A lifelong packrat, here’s the story of my unlikely conversion to minimalism.
Concert tickets. Refrigerator magnets. Christmas ornaments. Comic books. Trading cards. Greeting cards. Bobbleheads. Bank statements. Photo albums. Vinyl records. Shoes. Shot glasses. Jewelry. Blu-rays.
What does the stuff we collect, consciously or unconsciously, contribute to the story of our lives?
And… what does it mean for us when there’s less of it?
In an opinion piece that appeared in the New York Times earlier this month, columnist Peter Funt laments the obsolescence of analog mementoes in a Digital Age:
And so ticket stubs join theater playbills, picture postcards, handwritten letters and framed photos as fading forms of preserving our memories. It raises the question, Is our view of the past, of our own personal history, somehow different without hard copies?
Peter Funt, “Does Anyone Collect Old Emails?,” Opinion, New York Times, April 5, 2019
In recent years, I’ve expanded this blog from its initial scope, an exclusively academic forum on storytelling craft, to chronicle my own personal history, often in no particular order. I am ever and always in search of a clearer, more complete, more honest perspective on my past, and how it has shaped the narrative arc of my life; I mine my memories regularly for content, and for truth.
I have also routinely expressed apprehension about the practices we’ve lost in a Digital Age, the kind to which Mr. Funt refers, particularly as that applies to the corrupted discipline of storytelling itself: From the superhero crossovers of the “Arrowverse,” to the literary Easter-egg hunt of Castle Rock, to the expansive franchising of Star Wars, today’s popular entertainments are less concerned with saying something meaningful about the human condition than they are with challenging the viewer to catch all their internal cross-references. Whereas stories once rewarded audiences with insight, now the reward is the esteemed privilege of calling oneself a superfan—a participatory designation earned by following all the breadcrumbs and connecting all the dots… an assignment only achievable if one never misses a new installment:
In a nod to the subscription model of consumption—where we lease cars or pay monthly to a music service—the extended narratives of prestige TV series spread out their climaxes over several years rather than building to a single, motion picture explosion at the end. But this means energizing the audience and online fan base with puzzles and “spoilers”. . . .
. . . The superfan of commercial entertainment gets rewarded for going to all the associated websites and fan forums, and reading all the official novels. Superfans know all the answers because they have purchased all the products in the franchise. Like one of those card games where you keep buying new, expensive packs in order to assemble a powerful team of monsters, all it takes to master a TV show is work and money.
Douglas Rushkoff, Team Human (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019), 163
Fanboys and -girls thought they were legitimized when the geek subculture went mainstream—when superheroes and sci-fi went from niche hobby to pop-cultural monopoly—but they were really just commodified: “geek” shifted from a stigmatized social category to a lucrative economic one. Leveraging our telecommunications-induced FOMO, a new permutation of commercial narrative was contrived: the “mega-franchise,” which seeks not our intermittent audience, but rather our habitual obedience. Sure, you may not have even liked the last four Star Wars or Terminator or Transformers movies… but do you really wanna run the risk of skipping this one?
So, given those two ongoing preoccupations—personal history and receding traditions in the Digital Age—the thesis of “Does Anyone Collect Old Emails?” would’ve spoken to me regardless, but the timing of it was nonetheless uncanny, as I have devoted no small degree of consideration in recent months to the matter of the physical objects we amass, wittingly or otherwise, and how they tether us to the past. Here’s the story.
Going Minimal
Over New Year’s, my wife and I were having lunch at the Dimmick Inn in Milford, Pennsylvania, about seventy miles northwest of New York City, an area I’ve only recently had occasion to revisit after a quarter-century absence, one pregnant with personal memories: Between the ages of eleven and sixteen, this card-carrying city kid spent an unquantifiable percentage of my time up in the witching woodlands of the Poconos. It’s where we found and brought home my childhood dog. It’s also where the only quality time I ever enjoyed with my father’s side of the family occurred, and for that alone I cherish the experience.
Between rounds of appetizers, our conversation turned to a documentary my wife had recently watched called Minimalism, which makes the case for dramatic personal downsizing—that is, not owning anything that doesn’t serve some identifiable and active function. You must be able to justify—if only to yourself—everything you own; it has to add demonstrable value to your life.
The more we talked, the more convinced I became we likely owned a shitload of stuff that afforded no purpose or pleasure, so she suggested we perhaps adopt the practice of minimalism for ourselves. I can’t say what came over me (though I suspect the sustained quaffing of Winter Lager played a substantial role), but I agreed to it on the spot. As soon as we got back to Los Angeles, we would begin the long-haul process of minimizing our life, an initiative we codenamed Project Dimmick.
To be clear: Minimalism should not be confused or otherwise conflated with the whole Marie Kondo thing, so fashionable right now, which is about organizing. We discovered we were already quite organized, and that organization rather insidiously conceals a hell of a lot of clutter. Thusly, we spent every Saturday tackling a room—pulling all the shit out of drawers, cabinets, closets, and so on, deciding what would stay and what would go.
Most of it was surprisingly easy to rid ourselves of. In our hearts, each of us already know goddamn well which shirts we have no intention of wearing again, the books we’ll never reread, the holiday decorations we stopped bothering to put out years ago—those are all effortless expunctions. But there is the matter of the sentimental stuff—the handwritten notes, the old report cards, the family heirlooms deprived of sunlight in the recesses of the closet—which does indeed deserve and demand special consideration.
Even Better than the Real Thing
By the time we were in our early thirties, my wife and I had already lost fifty percent of our parents—her mother and my father. We have so much treasured miscellany from my mother-in-law, whose presence was larger than life, from jewelry to knickknacks to gifts to the condolence cards folks sent when she passed. Going through that was emotional, and I think my wife struggled somewhat with what to keep.
Funny enough, I was in the opposite situation with respect to my late father. He’s a hard man to describe to anyone who didn’t know him, but the key thing to understand is that he did not live in the physical world you and I occupy; he resided in a cerebral inner space from which he only occasionally emerged to visit the rest of us here in reality. On account of this, material objects meant nothing to him. We lived in an area of the Bronx with the highest auto-theft rate in the city of New York at that time, so we minimally had one vehicle stolen per year; Dad would come home with our next car—used, but by and large in decent-enough shape—and within a matter of weeks, it looked like it had just placed dead last in the Hazzard County Derby. Earthly articles in his possession literally fell apart, because that’s how categorically unimportant they were to him.
