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Andrew Wood is a Toronto-based writer and educator.
Do you own things? Of course you do; everyone does.
Do you own a lot of things? Well, that’s commonly the case too.
Do you own too many things? I mean, more things than you need – things that you’re tripping over. If you’re like me, you do.
But at what point do our things start owning us? I’ve reached that point. Have you?
I live in a townhouse built more than 50 years ago. It’s not very big, but my wife and I have lived here comfortably for many years. There are three bedrooms on the top floor, while the basement has been converted into two rooms and a kitchenette for prospective tenants. Except there are no tenants, nor any room for tenants, because of all our things.
In one of those rooms there are instead three wheeled racks of clothing – coats and suits and dresses that rarely, if ever, get worn. There’s a dog crate from when our schnauzer was a puppy that he hasn’t used in years. In the closet, endless boxes of stuff are piled high. There are two things, however, for which there is no room. Those are us; we have to kind of sidle in crablike to enter it.
You get the idea. We’ve fallen into a trap. Our things have taken over the house.
A century ago, most people’s possessions were limited: a few changes of clothing, some personal items and adornments, basic furniture. These were chosen carefully and often handcrafted, repaired rather than replaced, and passed down from one generation to the next. Frugality and thrift were major virtues.
That all changed when capitalism went on the march and factories began to churn out mountains of products in dizzying variety. The age-old objective of making objects for their usefulness and durability was replaced by the goal of profit, and a corresponding need for the machinery of advertising to plant the seeds of desire.
But our myriad acquisitions come with hidden costs: We cart things home for our comfort and convenience, only to bring in clutter, anxiety and guilt instead. I’ve long known this on a subconscious level, as I suspect most of us do, but this realization was brought to the surface for me by learning the ideas of the Lakota holy man John Fire Lame Deer.
In 1972, he published, with the artist Richard Erdoes, Lame Deer: Seeker of Visions, a book whose central claim is devastatingly simple: That we in the modern West are surrounded by things, yet at the same time are profoundly starved of meaning.
Lame Deer saw the accumulation of objects not as abundance, but as noise – a constant interference that blocks self-knowledge. As we pass through the decades of our lives, we are meant by our natures to become steadily more grounded and at peace with ourselves; these should be the rewards of aging well.
Instead, far too many of us are distracted by the trivial task of gathering more things. Each new thing we acquire demands our attention, taking up space both in our homes and in our heads while pulling us away from our real selves, and toward comparison, envy, status and the fear of loss.
Surrounded with manufactured objects, we forget that we are creatures living in a natural world. We become insensitive to the weather, the seasons, the very land we live on. We lose patience with silence, and forget the timeless rhythms that shape attention and restraint. What replaces them is consumption without ceremony – an endless taking that is stripped of all meaning.
Humans have always owned things, since the first of our species began to shape stone tools countless millennia ago. Indeed, this is what lifted us out of the jungle. But through all the ages, our tools were primarily used to serve life. A thing that exists primarily to be owned, displayed or stored reverses the relationship. When the objects we surround ourselves with overwhelm our purposes, we are reducing ourselves to servitude.
I’m going to think about this the next time I’m tempted to buy something I don’t really need. Hopefully, I’ll choose to step aside from the trap.