Stuff

The strawberries taste like strawberries. The snozberries taste like snozberries. Snozzberries? What the hell of a snozzberry? We are the music makers, and we are the dream of This is the Music Makers podcast where I read things out loud to you and then offer my unqualified opinions on them.

Stuff by Paul Graham. I have too much stuff. Most people in America do. In fact, the poorer people are, the more stuff they seem to have. Hardly anyone is so poor that they can't afford a front yard full of old cars.

It wasn't always this way. Stuff used to be rare and valuable. You can still see evidence of that if you look for it. For example, in my house in Cambridge, which was built in 18/76, the bedrooms don't have closets. In those days, people's stuff fit in a chest of drawers.

Even as recently as a few decades ago, there was a lot less stuff. When I look back at photos from the 19 seventies, I'm surprised how empty houses look. As a kid, I had what I thought was a huge fleet of toy cars, but they'd be dwarfed by the number of toys my nephews have. Altogether, my match boxes and corgis took up about a third of the surface of my bed. In my nephews' rooms, the bed is the only clear space.

Stuff has gotten a lot cheaper, but our attitudes toward it haven't changed correspondingly. We overvalue stuff. That was a big problem for me when I had no money. I felt poor and stuff seemed valuable, so almost instinctively, I accumulated it. Friends would leave something behind when they moved, or I'd see something as I was walking down the street on trash night, or I'd find something in almost new condition for a 10th its retail price at a garage sale, and pow, more stuff.

In fact, these free or nearly free things weren't bargains because they were worth even less than what they cost. Most of the stuff I accumulated was worthless because I didn't need it. What I didn't understand was that the value of some new acquisition wasn't the difference between its retail price and what I paid for it. It was the value I derived from it. Stuff is an extremely illiquid asset.

Unless you have some plan for selling that valuable thing you got so cheaply, what difference does it make what it's worth? The only way you're ever going to extract any value from it is to use it. And if you don't have any immediate use for it, you probably never will. Companies that sell stuff have spent huge sums training us to think stuff is valuable, but it would be closer to the truth to treat stuff as worthless. In fact, worse than worthless because once you've accumulated a certain amount of stuff, it starts to own you rather than the other way around.

I know of 1 couple who couldn't retire to the town they preferred because they couldn't afford a place there big enough for all their stuff. Their house isn't theirs. It's their stuff's. And unless you're extremely organized, a house full of stuff can be very depressing. A cluttered room saps one's spirits.

One reason, obviously, is that there's less room for people in a room full of stuff, but there's more going on than that. I think humans constantly scan their environment to build a mental model of what's around them. And the harder a scene is to parse, the less energy you have left for conscious thoughts. A cluttered room is literally exhausting. A really painful thing to recall is not just that I accumulated all this useless stuff, but that I often spent money I desperately needed on stuff that I didn't.

Why would I do that? Because the people whose job it is to sell you stuff are really, really good at it. The average 25 year old is no match for companies that have spent years figuring out how to get you to spend money on stuff. They make the experience of buying stuff so pleasant that shopping becomes a leisure activity. How do you protect yourself from these people?

It can't be easy. I'm a fairly skeptical person, and their tricks worked on me well into my thirties. But one thing that might work is to ask yourself, before buying something, is this going to make my life noticeably better? A friend of mine cured herself of a clothes buying habit by asking herself before she bought anything, am I going to wear this all the time? She couldn't convince herself that something she was thinking of buying would become one of those few things she wore all the time.

She wouldn't buy it. I think that would work for any kind of purchase. Before buying anything, ask yourself, will this be something I use constantly, or is it just something nice? Or worse, a mere bargain? The worst stuff in this respect may be stuff you don't use much because it's too good.

Nothing owns you like fragile stuff. For example, the good china so many households have, and whose defining quality is not so much that it's fun to use, but that one must be especially careful not to break it. Another way to resist acquiring stuff is to think of the overall cost of owning it. The purchase price is just the beginning. You're going to have to think about that thing for years, perhaps the rest of your life.