As such, I have no keepsakes from my father—not a single one—if for no other reason than the man didn’t own anything! (Nothing that survived, anyway.) And in the process of sifting through my mother-in-law’s possessions, here’s what I realized: I don’t need anything to remember him by. I think about my father every single day. I’m not a religious man, but when I feel the need to talk to a higher power, I talk to him; I feel like he’s out there in the cosmos somewhere. That’s where he was before death, so it stands to reason that’s where he is now.
My father lives in my heart, and in my mind, and no totemic reminder of him is going to help me better recall the sound of his voice (we have no recordings of it), or what his hands looked like, or how his sandpapery stubble felt against my cheek when he’d kiss me. And I think—perhaps I’m speaking out of turn here—that insight helped my wife winnow down the mementoes from her mother she ultimately elected to retain.
That stuff has meaning only because we ascribe meaning to it—but it isn’t really real. Counterintuitively, the real connections we keep with those we’ve lost aren’t physical but metaphysical—the things we feel but cannot touch.
Erased… from Existence!
None of that is to suggest physical reminders are entirely without merit; science attests to their value:
Researchers know that of the two primary forms of accessing memory, recognition and recall, the former is a simpler and more reliable process. It is the association of a physical object with something previously encountered or experienced. This could be because tangible memories utilize all five senses, evoking emotional triggers and transporting us back to a precise time, place or moment.
In his new book, “Digital Memory Studies,” Andrew Hoskins, a professor of social science at the University of Glasgow, concludes: “Despite the decay and wear and tear of photographs, letters and other objects that are reminders of people and past experiences, their keeping is like holding on to those people and experiences.” Digital items offer nothing of the kind.
Funt, “Does Anyone Collect Old Emails?,” New York Times
Indeed. It’s even fun to know with date-specific certainty you saw The Empire Strikes Back on 84th Street on March 1, 1997:
But is that really the value we take from an old ticket like this? Or is it—if we’re being perfectly honest with ourselves—a different kind of consolation such souvenirs supply?
I admit that I’m a memory pack rat, and that sometimes evidences itself in keeping physical mementos. I’ve still got a cardboard box containing every letter, card and locker note I got from a certain girl in high school, for instance. I’m not in any way pining after her. I don’t miss her. I don’t even read the notes. But I know they’re there. Similarly, I have no wish to return to grade school, but I’ve got boxes containing essays and homework assignments and drawings from as far back as first grade. . . .
. . . It’s more than nostalgia. I guess I’ve always been keenly aware that time can never be revisited. You might be able to revisit a place, even with the same people, but “that time” will always be that time—unable to be reproduced, relived. Tantalus’ bane. The keepsakes are almost mystical. They were written or touched or created by a then-me who, if not for those artifacts, will be erased with no proof he ever existed.
Erik, October 31, 2017 (9:21 p.m.), comment on Sean P Carlin, “Different Stages,” Sean P Carlin (blog), October 31, 2017; boldface added
I tend to think Erik is right: Hanging onto shit we don’t use, need, or even look at isn’t a matter of personal history, in the end, so much as personal mortality. It’s a crisis of existentialism. Everyday, a little bit more of us recedes into the inaccessible abyss of the past—a variant of us dies overnight again and again and again—but the tokens we’ve accumulated along the way at least serve as documentation that, hey, our then-mes were once here, too. Life may be ephemeral, but material goods? They last forever.
Head in the Cloud
It isn’t just life itself that’s ephemeral, though—memory fades, as well. This is not a design flaw in our sentience but a design feature: Forgetting is what allows us to move on. We’re not meant to recall everything we’ve ever experienced; just like material objects, we’re only meant to keep those memories that add value to our lives. The rest are involuntarily jettisoned for a reason.
For most of the timeline of human existence, we didn’t have photos or even letters—codified writing only came about 4,600 years ago—by which to preserve our histories. What we had was the feedback loop of memory and story—each continuously augmenting the other; that which emerged wasn’t always fact, but it was truth.
As a medium, stories have proven themselves great as a way of storing information and values, and then passing them on to future generations.
Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now (New York: Penguin Group, 2013), 16
Before record-keeping technologies became the repository of our personal and cultural narratives, storytelling was the means by which we not only stored relevant information and values, but how we gave those events context and meaning; story wasn’t intended to supplement our memory—the way scrapbooks and souvenirs do—so much as process and express it. The stuff we committed to our stories was the stuff worth remembering; it was perfectly okay to let go of anything else.
Whereas leafing through a family photo album is an invariably maudlin experience, swapping tales about the good old days—as anyone who’s shared a few drinks with old friends who “knew you when” can attest—is a jubilant one. Recollection is always more satisfying when it’s exercised socially rather than materialistically.
My two kids, now in their 20s, have mostly digital keepsakes. Increasingly they rely on Facebook and the cloud to store memories. Their letters from college, sent by email, are long gone. Many photos, never printed, have disappeared. I worry that for them, personal history already doesn’t reach back as far as it should.
Funt, “Does Anyone Collect Old Emails?,” New York Times
Look, say what you will about the kids of Gen Z, but they don’t take the same false comfort in material ownership as their twentieth-century forerunners. Their philosophy? Who needs to own something so long as you have access to it? Mr. Funt asks: “Is our view of the past, of our own personal history, somehow different without hard copies?”
Perhaps it is—and why should that be a bad or worrisome thing? Maybe without all the mementoes—the birthday cards and ticket stubs never intended to be indefinitely archived—they’ll perceive their own personal histories as an amorphous continuum rather than a chaptered chronicle… and consequently obsess over their pasts less neurotically and fetishistically than the Boomers and Xers do.
Hell, with a worldview like that, perhaps they’ll even reclaim both digital technology and popular storytelling, reforming them from the instruments of nostalgia-driven consumerism they’ve become:
We sure do love our toys, don’t we?
And our cars.
And our phones.
And our guns.
