Too Much Stuff
And Why That Is
The other day I was sitting around thinking about all the stuff I own. Right there you would be right to wonder any number of thoughts.
“Have too much spare time do you?”
“You’re lucky to have such a problem.”
“Yeah, me too.”
“What does this possibly have to do with me?”
I’ll stop there, but answer . . .
“It doesn’t seem that way, but maybe.”
“True”
“I know how it feels.”
“That’s why I’m writing this.”
These thoughts about too much stuff are, I suppose, the recurring shadows of guilt, remorse, buried enlightenment, and moral fervor of idealistic youth coming back to haunt people deep in their middle age. You reach a kind of life tipping point where you start to wonder, “Where am I going, what am I doing, and how did I get to this point anyway?”
Or, it could be much simpler than that. It could be just waking up one day and looking around—not like you usually do when you’re trying to find your favorite sweater or your misplaced reading glasses—and thinking, “I sure have a lot of stuff. Where did it all come from and what is it doing here?”
Either way, that was me, going through what seems like an increasingly regular ponder on all the stuff I own.
There are all those suits I never wear jammed into a closet that I hardly ever open. There are all the shirts, ties, braces, belts, and more ties and more ties that go along with them.
There are bin upon bin of socks, many of which I wear when the weather warrants, but many of which haven’t seen my foot in many seasons.
There are dress shoes sitting high up on a shelf I can’t reach that see even less action than my socks.
There are the twenty-five or so fountain pens and related roller ball cousins gathered in a row in a couple of different display cases. These, at least, I use albeit on a rotating basis.
There are all the cameras and camera related gear that I own. I wouldn’t even attempt to catalog all of it except for an insurance claim, but for the record, there are something like nine camera bodies, twenty or so lenses, at least three light meters, four tripods, four or five camera bags, and an endless assortment of finders, filters, film backs, adaptors, brushes, doodads, and thingamajigs. None of this includes the digital cameras, throwaway box cameras, or point and shoots that have snuck into the house by various means. By civilian standards it’s a lot, but I know plenty of people with lots more than me.
There are all the hand tools that I own. These I came by honestly. I worked for a couple of years out of college renovating houses and commercial buildings. So I actually had a commercial use for this reasonably vast collection of things that drill, cut, drive, poke, pound, and prod. Having said that, I now use about four of them on a regular basis and couldn’t tell you today where a lot of them are—what with their tendency to grow legs and walk off—but I know I own a lot of them.
There are the books. Almost on principle I am tempted to exclude books from the land of “things” or “stuff.” As a writer and fan of writing, I tend to hold written works by others—with some categories of writing excepted—in the highest possible regard. They are acts of love, or at least intellect, and therefore are granted rights of display and permanence in our house that is way, way disproportionate to the amount of time I spend actually reading them or referencing them (buy it, read it, keep it for twenty years).
I personally own and use three computers, two printers, a scanner, three tables, two office chairs, two routers, assorted cables, and lots of office supplies for the purpose of earning money and staying out of the way of the other people in the house during normal and abnormal business hours.
We own and operate four cars. I have golf clubs but I never use them anymore. I’m pretty sure I have two racquetball racquets somewhere. It seems like everywhere I look there is a little pile of CD-ROMs (yes, I still buy my music). We only have two televisions, one big and one little. Along with the televisions goes a fair amount of audio equipment. And then there is the other audio gear that I call “the stereo” which dates me terribly.
There’s more, lots more, a lot of which doesn’t fall into any discernable classification but at different times and for different reasons seems important. I could be more specific and descriptive than that, but why? This is an essay about too much stuff and just writing about the things I can readily and easily list is daunting enough, which is precisely the point here.
And this is just the stuff to which I can with accuracy and honesty attach the word “mine.” Other people live in the same house, and they have stuff to. So it’s not just me, it’s we. And it’s a lot.
Where Stuff Comes From
Wiser people than me inform me that “stuffism” is all pretty normal. Given the opportunity—and I certainly had and have the opportunity—people are generally inclined to acquire things.
This desire to acquire starts early but gets going when we emerge into our “householder years.” That’s the time of life when we get jobs, build nests, and feather our surroundings will all the totems of a person who is finally part of the adult world.
