The Problem With Stuff

Commonplace Newsletter #110

It’s early December as I write this and already I am tired of Christmas. Make no mistake, I love the day itself and celebrate it with abandon- food, gifts, family, gratitude, revelry and reverence. Dickens adaptations on the TV, a drunken Dean Martin slurring through Silver Bells on the stereo, more food, The King’s Speech at 3pm, a walk to the pub, twinkling fairy lights and baubles. I love the whole thing.

On December 25^th.    

But the holiday has degenerated to a whole season¹ now with not a single day of reprieve between Halloween and early January. As the weeks roll on it all becomes as irritating as the ceaseless saccharine Christmas hits blaring out through shop and cafe speakers, and as dispiriting as having to manoeuvre around hordes of frantic, bag-laden, tunnel-vision shoppers in town each day. Not to be a humbug but I have to point this out to begin with. 

See, these Christmas blues that have been at the corners of my consciousness are merely a manifestation of the problems that I believe are now with us all year round. I believe that we are consumed by consumption and are struggling to navigate a form of abundance that feels like scarcity because it drowns out meaning. Too much has a way of soon becoming not enough. On the surface this may seem to be readily solvable by merely curbing excesses and trying to become more capital M Mindful, and capital M Minimalist. But it takes more than this. Compulsions and deeply engrained habits and ways of being- if not full blown addictions- are not reversed with a finger click and an overnight adherence to some lifestyle magazine’s (that’s Lifestyle with a capital L) touted ‘ism’.

The roots run deeper than that.  

If, as the saying goes, we cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used to create them² then we need to consider the Problem of Stuff in a different light. And maybe then we can re-enchant and revivify the once magical celebrations that define our calendars and our lives.     

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The problem with human intelligence is that it has a way of turning on itself, the mind³ can use all of its cleverness to construct an elaborate and seemingly reasonable latticework of rationalisations that promise change and growth but in reality actually act as impediments to true change and true growth.  

We like the idea of improvement and transformation, but not the reality. We may crave more but we are in many ways geared up to preserve what we have and to minimise risk and energy expenditure.    

It is human then, to use rationalisations- often without our explicit awareness- to maintain an equilibrium of sorts within our unbalanced selves.

Enter capital M Minimalism, which is one of the more readily available strategies for dealing with the overwhelming Problem of Stuff that I outlined above. Like all the best rationalisations it makes perfect sense on the surface. If you feel hemmed in by all of your stuff, then simply get rid of it. You’ll feel lighter and freer, you’ll have more space and more money. It’s hard to argue against this logic.  

But as with most ‘isms’ it is sadly not as simple as that. The way we have set up our economic system and our lives is such that we must continually consume to keep the wheels in motion. You can dress how you want, think how you want, act how you want (within reason of course) just so long as you do not truly go against the fundamental notion of the perpetual purchasing of goods and Lifestyle signifiers with money, ideally going far beyond what you from a strictly survival standpoint truly need. And so the act of trying to rebel against this principle becomes itself commodified, transformed into a Lifestyle and then subtly sold back to the would-be nonconformists. It’s very clever. As consumerism is a system built on status games the strategy becomes then to move people who want to no longer participate in the traditional consumerism game to play different status games. It’s to keep them playing all the same. And so the practice of minimising consumption becomes capital M Minimalism and what was once a nameless action, an instinct, becomes a categorised thing with a built in aesthetic and internal competition and implicit rules. The instinctual desire for less (and perhaps freedom) becomes subverted into signalling via white walls and negative space and capsule wardrobes. It’s just another status game.

Inversion is not transcendence. 

This same principle applies to many stripes of rebellion when you look at them closely.

The energy and aims of rebellious movements are co-opted, codified, commercialised, sometimes institutionalised and then sold back as a Lifestyle. Inspiration becomes aspiration as the unnamed becomes a pre-packed ‘ism’ with its own thought leaders and figureheads. You can choose a different surface, a different aesthetic, but at root it is all still consumerism. The world we have built, particularly the online world, favours appearances, which includes the appearance of change instead of the real thing. 

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What I have described above is essentially a sleight-of-hand. This Lifestyle selling business for all intents and purposes is a confidence trick and like all confidence tricks it falls apart when you see how it works. The core of the con involves getting the mark to buy into a series of untruths, which as they escalate lead the mark to perform the desired behaviours while all the while thinking it was his own idea all along. This buying into a Lifestyle, whether it be capital M Minimalism or anything else, hinges on the idea that you are somehow incomplete as you are, but that you can become complete if you cultivate certain appearances via acquiring certain items and experiences (the items and experiences vary depending on the Lifestyle in question but the principle remains the same).  

Hence the look of the bored compulsive in the eyes of so many shoppers, both at Christmas time and throughout the year. They are compelled to fill a void that they believe is inside them, they are hurrying to shore up and disguise what they see as deficiencies within their being. I believe that fundamentally, beneath all of these received notions and assumptions, that we are enough and that we have enough. This is a radical notion and I suspect that it will be met with resistance. It goes against so much of what our media-saturated landscape teaches us. 

Because here’s the thing- if you believe you are inherently sufficient and if you are content and satisfied with who you are then status games- the crux of it all- lose their appeal. You don’t long for resources if you trust in your own resourcefulness. You don’t need to show off to strangers when you inherently know and respect yourself.  Quite simply you don’t grasp after that which you already truly own. 

The Problem of Stuff comes about because we have been led to believe that obsession with possession (including the possession of a certain image) will quell the scarcity within our minds and within ourselves. But this scarcity is a perspective, not a fundamental fact of reality. As people with less than us can feel as if they have more, while people with much, much more can feel as if they will never have enough. Externalities, especially those available to purchase and display, can never fundamentally change the internal.   

Change and growth cannot be bought, only earned through the difficult business of removing all of the dross and faulty thinking (that’s been imposed on us) and getting to the core of things:

Love, service, creativity, community, relationships, family.         

When projecting a Lifestyle is no longer a preoccupation, then you can really begin to live.  

1. Christmas card messages going from Merry Christmas to Happy Holidays to Seasons Greetings speak to this elongation of festivities as much as they highlight increasing secularisation. 

2. This is one of many that while attributed to Einstein- proves to have an uncertain provenance when you try to look into its origin.

3. Or ego, if you prefer.