We love that stuff. Because it adds value to our lives… or because our fear of mortality has been manipulated and exploited by a capitalistic operating system that’s rewired our brains to draw comfort from material possessions? Maybe the cloud-storage generation won’t be as susceptible to such sentimentality. Just maybe they’ll understand what we don’t: that you can fill shelf after shelf and room after room with licensed merchandise, but those expensive effigies won’t bring back the then-you that first fell in love with the stories and characters they represent; none of that bullshit will ever recapture what you felt when you first saw Ghostbusters or Star Wars.
Those collectables don’t contribute to the story of our lives; they encumber it. Curating a collection like that one (to say nothing of fulfilling the broader requirements of superfandom) means less time spent living, spent socializing—in other words: less time spent making new memories worth keeping.
The more people spend time with one another, the less stuff they buy. A deep connection to other humans makes you an enemy of the marketplace.
Philip McKenzie, “Douglas Rushkoff—Fighting for #TeamHuman,” MediaVillage, April 17, 2019
And new memories worth keeping, in turn, become new stories worth telling—the process of socialization thereby attaining self-perpetuation. Honesty and integrity could even be restored to popular storytelling—sort of like what Star Wars was when it was the idiosyncratic vision of filmmaker George Lucas versus the corporate mega-franchise “multimedia initiative” it is now. Imagine retooling our pop culture to serve as a prosocial apparatus rather than merely a rapaciously commercial one—one that gets you thinking and talking versus one that has you clicking and buying?
So, yeah: Sans memorabilia—the lion’s share of worthless correspondences, souvenirs, and tchotchkes accrued over the course of a lifetime we can’t seem to leave behind—I suspect our view of the past would be appreciably different. And just think what that might mean for us moving forward.
The practice—and philosophy—of minimalism transformed my life in ways I never could’ve anticipated, and I’ve shared those experiences, along with my perspectives, here.
This post is so pertinent to the choices going on in my life right now, Sean. My parents are in their mid to late eighties and I just helped them move from a “stuffed” house to a senior-housing apartment. They needed to downsize, and I saw first hand the difficulty letting things go. SO MANY MEMORIES attached to stuff that my brother and I will toss in the dumpster one day. We rented a storage unit for them to keep boxes of things that they’ll never revisit. Just knowing that the valued memories are there is comforting to them.
At the same time, I’m engaged in “minimalizing.” Partly because I have no closets and I hate clutter. But also because my stuff stored in the barn is starting to mold. I need to make room for it or get rid of it. I’ll admit to keeping old school papers, art projects, text books, things I haven’t looked at in years. I ask myself, Will my daughter want this stuff someday? The answer is an emphatic No, and since I can’t take it with me to the great beyond, I’m saving her the trouble of dumping it myself, now.
She’s from the digital generation, and you’re so right that she doesn’t want much. Whenever she visits, I tell her, “Take anything you want!” And she has, here and there. But there’s so much left over. There are harder choices ahead as I will eventually make decisions about heirlooms and treasures. My husband and I have considered selling a few things off in exchange for a vacation – a pretty nice tradeoff for stuff sitting in trunks in the barn. 🙂
Congrats to you and your wife for minimalizing. And I love the way you write about your father and the way you remember him. Feelings you can keep in your heart at all times. Much better than memories stored away in a box at the back of a closet. <3
What a characteristically lovely and thoughtful comment, Diana. Thank you, as always. Thanks for giving this admittedly long piece — even by the standards of this blog! — such a careful read and sharing insights from your own personal experience.
I have come around to the belief that we place way too much importance in mementoes; even that word alone — mementoes — lends the junk we collect a weight it seldom deserves. For all sorts of reasons — some of which I’ve addressed in this post — we burden ourselves with stuff we just don’t need.
My wife and I have lived in the same apartment for nearly eighteen years, and though it is aging — we occasionally indulge the fantasy of moving into one of the many brand-new buildings, with their state-of-the-art appliances, springing up like weeds here in the San Fernando Valley — one of our apartment’s major selling points is that it has fabulous storage space: multiple walk-in closets, built-in cabinets, etc. Newer buildings just don’t offer that kind of storage. So we’ve taken that into account whenever the subject of moving has arisen over the years.
But through minimizing, we realized that this apartment’s “advantage” is actually a curse, because you know what you do with storage space? You store stuff in it. I think part of the reason newer apartments don’t have closets like they used to is because a new generation — like your daughter — is simply rejecting the burden of physical ownership. Partly that’s owed to changing technologies… but partly it’s a worldview shift, too. And a healthy one.
Minimalism isn’t asceticism, it’s just about making sure the stuff you do own is adding value to your life. And my wife and I realized that anything we’d left untouched/unused/unacknowledged in a cabinet or closet for more than a year (and, in several cases, multiple years) was something we just didn’t need anymore. Thusly, we have donated and sold more than I’d ever realized we’d accumulated in the first place! (I’ve made several hundred dollars selling comics and DVDs, and I still have some other items worth a few hundred apiece that I’m in the process of unloading. Not too shabby for shit I would’ve happily given away just to be rid of it!) Now we open closets and cabinets and see… nothing! A vacuum. A pair of shoes. But that’s about it.
And I’ll tell you what: I don’t miss a single item we’ve gotten rid of. Not even on one occasion have a sat around and thought, “Gee, I wish I had that thing I tossed right about now.” Never. Once it’s gone, you don’t even think about it again. Same as you didn’t think about when it was in the closet, except now it’s not cluttering your life anymore. Whenever I return from Goodwill after a donation drop-off, I put all the now-empty boxes on the living room floor and say to my wife: “That’s how much of our space we just reclaimed today.” And when you measure it like that, it takes your breath away.
As for my father: He was a deeply complicated and controversial man — generous and kind to a fault (’cause, again, he wasn’t possessive about money or material goods), but haunted in a way that ultimately alienated him from everyone in his life. But what I’ve discovered in the nearly eighteen years since he’s passed (he would’ve been ninety in June) is that no one remembers the controversial stuff: It’s all been forgotten — the way it was meant to. That’s what I mean when I say memory fades in order that we might move on.
Instead, he lives on through the hilarious anecdotes people share about him at holidays and family functions — the bad stuff has all been expunged from memory and the good stuff has been preserved through story. By not having anything to leave behind when he passed, he may’ve in fact left us with the most valuable endowment of all.
