I have some mixed feelings about that phrase, “You will own nothing and be happy.” The idea of linking happiness to an absence of possessions typically calls to mind—as that slogan is supposed to—dour environmentalism and forced asceticism.
But on the other hand, does anybody love decluttering?
I’ve been thinking about this because I’ve been doing a lot of organizing in our house lately. And it’s striking how much of the stuff I own isn’t stuff I particularly like, or even want to keep. Some of it is, of course. But a lot of it is just…there. Sure, there’s a reason for all of it, but the reasons often amount to little more than “It’s easier to just keep it.”
And it is easy to keep it. Over the years, as I’ve gotten more space and accumulated more stuff, I’ve also gotten more attached to stuff. More likely to view it as having some meaning or symbolic significance. I think of this as “sacramentalism”: old things contain memories, and keeping them around allows you to access those memories, or even, in some way, to make them present. Silly, spooky, all too easy a response to that nagging feeling that I should declutter a bit.
I can remember a time when I didn’t feel this way about (most) stuff, and when decluttering, if I had to do it at all, wasn’t a mental and emotional marathon. That time was college.
If you think about it, college life is actually a fairly good approximation of “you will own nothing and be happy,” shorn of the negative political implications. And curiously enough, we tend to be pretty happy during those years. Correlation is not causation, but it’s not nothing. In college, you really do own a lot less, and you probably are fairly happy.
Caveats, of course: a lot of “your” stuff is at your parents’ house, so the contents of your tiny dorm room are not your entire set of possessions. If you’re on a dining plan, you need little or no cooking and home equipment. The bed and the desk and the dresser come with the room and belong to the college, so you don’t need to buy or own any major furniture.
Nonetheless, you really do own less stuff—and not for any ideological reason, or even really intentionally, but simply because you need less, and you have room for less. Nobody is telling you that you can’t own things. A lot of college students are free for the first time to just go shopping without having to clutter their parents’ house.
But you have tightly limited space, and you move every year. The enthusiasm and the momentum overwhelm the habit and the inertia. You don’t have time to get attached to things. You don’t imbue them with years of memories.
You run to Target with your friend who has a car and get some new organizing crates, then you get tired of them, give them to a friend, and get something else.
You buy a bunch of cool stuff during move-in week and then realize you’ll never actually play board games or raise a goldfish, and you never think about it again.
You’re throwing a party in your room and some idiot friend of a friend knocks over your fridge or TV and breaks it? You don’t get too upset about it; you go home the next weekend and cajole your parents into buying you a new one. Or maybe you trashpick one from a rich, spoiled student.
There’s still buying—though still much less than a suburban homeowner—but there’s absolutely much less accumulating. Stuff comes and goes and doesn’t mean much. This disposability ethic is often viewed as an unhealthy, consumeristic, throwaway attitude. I think in some ways it is a healthy attitude: one which doesn’t elevate consumer products to some kind of mystical level, and doesn’t turn them into talismans or memory vessels.
Of course age and stage of life, income (lack thereof), and the general coming-and-going nature of college life are variables here. But the point is that there is an interplay between culture and psychology and spending and accumulating and raw physical possibility.
Stuff, and the accumulation of stuff, simply can’t play such a large role in your life when logistics and space limit its usefulness. College is, but isn’t only, a different life stage. It’s an environment with built-in logistical friction against owning and keeping a lot of stuff.
That environment does a great deal of the work of buying and keeping only what you need for you. And the simplicity and lack of attachment that environment facilitates can be liberating.
It is also