Everything you own takes energy away from you. Some give more than they take. Those are the only things worth having. I've now stopped accumulating stuff. Except books, but books are different.

Books are more like a fluid than individual objects. It's not especially inconvenient to own several 1,000 books, whereas if you owned several 1,000 random possessions, you'd be a local celebrity. But except for books, I now actively avoid stuff. If I want to spend my money on some kind of treat, I'll take services over goods any day. I'm not claiming this is because I've achieved some kind of zen like detachment from material things.

I'm talking about something more mundane. A historical change has taken place and I now have realized it. Stuff used to be valuable and now it's not. The good news is, if you've been carrying a burden without knowing it, your life could be better than you realize. Imagine walking around for years with 5 pound ankle weights on, then suddenly having them removed.

I'm gonna use this article to reveal another kind of weird thing about myself. I wear the same thing to work every single day of every single week. A while back, I read an article about this lady who wears a uniform to work and that she bought the same outfit and wears it every single day to work. And I thought it was kinda crazy, but also kind of awesome. That article about uniforms, the article we just read about having too much stuff, and a book called Essentialism, The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, All of those things made me realize, hey.

Maybe I wanna try a uniform too. So I went in my closet and looked, like, actually looked at all the clothes I have. And I realized, I don't wear most of these clothes ever. In fact, I don't like most of these clothes. I would go into my closet and look at all these shirts I have and essentially pick from the same, you know, 4 or 5, and the rest would just be there.

I started wondering why am I keeping all this stuff that I don't wanna wear and I don't actually like. It's just taking up space in my closet. So I did something crazy, and I found a shirt that fits well, a shirt that I like. And I bought 4 of them. Found a pair of shorts that fits well, and I bought a couple of those.

And now I wear the exact same thing every single day to work. And, yes, I get to wear shorts to work, and that's pretty awesome. So I took all of these other clothes, and I gave a lot of them away and then put what was left in the guest closet thinking, this is insane. I'm not gonna wear the same thing every day. I should keep these clothes just in case.

But you know what? I haven't missed them at all. Now every time I look in my closet, I know I like the way that those shirts fit. I like all of these shirts, and I can pick any one of them and wear it. And I've slowly started to add a few more into the rotation.

So I'm kind of shifting away from a strict uniform and shifting more towards something called a capsule wardrobe. And the whole idea behind that is, what are what are the clothes that if you put in a time capsule and opened it up in, you know, 30, 40, 50 years, what clothes would still be wearable? What clothes are timeless? And the author is right when he says there's a a mental cost to owning things. You can't just buy it and bring it in your house and forget about it.

There's a mental cost to stuff. There's a guy called William Morris that lived in the 1800, and he said, have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful. This is the best rule of thumb for me. Don't have anything in your house that you don't know is useful or think is beautiful. There are some things that you just have to have because they're useful.

That's fine. But if it's not useful and you don't love it, why do you still have it? Get rid of it. Free up that mental space that you've allocated towards keeping and taking care of that thing or finding a place to put it or how to organize it or whatever. Tidying up becomes much easier when you're not tidying up a bunch of junk that you don't like.

Another rule of thumb that's useful in so many areas of life is it's either a hell yes or it's a no. Do you need that new thing? Absolutely yes or no. If it's, I could I could maybe use it, or I I think it's pretty cool, it's a no. So go around your house today and ask yourself, do I absolutely need this thing?

Is this thing very useful, or do I love it? Do I find it to be extremely beautiful? If you don't know that it's useful or think that it's beautiful, why are you holding on to it? Don't just keep it because it was a good deal or because you've had it for a long time. That stuff in your life is continuing to cost you.

It's costing you your mental energy. So don't just assume that because you already own it, you should keep it. Get rid of some of that stuff and free up your mental space. The Music Makers podcast is released twice weekly on Mondays Thursdays at 10 AM CST. You can subscribe in iTunes by searching for The Musicmakers or visit us online by going to musicmakers.fm.

And as always, you can reach me at aaron@musicmakers.fm.