I sympathize with what you’re experiencing and feeling re: your own parents, and you needn’t feel guilty when the time comes about ridding yourself of their physical possessions: If it provides comfort to them, then it serves a function; once it becomes your stuff, and you have no use for it, there’s no sin in admitting that and acting accordingly. And if you haven’t seen it, I very much recommend Minimalism: A Documentary About the Important Things. Feel free to reach out to me directly, my friend, should you need a minimalism pep talk!
I’ll watch the documentary tomorrow, Sean. After reading your post this morning I walked through the house and filled a box for Goodwill. I feel lighter already! Lol.
It does feel good, Diana — it even becomes addictive. Someone just told me on Twitter that there was a recent episode of Family Guy in which Lois Griffin became addicted to ridding herself of things that don’t “spark joy” (which is a Marie Kondo reference, if you didn’t catch it)!
Diana and Sean, I enjoyed reading this dialog as much as the post itself. I miss you, being in the mix with your perspectives, honesty, words and wisdom. It encourages me.
Diana, I was wondering about your parents just this morning and planning to reach out to you. I agree with Sean: keeping their “stuff,” if only for the sake of their feeling comforted, is the right thing to do. And, when it is yours someday—let it go with freedom and peace of mind that it served its purpose.
Writing these essays is an intensely and joyously solitary experience — cerebral and creative — in which I get to “discover” some truth about something that’s been on my mind. I seldom start these pieces with the “takeaway point” at hand; instead, I find it in the drafting of them. These posts always start with a notion in my head, and the writing process, for me, is almost an act of archaeology: You chisel away at the site, carefully and thoroughly, and then finally unearth the treasure — insight — buried within. (It’s a less regimented approach than I take with my long-form fiction, which is always meticulously conceptualized before I begin composing a formal draft.)
Then, of course, it’s the open dialogue these (admittedly esoteric) posts inspire with those who routinely engage with me — bless you all! — that transforms it into a different kind of experience: something social and communal. And in talking about these issues — versus merely thinking and writing about them (and writing, per Stephen King, is a refined form of thinking) — I always walk away with greater insight yet into the topic at hand. That’s part of the reason I revisit topics sometimes: because after sufficient time and discussion, I find I have more to say about them. (To wit: I’ll be posting a piece this weekend on superhero culture that draws on some of the observations/assertions I’ve made in previous posts on the subject, but aims to pinpoint the precise moment when superheroes were expropriated from children, and then examine the confluence of cultural circumstances that made that possible, even inevitable.)
It was, after all, a candid dialogue that ensued in the comments of “Different Stages” in which Erik first introduced me to the concept of “then-me”; in the intervening years, I have ruminated on that often and brought it up in countless conversations — it was just one of those notions that gave me so much to chew on intellectually. And then it synthesized with the ideas and themes I set out to explore in this essay; seeing how it said everything I wanted to say so eloquently and concisely, it seemed more prudent to simply cite it rather than summarize it!
So, what starts as a private exercise evolves into a public experience, but that delightful metamorphosis is only possible on account of reader interaction. So, thank you both for always engaging, and making me think more deeply about the themes I tackle here — for helping make both this blog and its blogger an ever-improving work-in-progress… all of which is source of tremendous encouragement to me, too, Erik!
And I completely second Erik’s closing remark: What your parents mean to you, Diana, is in your heart, not in their stuff. (As I know you already know.) When the time comes to purge their possessions, take a moment to acknowledge with gratitude the function they served, then free yourself of them with peace of mind.
Thoughtful and perceptive post, as you always do. I’ve been considering unburdening stuff for some years, even make inroads periodically. Seems I’m keeping stuff at bay, but still there is too much. There’s powerful symbolism in a few things, like the goddess statuettes and Mayan artifacts that I’ve done ceremony with. I love the idea that the more people interact, the less things they acquire. Ultimately we need to release everything, to become less and less attached to material existence. Recently I experienced living for a month in a “senior independent living community” testing the waters for the final years of life. Not a great experience, I’m writing a short piece about it. Facing our mortality and negotiating the transitions is our final act, let us perform it well.
Perceptive comment, Lennie. Thank you!
Some items — historical, cultural, and personal — are unquestionably endowed with inherent symbolic and/or emotional significance, and we have an obligation to preserve them. We need to recognize the value in the things we’ve built and safeguard them commensurably, hence the reason the entire world was (rightfully) on edge while Notre Dame burned a few weeks ago.
Where we’ve gone astray — and chalk this up to twentieth-century consumer culture — is that we own so much shit, we simultaneously overvalue it and don’t value it at all. Nothing we have is ever good enough — we always need the next thing — and yet, confoundingly, we archive everything we own like the Vatican, filling bins and boxes and shelves and closets with stuff that serves no identifiable function. Every single-family garage in my suburban San Fernando Valley neighborhood is packed to the gills with storage containers, too crammed to even accommodate a car!
And when I went home for Christmas a few months ago, I was absolutely astounded at the growing number of commercial self-storage warehouses all up and down the Major Deegan Expressway. Somebody is keeping these places — with their substantial square footage and prime NYC locations — in business, after all, but who? And what are they storing? It’s almost a subset of hoarding, in a way, except instead of living on top of the junk we collect, we just pay to put it someplace where we don’t have to look at it. But if we don’t want to look at it, and it’s not important enough to keep on-hand, do we really need it?
Minimizing is about learning to recognize the value — or lack thereof — in the things we own, and coming to appreciate the benefit of having them in our lives. It’s really about making a deeper, more meaningful connection with the material world — a perspective we’ve long since lost living here in the Land of Plenty. The material world has much to offer, but it cannot be a permanent haven from the immaterial world; reconcile with the former (our conspicuous consumption), and we reconcile with the latter (our inevitable mortality).
Thanks, Lennie, for your time and insights. Looking forward to that essay on your recent independent-living experience…
This reminds me- I need to clean my closet. Who has time for that?
Haha! Well, if you’ll allow me to pass along a little wisdom from my own recent experiences, Ernie, the thing about minimalizing is that it’s a long-term initiative — something you’ll do over the course of, say, six months (or whatever) — and you have to set a sustainable pace. If you tackle too much too soon, you’ll burn out on the project and never see it through to completion; you’ll simply go back to storing stuff where it’s out of sight and out of mind.
