nemesis) hassle.

When you move once or twice in a decade, this is not significant. When you move five times in three years, it becomes profound. The first couple of moves are opportunities to examine your priorities, pare down your life a little, throw away things that are no longer important. By the fourth and fifth, it has become a frenzy of self-denial, a wild game of seeing exactly how much material loss you can stand. And eventually you find that your whole attitude toward material possessions has changed. There's a place in your brain that is conscious of every single thing you own; they pile up like beans on a scale, increasingly oppressive. You start to evaluate everything you possess, not with the vague "Is this important to me?" but with the ruthlessly concrete "What value does this add to my life today?"

And this is the question I would have people learn to ask. Obviously there are things like clothes, books, movies, and music, that you use every day but not all at once. Likewise there are special-occasion things (a set of fine china, materials for a project you will undergo over your summer vacation) that can justify their place in your life, even if you use them rarely. But there are so many other things, things you thought it would be nice to have, for which a serious audit would reveal that they're not worth the space they occupy.

A case in point was my guitar. When I was twelve years old, I thought I'd like to learn to play guitar, so my mom and dad got me one for my birthday. For a few months I worked at it, learning chords and picking out songs I liked; then I got distracted and it lay unused under my bed. Every three or four years I'd remember I had it, take it out, tune it up, and re-learn those chords, but it never lasted more than a month. About the time of my third post-graduate move, I looked at it and suddenly felt sick. It's a beautiful guitar, an excellent instrument, and what role does it fill in the world? To collect dust under my bed, and to give me the ability to say, "Yeah, I have a guitar, someday I'll learn to play it."

People who say our society worships possessions have it wrong. We worship possession: the state of having stuff. Toward our possessions, we are cavalier, almost sacrilegious. We take a thing that ought to be good, ought to bring value to someone's life, and we let it become waste, clutter. A guitar was not made to be a funny-shaped object under someone's bed: it was made to be music. What right had I to debase such a beautiful thing for so long?

I am no anti-materialist. Nobody who would delightedly lay out two hundred dollars on a single pen has any claim to be called an anti-materialist. I value material possessions; I value them so highly that I hate to see them suffering the kind of debasement and neglect that they live under in so many American households. Things ought to bring joy, they ought to enrich the lives of their owners, they ought to enable us to live healthier, happier, or more effective lives. If they do none of these things, then why for pity's sake do we have them? Because they made us feel good at the moment we bought them? Because they allow us to kid ourselves about who we are? ("I am a person who will someday be able to play a guitar.") To have a thing for that reason is an impoverishment.

I don't want to be a wealthy woman and I don't want to be a poor woman. When you walk into my house, I don't want you to see opulence or asceticism. I want you to see things that please me, that enrich my life on a daily basis, that assist me in the pursuits and entertainments that I truly value. Everything else is merely a burden and a disguise. Throw it out.