We are all one missed storage payment away from an episode of Hoarders
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Version 0 of 1. Last weekend my boyfriend and I were driving up into the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina in the rain. Twilit clouds hugged their wet bellies to the ancient mountainsides. The highway signs reflected gently against the low, soft sky. Related: Hysterical consumerism ruins food. And holidays. And books | Emma Brockes Since the last time we drove that stretch of highway, at least three new blocs of climate-controlled storage units have materialized. Rows upon rows of squat, sterile, eternally-lit, post-brutalist boxes that are proliferating like genital warts through some of the most beautiful countryside east of the Mississippi. Not only are their constant lights, heat and air conditioning sucking up energy, storage units are ultimately the physical manifestation of everything that’s horrible and excessive about our consumerist, cheap, plastic throwaway culture: we buy and we buy until we literally don’t have room for it all, so then we rent a hole to hide it in to escape from having to think about it. We pay our own rent or mortgage and simultaneously pay for little houses for the crap we can’t throw away. Just like the pockets of body fat that bulge out on the frames of those of us who habitually consume more calories than we burn, the landscape is bulging with storage units because we buy more things than we can use. I can’t help but see a lack of generosity in this hoarding. Is everyone in America ultimately that vicious kid in the sandbox who refuses to let anyone else touch the toys? Do we really have to hang on to everything that life has ever handed to us? Are we all a couple of missed storage payments away from starring in our own episodes of Hoarding: Buried Alive? We buy things because we believe they will make us happy, but science says the reverse is true. A 2013 study by Northwestern University psychologist Galen V Bodenhausen found that negative emotions and antisocial behaviors increase in consumerist cultures. He wrote: Irrespective of personality, in situations that activate a consumer mind-set, people show the same sorts of problematic patterns in well-being, including negative affect and social disengagement. We need to let some stuff go. Let’s stop being sentimental and intellectually lazy and release those belongings back into the wild. Let’s admit to ourselves that storage units are just expensive dumpsters that never get emptied. Those clothes you think that you will someday fit back into? You will not. And if you actually do manage to get back to the size you were in college, you will assuredly want to buy a whole bunch of new clothes to celebrate. Those books you’re dragging around? You will not re-read them. Choose 50 to 100 that you absolutely can’t live without and give the rest away. You will thank me when it comes time to move. Donate those things. In your town right now there are halfway houses full of recovering drug addicts – men and women who literally lost everything to addiction and who, chances are, turned up at rehab with nothing but a pair of shorts, a Panama Jack t-shirt and one flip-flop. They can wear your old clothes to job interviews and get a start on a new life. Your old end table could make someone’s harsh reality a little less barren. The rest of it – just let it go. If you don’t see it or use it for years at a time – if those storage-unit items aren’t integral to your existence – you don’t need them. You are not going to put that moldering collection of Beanie Babies on eBay. You say you are, but you won’t. Let them go. Every penny of the money you think you might make selling your “collectibles” is like that leprechaun gold from Harry Potter; a myth. But the money you’re shelling out each month for that 20 cubic feet of sadness you call a storage unit is very, very real. And maybe next time, before you pick up that wonderful, tempting, brightly colored thing off the shelf at Target, ask yourself, “Do I really want to be shlepping this to a storage space in two years?” And maybe just don’t buy it. |