On the other hand, if you’re not adhering to a preset schedule — that is, you’re simply cleaning out here and there when you find a little free time — you’ll water down the task of minimalizing to what amounts to a bit of light spring cleaning. You’ll never really reduce your possessions to the ones — and only the ones — that add value to your life. Here’s what I recommend:
1. Determine a regularly scheduled timeslot in which you will devote yourself to Project Minimalism. For example: Each Saturday morning from 9:00 a.m. to noon will be exclusively reserved for cleaning out one section of the house. (Or whatever’s convenient for you.)
2. Set a timer for the allotted interval, be it two or three or four hours. You can get a lot done in a few concentrated hours, and it’s better to not schedule too many or risk fatigue and/or burnout.
3. No phone calls, texts, Internet, or other distractions are permitted during this allotment. We silence ringers; we turn our phones facedown. It is our life; we are entitled to a few hours without interruption, particularly from loved ones. We ask for their support. “I’m minimalizing” is something they learn to understand. But they won’t respect it unless we do first.
4. At the end of each minimalizing session, we determine which sector of the house we will tackle the following week. It’s crucial to limit ourselves to manageable units. For example: We may very well be able to clean out our entire living room in a single session — perhaps it’s just a matter of collecting a few decorative knickknacks and vases and donating them to Goodwill, but the sofa and TV and area rug can stay put — and yet our home-office desk alone might take up an entire Saturday, especially if it’s stuffed with bank statements and business cards and birthday notes and similar small (possibly sentimental) items that need to be sorted through mindfully. So try to assess as accurately as possible whether you should take on an entire room, or just a closet, or perhaps just a cabinet, or even just a drawer, depending on the density of quantity each represents (something only you can appraise). Break the project down into manageable units so you can track measurable progress over the months it will take to fully minimalize.
5. When we have fulfilled our weekly commitment — when we’ve minimalized our garage or kitchen or bedroom closet or junk drawer or whatever we’d preselected for a given day — we make sure to credit ourselves for doing so. We have satisfied our obligation to ourselves, and the rest of the week is ours to do with as we wish until the next predetermined session; there’s no need to squeeze in “extra cleaning” off-schedule just because we happen to have a spare fifteen minutes for it — that invariably leads to project burnout.
It’s all about understanding that we take on a very ambitious (and profoundly emotional) project when we choose to go minimalist, and if we set our expectations too high (“I’m going to minimalize my entire house in one week!”) or too low (“I’ll clean out for ten minutes a day, a couple times a month as I get a chance”), we will not set ourselves up for success. We have to set aside a reasonable amount of time, on a regular basis, and have the patience to see the project through to the end, knowing it will take several months to rid ourselves of the useless possessions we’ve spent a lifetime accruing.
Good luck, Ernie! Thanks for stopping by the blog!
I love the idea that the more we interact with people, the less we need. It’s amazing how much can be collected over the years until we finally get to that point where we have to get rid of it. I do love having photo albums from years ago even though I don’t bother printing photos to create new albums now (and if I did there would be way too many photo albums around)! It’s nice to have those photo albums, but I don’t look at them often either. It’s true that we don’t need any of those things for happiness, especially when there are always new memories to create.
Hey, Sheila!
Regardless of whether or not we interact socially, we need a lot less than we have; as Rushkoff astutely observes, the more we interact with other people, the less stuff we buy. The acquisition of stuff fills a hole in our lives that’s created when we isolate ourselves socially; it’s not a coincidence that suburbia (along with the automobile culture it symbiotically supported) and consumerism, those two pillars of the American Dream, arose simultaneously in the mid-twentieth century: Living in and commuting to a home outside the city vastly reduces accessibility to other people, so we fill that time instead by filling those big private homes with things. Rather than meeting a friend at the park for a picnic, or at the museum for no reason at all, we went instead to the shopping mall, where we always returned with new acquisitions — else what was the point in going?
But if nothing else, at least a field trip to the mall forced us to be out amongst the whirl and rush of humanity! Now, in the 21st century, our digital technologies keep us yet more isolated through the “convenience” of click-and-buy consumerism, which doesn’t require even so much as the superficiality of a transactional relationship with another person! This is how the marketplace deploys divide-and-conquer strategies to get us to keep buying.
As for how things like photo albums apply to a minimalist philosophy: It’s all about what adds value to your life. If you can identify the specific value a given possession adds to your life, than that is all the self-justification required for owning it. With respect to our own photo albums, my wife and I went through the many, many pictures we’ve taken in the twenty-three years we’ve been together (meaning a good deal of our photos — especially those from the Early Years — are actual physical copies that take up real estate in our home). What we discovered was that a lot of them — particularly from trips we’ve taken — were just “tourist shots” that could easily be pulled up on Google Images, you know? Accordingly, we sorted them into “personal” and “impersonal” piles, and it wasn’t that hard to chuck all the impersonal stuff — snapshots of places rather than people — which comprised the overwhelming majority. Now what we’re left with are unique pictures of us, and the people we love, and each one we’ve kept adds demonstrable value to our life.
I will say, though, that sorting through sentimental items like photos is a far easier task when done as a team; you “gut check” each other in ways that would be difficult (nigh impossible) if you had to do it yourself. My mother, who lives alone, has recently been inspired herself to minimalize her apartment, and she has specifically asked if I could help her go through the photo albums next time I’m back in New York. But that just goes to show that even the act of reducing one’s possessions can be a prosocial activity, whereas amassing them was mostly asocial (if not outright antisocial). So, if minimalizing promotes the very peer-to-peer influence Rushkoff champions, then so much the better!
Thanks for stopping by, Sheila. Hope 2019 has been a happy, productive, and healthy year for you thus far!
Sean
It’s been a while since I posted on your blog. I always enjoy reading your posts. I am not a keeper of all things. In fact, if it isn’t nailed down or has some personal value, I throw it out or donate it. Clutter causes me anxiety. Ha!
The things I value the most seem to be photos. They are the visual reminder of wonderful times in the past that help our mind keep the image sharp. I miss taking my film to the store to have developed and waiting in anticipation for the results of camera shots and shouts of “Cheese.” Now, my photos sit on my phone or computer waiting for the occasional scroll through. I no longer print them out and place them in scrapbooks where I wrote notes or messages about the moment. I’ve lost many pictures because my computer gave out before I had a chance to retrieve the pictures. I suppose if I lost every photo ever taken of the people I care about, I’d still have the memories. But, like photos exposed to light, those fade from time.