Here in the big PX, that usually means a progression of new cars (which at some point isn’t just a new car, but an icon that says something about our personal ambitions and self image), new clothes, jewelry, electronics, a nicer places to live, and of course someone to share it all with.
More time goes by. More stuff gets acquired. And then one day you wake up and this voice won’t leave you alone.
“What’s it all about?”
“What is my place in this world?”
“What is my purpose? What is my calling?”
“What’s next?”
“And why do I have all this stuff?”
If you’re like my friend Jeff Belkora, you take drastic action. You box up the stuff you really care about, get rid of the rest, give up your apartment, get someone to look after your car, and you pack your wife and young son off to Fiji, Australia, and New Zealand for four months and have a good look around.
If you’re not like Jeff, you are left with less exciting choices, like . . .
-
Taking a hard look at all that stuff and getting rid of as much of it as possible.
-
Ignoring the voices and hope you don’t have to move someday, in which case, see point 1.
Nothing Is Forever, But Some Things Should Be
Among other things I am a consultant, which means that I have a highly evolved affection for constructing mental models. When all else fails, make a “four cell.” That’s what I tell people I know who want to go into consulting. That’s what I tell my clients. Reality has only two dimensions and the right answer is usually in the upper right hand corner.
So, of course, all this thinking about stuff got me going on a four cell model based on durability and desirability which I think quite elegantly sorts all stuff into one of four useful categories.
If you read the labels in my model, you’ll see that the word “Should” is really the key to this whole thing as it cuts to a sense of personal values. We tend to blindly accept the idea that quality is good—and depending on how you define that word, it is—but often without critically examining just how much durability is good.
As a result, this potential mismatch between our sense of value and the actual durability of a thing tends to leave us with households full of stuff that we don’t care very much for, and lots of wistful memories of people, places, and things that have long since passed from our presence and the present.
Take the category of “Things that shouldn’t last very long but hang around anyway.” I think of this as the nightmare category. Southern Senators fall into this grouping (and I think even qualify under the rubric of “things’) as do mother-in-law stays, bad movies, cheap kitchen knives, chipped glasses, broken eye glasses (you can never find the new pair, only the ones with scratched lenses and one side missing), old report cards, pictures of you when you were fat and eight, one sock (the other is gone), and all sorts of odd things for which you think you’ll have a future use but won’t.
In these cases, “should” and “do” are out of whack. By rights, the stuff should have self-destructed long ago, but it hasn’t. I don’t have the sense to give it the heave. And there it is, twenty years later, taking up physical and psychic space.
My wife has some less malignant items that she puts in this category. For example, she has a Sunbeam hand mixer that she got years ago and that she associates with a relationship gone bad. The problem—if you could describe it that way—is that it won’t die, it doesn’t take up a lot of space, it does the job at least as well as whatever newfangled mixall thingee we bought to replace it. It deserves a better end than getting tossed, but she doesn’t use it much, so it just sits quietly at the back of a cabinet somewhere waiting for its next star turn.
The category of “Things that shouldn’t last very long and don’t” is nicely benign. Fresh fruit comes to mind as do dairy products. Trashy fiction goes in this grouping as do personal hygiene products (I’m always suspicious of people who have collections of hotel shampoos and conditioners that date back several years).
In truth, there are probably way too many things that fall into this classification here in the US. I was told the other day that the U.S. spends more every year on waste disposal than the gross national product of all but a small group of nations. We are the land of disposable everything, but that’s a different essay.
But just to site one particularly loony example, the other day I saw an ad for a disposable digital camera, a concept I find truly baffling. By very definition, digital images are disposable. You take a picture, you look at it immediately, and if you don’t like it, you chuck it out and take another. So why would you buy a digital camera that didn’t erase images, use it to take a bunch of pictures you can’t see, and then return the whole thing to a photo lab for processing? Isn’t that what film cameras are for?
“Things that should last forever (or nearly) and don’t” are truly vexing. In the non-thing category, which I probably shouldn’t be including in this discussion, these are memories in the making like long romantic kisses, watching the sun set over the Golden Gate Bridge, the smell of the land after a good hard rain, the strange calm of New York City before things really get going, reading a really good book . . . well that list just goes on and on.
