How Thanksgiving Led to a Meditation on Death & Cleaning (SWWC vol 3, issue 67)
Hello!
When the world gets to be a whole lot, it helps if you clean your own house and craft just one small island of sanity. (Note to self: hunt down circulation and traffic numbers for shelter-mag and -blog brands.) Hence today's topic.
*
As part of last week's pre-Thanksgiving prep, I moved the Ikea Stuva bench in my bedroom to our living room so as to provide our guests with extra seating. This entailed clearing out the drawer underneath of two canvas bins full of linens and clearing off the top of three dozen books I've somehow acquired in the last year. As I searched for somewhere else to put this stuff, the thought occurred to me -- not for the first time -- that if I had less stuff, I'd have more time to do things that did not entail managing my stuff.
The direct connection between stuff management and time management is an evergreen in lifehacking features."Women will spend eight years of their lives shopping!" blares a headline, space constraints perhaps explaining why there's no mention that a substantial percentage of that time is spent shopping for the stuff that keeps entire families fed and clothed. We'll lose 153 days of our lives to searching for lost items, another story assures us, the premise being that had we fewer things to lose, we'd have more days of our lives. The implication is clear: More stuff means less time.
But whose time? I asked this question after reading about Swedish Death Cleaning, the process by which someone in their middle to later years winnows their belongings. The goal to Swedish Death Cleaning -- which, by the way, sounds so much more hardcore than "decluttering" or "KonMari" -- is to reduce the amount of stuff your descendants have to handle after your death. In the case of Swedish Death Cleaning, the time you've spent managing your stuff is time saved by your next-of-kin.
And does having less stuff really mean more time? Maintaining minimalism requires a lot of time devoted to saying no, to dispersing of unwanted stuff, to making decisions about everything you own.
Or is having less stuff actually pointing to another often-managed resource: money? People who don't have to worry about budgeting have the luxury of taking the "If I don't need it, I can get rid of it. If I need another, I can buy another" approach, as do people who don't really subscribe to the idea that objects have value because you worked to buy them and they still do what they're supposed to. People who have not experienced privation may not understand the emotional security offered by a full-to-bursting pantry.
So what? As we head into the thick of the holiday retail season, with its projected $678.75 billion to $682 billion in sales, it's worth thinking about where we're going to put the $967.13 in new stuff we're either giving or getting in the next four weeks. (The good news is, you may only have to make room for an iPhone X.)
Stuff makes us feel things -- no surprise since there's a deep and complex relationship between emotions and purchases. Taking a look at your environment and whether or not it's stressing you out to have stuff in it might be the best holiday prep you can do.
Who cares? People who study people. There is research suggesting that people's fixation on stuff -- from choosing it to acquiring it to taking care of it -- stresses them out. When people embrace a stuff-management method, they're trying to find a way to manage their emotions and tell the story of who they are. As Lee Randall writes:
According to Russell Belk, a professor of marketing at York University whose 1988 paper about possessions and the extended self remains a touchstone for all subsequent research, this kind of projection serves a valuable function for a healthy personality, ‘acting as an objective manifestation of self’. Humans have a fundamental need to store memories, values and experiences in objects, perhaps to keep them safe from memory loss; proof that, yes, that really happened.
What is also interesting is how much economists love Marie Kondo, mostly because she takes cherished concepts in their field and applies them to the sock drawer. As Tim Harford writes, Kondo gently guides people through confronting status quo bias (keeping things the way they already are), applying the logic of diminishing returns to extras of anything, and assessing the opportunity costs in keeping and maintaining your possessions. Bourree Lam, whose CV includes a stint as the editor of Freakonomics.com, so she knows of what she writes, added this filip to the economists' take on decluttering:
Another important point that Kondo protects us from is the folly of prediction: People systematically make terrible guesses about the future. So instead, people should focus on the present, and in tidying, this manifests in the form of using present-day valuations of all of one’s belongings. People are wrong when they think that pair of jeans will ever fit again, Kondo is arguing. They're also wrong when they think they'll read that book again. These optimistic predictions keep people from getting rid of things they don’t need.
After reading that, Swedish Death Cleaning makes even more sense. In letting go of our optimistic and wildly incorrect predictions about our future selves -- decluttering them, if you will, and accepting that the Futurama head-in-a-jar technology will probably not be perfected in our lifetimes, so why not Freecycle that two-gallon Anchor Hocking jar now? -- we can let go of the crap that's weighing us down.
*
Your pop culture recommendation for the day: The chorus for 10000 Maniacs' song "Gold Rush Brides" has the line, "The land was free/ yet it cost their lives," and I have never driven through the raw peaks of the Rockies or the sere stretches of the Sonoran desert without singing that to myself. Between that song, the Ken Burns documentary The West (available on Netflix) and the late, lamented HBO series Deadwood, I've been come to regard the myths of the frontier with more than a little skepticism.
That I internalized the myth as a little girl bespeaks the power and reach of Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House series. And like a lot of women who were completely into the series as a kid, I've read the books around the series, from Donald Zochert's biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder to William Holtz's The Ghost in the Little House: A Life of Rose Wilder Lane to Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography with Pamela Smith Hill.
So you know I'm up for reading Caroline Fraser's Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder. What makes this look especially promising are two reviews I've read which elucidates on the conservative underpinnings of the series and what one can conclude about the U.S. today based on the story of the self-sufficient frontier family Wilder spun in her books. Patricia Nelson Limerick's review for the New York Times has a wonderful historic framing around it, while Vivian Gornick's piece for the New Republic brings up the terrible lie at the heart of homesteading -- less than 3% of the land on the Dakotas was suitable for farming, scientist John W. Powell warned, yet he was ignored by the industry titans and their amenable legislators of the day -- and its direct line to today's scrabbling American citizens. Read the reviews, read the book.
*