When I leave this earth, I hope to be more than items sold at a garage sale because my family that is left behind always hated my junk anyway. I would like to think there is one thing tucked into a drawer someplace that when visited from time to time brings a smile to my relative’s face. They can chuckle and say, “I remember when Stacey did that or said this.” Like my cooky Aunt Jenny. She gave me a very large, plastic Italian pepper when I bought my very first house in 1996. It was a gift to keep the evil spirits away. I now live in my third house, and that pepper still has a place in my home. Aunt Jenny passed away eighteen years ago. Every time I see that pepper, I laugh and with warmth in my heart, think of her.
Stacey!
So nice to have you join the conversation! Welcome!
There are few direct windows into the past like photos; for me, that is a double-edged sword. While I certainly appreciate the value of being able to access, if only visually, the people and places long gone from my life, I invariably find the experience too painful to indulge for very long. Reminders of times past is a reminder of all the time that’s passed, you know? Photos makes the recollections too tactile, too immediate — speaking exclusively for myself, I should stipulate — whereas I prefer the gauzy filter of memory. That certainly might be part of the reason I am such a staunch anti-nostalgist: I appreciate the value of forgetting, too, because how else do we move on? I’m reminded of the lyrics from Chris Cornell’s “Doesn’t Remind Me”:
I think your Aunt Jenny’s Italian pepper provides the perfect illustration of how keepsakes can be healthy — even joyous — reminders of those we’ve loved and lost. We needn’t hold onto everything — every note they ever wrote, every shirt they ever wore — and God knows I don’t understand the practice of keeping cremated remains in an urn on the mantle: I find it somber and borderline obsessive (though I acknowledge there are those who profess to take comfort from it, and I’m all for different strokes).
Material possessions aren’t inherently nefarious; we do live, in the words of a wise woman, in a material world, after all! Minimalism is only about appreciating material goods for the value they bring to our lives; if you can identify and articulate the value of something in your life — even if it’s “only” a sentimental/emotional value, like the plastic pepper — then it is worth keeping. But if an item either has no purpose or has outlived its function, let it go. I promise: You won’t miss it.
But however we retain them — via totemic reminders or not — memories are really only worth preserving if we share them, if we put them to use prosocially. So thank you for sharing your memories — a little bit of your story — with us here on the blog, Stacey. Your contributions to this little community are valued tremendously.
Sean
Sean, I’ve been saving this post in my “Important” folder for two months now. Interacting with you through my own blog post and comments today reminded me that it was there. And I’m glad I used my downtime tonight to read it. (And imagine my surprise as seeing a quote of mine included!)
There is so much here, so many thoughts I have, that it could be overwhelming. (Seems kind of meta, given the topic.) But I will “let go” of responding to everything and just sort of go wherever my stream of thought takes me.
On one hand, I don’t know that the younger generation collects fewer things than we do/did. In fact, I might even argue that digital collection allows them to collect even more “stuff”—more useless and untended “stuff”—than ever before in history. We were at least limited by physical space for our framed photos and memorabilia. The cloud, however, allows infinite storage of every moment, so much so that very few of them really stand out as particularly cherished.
So we saved the receipt from our first date dinner. Today’s generation saves pictures of every meal they eat.
Maybe we kept those favorite summer shirts in the closet too long. But they take photos of not only every outfit they ever buy, but even the ones they just try on, right from the dressing room—all tucked neatly away in the Cloud.
Just because the hoarding doesn’t take up as much space doesn’t mean it isn’t happening. As I say, I think the convenience and “spacelessness” of it actually exacerbates the keeping of unimportant mementos. But don’t think for a second that if someone were to accidentally miss a payment on their Cloud storage and have that torrent of “keepsakes” deleted that they wouldn’t have an emotional upheaval to rival anything we might put in a box and donate.
As for the usefulness of mementos, I do believe they can serve a real purpose with intention. For instance, were you to walk into my best friend’s home, you’d see an entire wall artfully covered in framed photos of all sizes, spanning back generations. Her late dad’s journal sits out on a table, and one of his wooden hunting ducks is on another. Her mom’s original recipe cards—faded and smeared—are still in use, even though reprints would serve the purpose, perhaps even better. But there is a feeling of groundedness, belonging and pride in that home. The “kids” (now in their 30s) have a visual connection to grandparents that still infuse family stories and wisdom. They see just how much they looked like grampa or Great Aunt Livy. At Christmastime, the vinyl records are brought out for dancing; and the “stereo-scope” allows us to see with our own eyes and remember that joy and fun and laughter are part of the legacy—an inspiration to each new generation to carry on those traditions.
But, no—nothing sits in boxes without purpose. I have things that serve no real purpose but which are on display as part of the mood I want created in my house, things without which my space might feel sterile or impersonal: a snow globe, a box from Paris, a hand-stitched little snowflake. When I see these things around me, I’m not holding onto the past. I’m holding onto the present, remembering how much I am loved by people in between our times of being able to get together. I like that you included in your definition of “serving a purpose” those things which are actively used to bring joy.
And yet… as much as I’ve downsized with recent moves, your post reminds me that there is still more that is boxed up in the backs of closets that can go.
I also want to say here that, while I’ve shared this with you before, I don’t think it can be said (or read/heard) too often: You’re a great writer! Your voice is unlike anyone else’s. I feel you in everything you write, and that’s both a gift and a skill.
Well, Erik, it has been a while since you’ve had a chance to pop by and share your unique perspective with the blog… and this wonderful comment only reminds me how thoroughly your presence, engagement, and insight have been missed! Welcome back!
Your observation about the potential for “digital hoarding” is a keenly insightful one that really deserves its own essay, perhaps as a follow-up or even counterpoint to “All That You Can’t Leave Behind.” I agree with every word of it. I guess in some respects your point is the flipside scenario to the hopeful one I suggested above about how perhaps the cloud-storage generation — whose personal histories will look more like an amorphous continuum than a chaptered chronicle — will be less neurotic, fetishistic, and sentimental about the past without all the tactile, memory-specific reminders of this event or that occasion, etc. If we are guilty of over-monumentalizing that stuff, what’s the equivalent pitfall for a generation that celebrates every moment as it happens, no matter how trivial or mundane, and preserves those moments for all time in the “cloud”?