This is the domain of disappointing durability. A nice new pen that breaks the first time you use it. A favorite shirt you wear eight times that then gets lost by the laundry. A new electronic gizmo that cost way too much and that never seems to work just right. A $40,000 car—which used to be an “expensive car” and no longer is—that goes back to the shop the first month and seems old and tired nine months before the lease is up.
To this list my wife would add favorite perfumes. I’m told they don’t last forever in the bottle, so you either use it or lose it. And unless your favorite scent is Channel Number 5 or one of a handful of others, chances are that when you go back to buy another bottle, it’s no longer available. She puts favorite shoes on this list as well.
Or here’s another example. The other day I was wandering with my wife around the local high-end home store—looking for stuff of course—when a fellow came breezing by looking for someone to help him with a shower handle. That’s the gizmo on the end of a flexible hose that slides up and down on a rail just to the right of the real shower head. He’d bought a real expensive rig with a fancy German name that’s all the rage, and he’d had three straight break on him because the fitting that tightened everything down was made out of plastic. He was hoping someone made something just like it but out of metal. When we left, he was still looking.
Which brings us to “Things that should last forever (or nearly) and do.” There just doesn’t’ seem to be as many of those sorts of things as there used to be. When you find them, they tend to be made out of solid, non-petroleum derived substances like metal, glass, wood, wool, cotton, and even paper. This isn’t always true, but it seems increasingly that those same things weren’t made any time recently, or if they were, they are made from designs that go back some considerable time.
Like a claw hammer. Go find a Sears catalog if you can from 100 years ago. Check out the hammers. They look just the same as the 20 year old Vaughan framing hammer I have out in the garage, which looks just like the brand new Vaughan hammer for sale down at your local hardware store (if you can find one of those). It looks the same, it’s made out of the same stuff, and works the same.
All of this got me to thinking about the stuff I have, specifically about how much of it actually falls into this later category. Things that have a real quality to them. Things with durability and utility that speak of good design, good materials, and good construction. Things that you’d actually bother to pack up and move when that time comes.
With not too much thought—I don’t actually have to pack up and move just now—I was able to list a decent number of things that neatly fell into this category. I was also able to identify plenty of things that didn’t, which begs the question about why I still have them. But what was most interesting was that the first five things I came up with all had the following characteristics.
-
The “youngest” of the items first came to market in 1954, with the others sporting dates like 1930, 1926, 1895, and 1884—though the versions I own are in some cases slightly newer.
-
They’re all made in whole or in part out of metal that has either been cast or machined.
-
Three of the five were direct descendents of the first product made by the inventor of the category. One of them was made by one of the real innovators in the category. The other is just old and lovely and made by one of the original companies in the category. History is etched into the DNA of each of these items.
-
They were all given to me by someone else.
This last discriminator probably weighs heavily on the “should” criteria, but my guess is that if I offered you any one of the items, you’d grab it in a heart beat and want to keep it around, not because it was a gift (though you might), but because the item in question was well designed, well made, pleasing to use, touch, and look at, and in all but one case as useful today as when it was invented.
New and Improved?
Did you ever think about the phrase “new” and “improved”? Together the words are a cartoon on how most things were marketed when I was growing up. Flash! Bam! Get the new galactiwhipinator with self-drive wide track alignment and self-cleaning flashalls! It’s New. It’s Improved!
This is surely a digression, but the part I don’t get is how something can be both new and improved. If it’s new, how can it be improved? Doesn’t new mean that it’s not old? That it’s meaningfully different than what went before? By the same logic, if it’s improved, how can it be new? See what I mean?
I’m a sucker for a good sales pitch and as prone to aspirational dreaming and purchasing as the next person, but I find that the things in my life that I truly value are neither “new” or “improved,” though they were certainly new at one point and innovative in some meaningful way when they came to market.
It may just be me, but except for one of the items that come quickly to mind as real keepers, the new-fangled replacement just isn’t as durable, isn’t as elegant, isn’t as desirable . . . just isn’t as good. That would be an Underwood typewriter, which only misses on utility: it’s far better on all the other measures than the PC I’m using to write this essay. The rest—a watch, a camera, a screwdriver, and a pen—easily match strides with the present day pretenders.
