Just scheduled a Salvation Army pickup of the leftovers from our garage sale on Saturday. We sold more than half of it and still had four good-sized boxes to pack up. It’s pretty sobering to realize a small family could set up housekeeping just on the extra stuff in our attic. Along with bedding, dishes and cookware of almost every type, we had a small George Foreman grill and a griddle/wafflemaker. Run a tap up there and someone would be set.
Notice I am talking about just the attic. We didn’t even get around to the closets containing clothes I sorta kinda hope to fit into again, or the many books and CDs gathering dust on our shelves.
I think we have a problem with materialism — attachment to “stuff.” It’s not the kind of materialism that maxes out credit cards on designer clothes and fine china, but the more common kind. The kind where you keep every nicknack because it has some meaning you’ve assigned to it. Souvenir sports cups from when we were first dating, the pillow made that time you took up embroidery; the cute toy the cat once liked—and could like again (maybe). We also have the kind of materialism that doesn’t let you get rid of stuff you’re not using because “it’s perfectly good.” It works for it’s designed function, the thinking goes, we might need it one day.
I remember how embarrassed I was when friends helped us move into a new apartment in Seoul and watched as we brought in box after box after box of stuff. Most of it we certainly didn’t need to live and a good bit of it we’d forgotten we had. (A set of four tennis rackets springs to mind. In our five years together, these had never left the box we stored them in.) We occupied a huge apartment that would typically house two generations of people. An older couple, for example, and a grown child, his or her spouse and the grandchildren. We took all of that space—us, our infant daughter and two cats—-and our stuff.
Our friends in Korea weren’t necessarily more frugal than we were. They liked to get the latest electronics: flat-screen TVs (particularly popular because of the small size of most apartments); new cellphones; fashionable clothes and furnishings. The difference is you don’t see people putting the old TV set or cellphone or clothes that don’t fit into a box in the closet. They don’t have that closet, so they don’t accumulate stuff. (Disposal of the “old” TV set, cellphone, etc. is still a problem, although there are much more extensive and established recycling programs.)
I’m making it a priority to divest us of our “stuff.” Stuff defined as the group of perfectly good, usable items that we have taking up space in closets and on shelves that we never, ever use. Someone might need it. We can part with it. And, we will.