If nostalgia-driven consumerism is the extreme outgrowth of a worldview that equates material possession with the meaningful experiences they represent, what is the corresponding consequence of a worldview shaped by “present shock,” whereby only the priorities of this moment matter — the text message we just received that took us out of the live conversation we were having, the photo we just posted on Instagram whose “likes” we are tracking in real time — and accordingly any sense of narrativity, with its goals and direction, is surrendered to the meaningless immediacy of now? For that generation, there is no “Remember when…?” (or even “What Next…?”), because they never stop curating a record of right now.
So, you’re right: It’s a different kind of accumulation born of different mores, technologies, and neuroses, but something to be aware of nonetheless. I suspect the remedy to either condition, be it analog or digital collecting/hoarding, is simply to understand that moments are intended to be experienced; that we can preserve them is a technological feat not without its benefits, but they shouldn’t be preserved at the expense of being fully and richly experienced. And I think, alas, that’s what’s happening more and more — like when we post pictures of our meal for strangers online instead of enjoying the sensation of eating it and the company of those sitting directly across the table from us.
I have no pictures from my boyhood adventures — which I wrote about three months ago — but, as the essay attests, they were among the most meaningful and memorable experiences of my life. I’m glad we never stopped to get a photo or “souvenir”! We were too in the moment to have ever worried about freezing the moment; as such, the unsupplemented memories I carry with me of those days are more powerful and emotionally tactile than any keepsake or physical reminder of them could ever be.
I also second everything you say about the value of mementoes, especially purely “decorative” ones. As is the case for your best friend, those keepsakes tell the story of her life! And she clearly takes pride in those items for the narrative value they add to her life, and — more importantly — she shares her history with others in a very powerful way by inviting people into her home and “seeing” the story of her life on display, you know? So, her “stuff” promotes prosocial behavior, instead of serving as a nostalgic cocoon — a museum exhibit to herself and her own arcane interests (like when people collect Beanie Babies and hundred-dollar Star Wars
toyscollectables). There is nothing wrong with taking pride in your life, your family, and its history, and employing memorabilia to celebrate and share that.
With respect to the tchotchkes we all acquire, I guess the key is recognizing what’s a meaningful keepsake versus meaningless miscellany. My wife and I have decided to forgo picking up any more souvenirs — concert T-shirts, refrigerator magnets from the places we’ve visited, those giveaway bobbleheads at Dodger Stadium — and instead allow our one sentimental indulgence to be Christmas ornaments. So we might pick up an ornament during a particularly magical adventure, and we have a photo ornament made each Christmas with the pictures and names of all the kittens we’ve fostered that year, because they are always members of the Carlin family even after they are no longer in our care. We memorialize those experiences on a Christmas ornament, and then once a year, it comes out of the closet, and we reflect on those things as we decorate our tree. So, all of our decorations are meaningful — we don’t have any “filler” pieces — and they help make for a special end-of-year celebration for our family. But then that stuff goes away again for eleven months — we don’t keep reminders of our foster kittens out all year long, but instead put that emotional energy into fostering new kittens — and when it comes out again at Christmas, the items themselves seem more meaningful, and they add meaning to our holiday. For us, that’s a healthy feedback loop — and a justifiable reason to keep some sentimental baubles in our possession.
We have downsized considerably ourselves, but every time I scan the shelves or drawers, I always seem to see another item that can be donated; minimalism is a lifestyle choice rather than a one-off housecleaning project. I’ve been going through my library of books and DVDs lately, rereading and re-watching many of them and then deciding if I still want to keep them. I’d say 90% of the time, it goes right in the DONATE box when I’m done with it!
And thank you so, so much for that kind closing comment, which I appreciate beyond my capacity to adequately convey! Thank you. You know, when I was a senior in high school, I was sure I was going to be a novelist and essayist. (I took an English class in senior year in which we were required to turn in a two-page essay every Monday, without exception, and I got really good at cranking them out! And I always got As on those essays… and that was a letter I very seldom saw on any other schoolwork I turned in! Haha!) In college, though, I got seduced by cinema, and signed with my first screenwriting manager when I was only 22.
The movie business didn’t turn out to be the creative bastion I’d imagined, even though I made some headway in Hollywood, and in 2014, I started work on my first novel and launched this blog. Five years later, I’m nearly finished with the first draft of my second book, and the blog has found an identity of which I am very proud; I love doing these essays! (I can only post one a month, though, because they always go so deep, despite the fact that I tell myself every time that this’ll be a short one!)
I mention all that to say that one of the great joys of hitting the professional reset button has been rediscovering — or maybe just discovering for the first time — my authorial voice. I’ve grown very comfortable being opinionated, and expressing those opinions in a style that is true to my sensibilities. That my writing isn’t for all tastes — the average post’s word count, prose density, and subject matter all make for a challenging read, I fully realize — is, in my view, an asset rather than a liability. We talked about that in “Artistic Originality” — that as your confidence rises in your craft, your personality steps in front of your influences to form your voice. And that’s where I feel I am developmentally, so thank you for affirming that. But it’s only something that could’ve happened by stepping away from screenwriting, and allowing myself the time, space, and freedom to be creatively experimental; I’d reached a point in my artistic development whereby I needed to shut out the advisers and listen to the voice within. Since doing that, I think that voice has emerged guns blazin’!
And of course it is always rewarding to have someone express their appreciation for what you do and how you do it, so sincerest thanks for being thoughtful enough to do that. I appreciate it, bud.
Hope all is well by you — glad to see you have a new blog post up! — and looking forward to more interaction throughout the summer months…
You’ve woven so many great ideas here that there’s more than I have time to reply to! Lately listened to Kondo audiobook with a grain-of-salt mindset & came away with a sort of feeling of permission to get rid of bunk o’ junk. I tend to over-love sending things to salvation army – so it’s all about balance. On the other hand, was recently glancing thru some ancient computer files – jpg’s of all things! & I see that I can no longer open them! one day old printed photos will be like gold, methinks…
Indeed, da-AL — it’s all about taking a balanced approach. Just as collecting things can be its own compulsive-addictive behavior, so too can the inverse: disposing of shit! (My mother was a chronic disposer when I was a kid: I’d come home from school to find certain toys gone, and when I’d asked if she’d touched or moved them, she’d say no — because she had no memory of throwing any of it out! It was just a habitual motion. For a long time, I became something of a rabid packrat in response — one set of extreme behavior inciting an equal and opposite reaction. Over the years, I am happy to report, Mom and I both found a more balanced approach to material ownership!)