It’s not that I’m a Luddite. Far from it. I’ve been buying the bleeding edge, or nearly so, on electronics since high school (though I would confess that I have no real interest in the latest in audio or video technologies). I’ve owned a lot of cars and as much as old cars push my nostalgia buttons, I wouldn’t own one now on a bet. But when it comes to many other categories I can think of, I’m just not convinced that either “new” or “improved” are.
The watch is a good example of my point. It was given to me when I turned thirty by my grandfather. It’s a Rolex. That was a big wow.
In many ways my grandfather was a real puzzling guy. I was terrified of him growing up. He was stern, humorless to my young sensibilities, and a college professor. But he did have really nice stuff. The Rolex watch I just mentioned, the Leica camera I’m about to mention, the best hi-fi he could afford—which if you’re old enough you’ll recognize the names Dual, Marantz, and Advent—Sabatier kitchen knives, a Melita coffee flask, and so on. He bought a Volvo P220 Amazon Estate and had it delivered in Europe back when nearly nobody did that. Later, he bought a BMW 1600. Later still, he bought a Mercedes 250.
Ah, a shameless brandaholic you might say. And if you did, you’d be wrong. Go back to the part about college professor. My grandmother was a high school teacher. These were not wealthy people, and both had vivid memories of the depression looming right around the last corner.
No, my grandfather was something else. He was a man who believed that the stuff you owned should be the very best. It worked better. It lasted longer (though it does need to be maintained). It was a greater pleasure to use. If you couldn’t afford the best, don’t buy anything. For example, by this logic, you should buy one really good kitchen knife and use it for everything rather than a dozen crummy knives.
So that’s how he wound up with a Rolex watch (actually two for reasons that revealed the depth of his affection for nice things) and how I wound up with it in 1986. It’s actually kind of embarrassing to admit that I have it because of all the class struggle abuse that was heaped first on the Rolex-toting greed generation of the Reagan years and later on the Rolex-toting rip-it-and-flip-it set of the dot.com era. It’s also sniffed at by the Piaget end of the socio-economic spectrum as too prosaic, but the truth is, a Rolex is a terrific watch.
The design of the one-piece “Oyster” case with screw-down winder (a first) was invented in 1926. It was worn by the first woman to swim the English Channel. It was the first watch advertised ever in the UK. It was the first watch with a self-winding mechanism. Mine was purchased in 1956, the year I was born. I know that it was serviced twice, so the crystal isn’t vintage. I replaced the bracelet after I got it so that’s not original either. It only lasted 30 years. The rest of it is the same watch my grandfather bought in 1956, and I plan on giving it to my son when he turns 30 at which point it will be 60 years old.
That same grandfather was devoted to photography. As you would guess by my description, he would only have the best, which by his lights meant a Leica. When he died, he left me a whole bag of cameras, lenses, and paraphernalia, some of which I kept, some of which I sold (stupid me). As is true of the watch, I use these cameras even today.
The design of the M3 he had dates to 1954, though he got his closer to 1960 (he had other cameras that were older). The progenitor of the M3 was actually the first ever 35mm still camera. It’s a longer story than is worth going through here, but this milestone in innovation was a small, light, compact, all metal camera at a time when “camera” generally meant a large wooden box with bellows and a bedspread hung off the back. The Leica revolutionized photography and was almost single-handedly responsible for making modern photojournalism possible.
In an era when consumer goods are made just as cheaply as possible, the progeny of that first camera—it’s now up to the M7—are still made in Germany out of metal and glass by people who seem to give a rip. They seem ridiculously expensive when you compare the retail price to some computer powered, electronics infused marvel offered by Nikon, Canon, Minolta et al until you realize that my M3 is over 40 years old and still takes marvelous pictures. It still will when those others will be long forgotten relics. On a cost-per-anything basis, the M3 is practically free.
I’m sure I’m wearing this theme out, but one of the other items that jumped onto my list is an Underwood Noiseless Portable which dates to the 1930s and was also the property of my grandfather. So that’s three for three, though I would emphasize that I think it’s a matter of his taste rather than my rank sentimentality.
The typewriter surely rates as one of the defining devices of the late 1800s and early 1900s, and the Underwood Number 5 is regarded as the breakthrough machine, selling millions of units over a 30 year production run (think about that for a second). The portable typewriter, which is what I have, was perhaps less consequential unless you were a writer, a journalist, or a college student in which case it in its own way changed your life as well.
