Stuff

I agree with Kondo, that we should only keep what we truly love. But in 2019, I’m this age of Amazon and online shopping, wouldn’t that be still way too much? We do tend to obsess about collecting the ephemera of our daily lives.  We live in a hyper-consumerist society. Every corner you turn there's an ad for something, a billboard promoting something, a coupon for 20% off, etc. There seems to always be a some kind of pressure to get something, to buy something, to add something to whatever it is that we already have.

I have resisted that for awhile. I don't own my condo, so I know that I will eventually move out and I LOATHE packing and moving. So I've tried to pace myself and have decided in the last years not to get too bogged down with too many things. Still, I cannot get to the point where my world is not understood through objects. Our lives become lives of hyper consumerism where our needs are packed back to us as aspiration. We are sold the idea of appetizing objects -stuff- tied to the experience they may bring. Take books, for example: they contain the experiences we want, so when Marie Kondo talks about maybe getting rid of some of those, we bristle. We want to own (and keep) them precisely because we want to repeat that experience.

I think that in what concerns our life, though, we find ourselves torn between the accumulation of what we have and a desire for an organized life. In this time of electronic, curated lives (think Instagram and the such), even though we tie what we have to who we are, we have decided that we want to project a more organized, attainable space and therefore more organized lives. Decluttering has become a goal in itself. It has gone from playing home with the Sims to actually having more compact spaces -think tiny houses- that are much more an idea of organization and decluttering than an actual goal for many people (because very few of us could actually live in a tiny house).  Following this trend, images have become the objects of the XXI century. Take for example the curating of our reading habits -good reads, for example- or the collection of images -pinterest- serve as inspiration, life-style window shopping: we consume vicariously the lives we want or aspire to.

We seem to try control our identities. At least I recognize that that's what I do. That's why Kondo's philosophy seems so attractive to me. Being intentional about what we want to keep, we feel more capable of reinventing ourselves: our aspiration is to live more authentically. Maybe that's my goal? Be more free by freeing myself of stuff? I don't know. The one thing I know is that I'm trying to be less tied to the material in order to feel.... more free?

XOXO