To your other point, I’m an analog person myself; I value the tactile experience of reading physical books, and writing by hand in notebooks, and being in touch with a reality that isn’t purely digital. And while I certainly appreciate that digital technology has made it easier for me to own things — like books and movies and photos — that no longer occupy physical space in my house, I am also aware that today’s technologies have a way of quickly becoming outmoded (much the way VHS gave way to DVD, which gave way to Blu-ray, which itself has given way to 4K UHD, and now 8K UHD, and so on…), so the ability to always access those materials is far from a given.
As such, I simply aim to experience things rather than own them (or own keepsakes of those experiences), and the things I do find worth owning — the movies I love, the photos of good times — are very meticulously curated. I’m more mindful of the things I own, be them digital or analog; I have found that applying the Marie Kondo test — Is this something you want to take with you into your future? — has been an invaluable method for determining what stays and what goes. In fact, if applied honestly, your heart will tell you that most of your mementoes ain’t worth the space they take up…
While it’s flattering to have served as a source of reference for someone else’s writing (even if it is an advertisement), it should go without saying — if you’ve read my subsequent thesis on minimalism — that I oppose long-term self-storage units, which enable us, in the words of Jerry Seinfeld, to “pay rent to visit your garbage.”
Self-storage units can absolutely serve a short-term function as a staging area for our effects when we’re, say, renovating, or perhaps when we’re between homes, which sometimes happens for a variety of reasons. But that’s not how anyone I know with a rented self-storage unit uses it. They use them to hide things they don’t want yet for whatever reason can’t justify selling, donating, recycling, or throwing out. If something you own has been in storage for more than 90 days — and that includes a closet or a garage — do yourself a favor and ditch it. Putting something out of sight isn’t leaving it behind; rather, it’s clinging to it owed to some unconfronted insecurity. Why throw good money after bad?
If you’re looking for inspiration, I highly recommend Minimalism: A Documentary About the Important Things, which you can screen in its entirety, free of charge, on YouTube.
Yeah, I was surprised to see that pingback on here
BTW, you’re absolutely right about storage units. I had one for way too long, and it was more than I could afford. I’m glad I finally got rid of it, but now all my stuff is cluttering my room…
I certainly could’ve simply refused to approve the pingback, Dell, but I thought it presented an unexpected opportunity to expound on the matter of minimalism, a great passion of mine, with particular respect to self-storage “solutions.” Putting shit into storage isn’t minimalizing. Rather, it’s the last desperate recourse we contemplate when we refuse — for whatever our reasons (and I don’t sit in judgment of anyone) — to do what minimalism asks of us: interrogate the usefulness of our possessions.
The thing about self-storage units is that they provide a temporary sense of relief: You get the dopamine hit of having cleared out your home without having had to endure the separation anxiety that comes with letting go of something forever. “This unwanted thing in my life is costing me in time and attention, and I don’t want to spend any more time and attention on it, so I’ll put it into storage. Great! Now it’s no longer imposing on my time and/or attention!”
Only now it’s costing me money. Which, at least initially, seems like a pretty fair tradeoff. For a small monthly payment, I get to circumvent the anxiety that comes with unwanted ownership. Instead of getting rid of the thing that’s producing anxiety in me, I pay rent for privilege of knowing I can visit it.
I have friends who inherited furniture from a deceased relative 20 years ago that they didn’t want… so they put it into storage. These were worthless furnishings, by the way — we’re not talking Fendi Casa here — that should’ve been donated to Goodwill. But instead this stuff’s been in storage for two decades! I can’t imagine how many thousands of dollars my friends have spent storing (worthless) furniture that none of them even want!
Let’s just say for the sake of argument their total storage expenditures come to ten grand. If I told you right now to burn $10,000 in your fireplace, you’d think me crazy. But that’s exactly what’s been done! And at some point, someone is going to have to deal with that unwanted furniture — someone is going to have to put it in the Dumpster where it should’ve been consigned the day that relative died, long before thousands of dollars were “invested” in its indefinite storage. And even if it were put to use tomorrow, it could’ve been easily replaced for far less than the money that’s been spent keeping it in storage these past 20 years.
And these are smart people, I’m talking about. Sensible people. But they are caught in the mental trap — the abusive relationship with anxiety — that comes with material custodianship. They are allowing their decision-making to be governed by the demon of sentimental anxiety, rather than alleviating themselves of the burden of anxiety by discarding the very unwanted material possessions that are fueling it! So many of us, and I say this with nothing but profound empathy in my heart, are caught in a deeply emotionally manipulative and even abusive relationship with our stuff, and that’s what minimalism can help us change for the better — by giving us the tools to recognize and rehabilitate that dysfunctional dynamic. Self-storage isn’t the answer, merely another (resource-consuming) coping mechanism.
My friend, I miss the lively engagement and great conversation of this blog! On the matter of reallocating one’s time and attention, I’m pleased to report I’ve had a hearteningly productive winter: I outlined (first on a beat sheet, then a corkboard) two long-gestating novellas, and plan to produce first drafts of each this spring and summer, respectively. (Though our colleagues might argue otherwise, Save the Cat! is an indispensable toolkit when used properly and artfully.) Along with a third novella I wrote in 2019, those stories will be featured in a collection of Out of the Bottle coming-of-age fantasies. And as soon as I’m done with that project, I’ll return my attention to my half-written manuscript for The Lost Boys of the Bronx. So, even though I ain’t blogging with regularity anymore — and I do miss it — I’m making appreciable progress on a number of long-form fiction projects I’ve been promising myself for a long time I’d get around to…
I am planning a big post for June to celebrate the blog’s tenth anniversary tentatively titled “Under the Influence,” which expands on ideas and themes first explored in “Artistic Originality,” but with a far more personal hook to it. It’ll be a chance for folks to think about and share their own formative favorites and creative influences.
I hope you’re having a healthy and productive winter yourself, Dell! I’m glad you popped by to say hi!
SPC