Unlike the other items on this list, the Underwood Noiseless Portable (mine was made after the company bought Elliot Fisher) has slid gracefully from truly useful to simply being lovely to look at. I’d be kidding if I told you that I used it or even contemplated doing so. I was one of the first people I knew who bought a personal computer, and I did so specifically because I wanted out of typewriting for ever. But I still like the old beast and would buy more just to have if I could just get rid of this nagging sense of “too much stuff.”
You’ll date yourself if you know what a Yankee Screwdriver is. Mine was given me by that same grandmother school teacher who got it from her father who was a carpenter. If you’ve never used one, the technical term is a “spiral-ratchet screwdriver.” It was invented by Zachary T. Furbish of Portland Maine, and the patents date to 1895, which means that the one I have is one of the first.
I didn’t know this bit of history when my grandmother gave it to me in the late 1970s, so I just used the old Yankee on a daily basis while I was working construction. To screw or unscrew, you set a little switch for the proper direction, pull out the handle to extend the ratchet, and push. The tool end spins in the proper direction and the fastener goes in or out as you desire.
There is no doubt that the cordless power drills and electric screwdrivers everyone has are superior in any number of ways, but my bet is that nobody is going to have their Makita whatever around 110 years from now if for no other reason than batteries as we know them won’t exist. Probably that doesn’t really matter. What you will be able to buy will no doubt be wonderful in some important way.
On the other hand, my Yankee Screwdriver will still work just fine, and with luck, my unborn grandchildren will be around to show some disbelieving soul how.
I have a silly affection for fountain pens and I have more than I need by several orders of magnitude to prove it. A decade or so before old Furbish was inventing his screwdriver, an insurance broker named Waterman finally had it with pens and inkwells and went about inventing what neither scientist nor engineer before him could master—the self-contained ink reservoir. It turns out that there is a happy relationship between capillary action and atmospheric pressure, and shirt pockets haven’t been the same since.
It is a fair question as to whether or not fountain pens are any more useful than my Underwood typewronger, but I don’t particularly care. The political and literary giants of past several hundred years wrote with pen and ink. The defining documents going back to the Magna Carta were signed with same. Despite my wretched penmanship and cramped hand, I would rather write with a fountain pen than anything else, and do so at every opportunity that isn’t better served by a word processor. And even then I sometimes do.
Of the stash I own—and I own a number of Watermans if anyone cares—the pen I think I like best is a Rotring 600 which is a design that dates to 1984 which is about when my wife bought me mine. (So as not to be caught in a fib, I’m claiming heritage to 1884 on the fountain pen, even though the one I’m going on about is only twenty years old.) It’s machined from solid brass billet and sports a pedigree from a fine old German pen company that was started in 1928. As is true of everything else I’ve mentioned, it is beautifully made, and with modest care, will last far, far longer than I or anyone I know will, and will work as long as there’s something that resembles ink available.
Cutting Down The Stuff
I thought I would stop my list there. Each of the five items seems to set a nice standard by which good stuff could be measured. There was no rationale to their selection other than, “Quick, what of the stuff that you own do you truly care about?”
Without railing on the general quality of contemporary manufactured goods, the quintet certainly points one in the direction of things made out of durable materials according to good design principles with real innovation and not a lot of frippery. The standard seems to me that the object in question is worth keeping around, both because it’s pleasing, and because it works really well. If I could only take ten things with me to someplace else, I’m pretty sure that some or all of the five would make the list, though that might depend on where that someplace was and how cold it was when I got there.
I still have too much stuff and am seriously afflicted with the urge to diminish the quantity by more than a bit. The first hack through will be easy. If I haven’t used it or looked at it in the past three years, it’s gone. Then maybe I’ll move the timeline in a bit. Give two years a try. Then maybe one.
After that, I think I’ll just line up my watch, typewriter, camera, screwdriver, and pen and see how the goods in question measure up. I figure that anything that makes the final cut will be around when my kids are raking through my personal effects with their kids wondering if the universe will forgive them for pitching some odd bit of junk that performs a function that nobody remembers or cares about anymore.
It won’t, but that will be their problem.
Send mail to
webmaster@kevinhoffberg.com
with questions or comments about this web site. Copyright © 2003 Kevin
Hoffberg
Last modified:
05/03/06