The tyranny of stuff

by: Kate Carraway

October 21, 2009 9:09 PM

Comments: (1)

Why am I sleeping on a pool toy? I’m possessed by a fear of possession

Sometime this summer, my friend and his brother moved a double bed from my parents’ basement to my apartment in Toronto. It had been a 20th birthday present and, aside from bearing the marks of one spilled cup of coffee and one spilled bottle of foundation, it’s a good bed that feels good to sleep on. Still, I regard the bed a little warily. When it arrived, a few years after I’d shipped it to my hometown, I put the frame together, heaved the boxspring and the fluffy mattress on top, and circled the whole, heavy thing a few times.

For over a year I’d been sleeping on blow-up camping mattresses: the first one was mysteriously destroyed when I hosted four rowdy girls for a slumber party featuring Heathers (obvi), Spumante Bambino, licorice and hash. The second one was a single that required constant re-inflating. Both of them were met with understandable incredulity by suitors. I thought about getting a real bed, or even a futon. Occasionally, in a hotel or at a dude’s house, I’d remember how nice it was to have something substantial underneath me while I slept. And, definitely, the first week of sleep following the delivery of my old-new bed was luxurious. Still, owning a real bed has been symbolic to me of “having stuff,” which is something I don’t particularly like.

Stuff, to me, is bondage. Not the fun kind. My mild, though not total, phobia of ownership mostly relates to stuff that is physically and mentally oppressive (furniture, breakables, fifth-grade report cards) and stuff that tends to multiply (thrift store tchotchkes, vinyl, cheap jewellery). I’m still a middle-class woman, so I have, relatively, a lot of stuff. Sweetly attempting to compromise with my mania about how much unused stuff there was in the bedroom, an ex-boyfriend suggested renting a storage locker, the ridiculousity of which made me even more inclined to toss each overloaded plastic tub of veritable shit onto the street. I fantasize about tearing through my friends’ crowded apartments, polluted with things, and coldly watching the garage-sale detritus and once-alluring impulse buys spill from my open hands into recycling bins and Goodwill-bound bags. Even the decaying, drying pens in a junk drawer — fuck, just the presence of a junk drawer, period — makes me totally batshit.

My dad has postulated that my compulsion to narrow and edit stuff has to do with the residual privilege of my safe and things-filled upbringing, while my parents’ lean, wartime childhoods explain their need to keep it all, every expired jar of VapoRub, every broken flashlight. Blaming all moral failings and lame preoccupations on my happy formative years is my favourite, but my opposition to stuff is also about its quiet tyranny of permanence. Stuff holds its owner hostage. It binds us to apartments and houses and cities and countries, and to the ephemeral but just as real ideas of what our lives are and could be. For me, not having any such commitment to stuff trumps the problem of sleeping on what amounts to a pool toy, even when I’m sliding off of it mid-coitus.

Over the years, I’ve accumulated a jungle of goods, including 50 or so cardboard boxes of books and a Clothes Mountain that feels sort of bare and on-purpose-minimal to me, though it’s still massive compared to the wardrobes of my guy friends. My procurement policy of late is to buy one-ish pairs of shoes a year, but shoes that are fucking killer. Not precisely ascetic, but rarely wasteful. Stuff that is boring or decorative or unused or too heavy for me to carry by myself is verboten, regularly hunted down and divested. By now, though, there’s not much left to get rid of (other than maybe this bed).

As my friends and I become more and more situated in our adult lives, it seems that the need we feel to both accumulate and keep random debris is informed by a secretly and malignantly aspirational urge to hold on to something lost (track-and-field medals), or to be someone else (red-sequined shorts) or to know other things (uncracked books) or to rebel against not having money to invest or buy better stuff by spending blindly on smaller, shittier, more attainable stuff (DVDs, H&M separates, IKEA everything). At best, the stuff we have contributes to our lives and even our identities, but unchecked, it holds us in thrall, a tyrannical presence with a heavy price tag.

Having too many things is a micro example of a macro problem, environmentally and economically. I’m not as attuned to either of those, but I can sense the value of stuff being falsely amplified, making our various things into comforting spectres of what they might be. So, I’m out, done with stuff. I have enough going on in my head without having to worry about furniture, too.

» What are you hoarding? Email kcarraway@eyeweekly.com or Tweet @katecarraway.

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My Life, My Fault

The tyranny of stuff

Kate Carraway