Learned reflexes

Just how much of what we buy do we really need?
I have, in the last months, had occasion to ponder that more than once.
As I am working smack in the middle of town, going out during lunch break means walking right through the busiest shopping streets hereabouts.
Of course, I don´t walk past there with my eyes closed, so, I cannot help but notice the shops and their decorated windows. And if it´s raining and I still want to stretch my legs a bit, I enter the bigger shops and do some walking around in there.
I usually do not even bring my wallet along any more for those walks, and that made me realize something that I would, in olden days, not have noticed.
Namely, how often I see something that seems to say "buy me".
In the old days, I would not have thought twice about it. If it said "buy me" and I had the cash on me to buy it- or the credit cards- I bought it.
There was hardly a day going by when I did not carry home some plastic bag filled with something bought on that day, starting out with things like scented soaps, or perfumes, or makeup, to aromatized loose teas, or music cds, or decorations. I ended up with a full drawer of makeup that spoiled faster than I could use it up, several shelves full of cds I don´t have time to listen to, and more tchotchkes and bric-a-brac than I could ever put on display in my household.
I also ended up renting a bigger apartment to put the stuff in.
The bigger apartment part did come in handy when DH moved in with me, so I´m not complaining there, but still the continuous influx of mostly small items without a corresponding amount leaving the flat again made me reach a point where it was virtually impossible to keep the place tidy, simply because most of the items did not have a place to put them away.
Fast forward to now.
Several years of continuous decluttering have, by now, reduced the amount of stuff to the point where everything can, theoretically, be put away somewhere.
I still have some cupboards that require ingenious stacking methods to put everything in, and some drawers that are a bit hard to close, but hey- I never said I was perfect, did I? And our cellar compartment still houses several plastic boxes of china and kitchen utensils I´m not yet ready to toss.
But apart that, I have whittled my possessions down to a point where they have become manageable again.
It was hard work to get there, and I do not want to go back to where I was. So, I have installed an ironclad rule. No item may enter our flat of which we cannot in advance tell where it will live.
The second rule is no shopping for recreational purposes. I can, of course, look all I want. But I must not buy.
That is where I suddenly realized how often I had the impulse to buy something. Having no cash or cards on me meant not being able to follow that impulse. So, I left the shop without the item.
The interesting thing was that I rarely even felt the need to go back to that shop to get the item at a later point.
Imagine that- the very things that I would, before, have dragged home without a second thought to clutter up my flat are now not even interesting enough to come back for them. Or, on having time to think about them, I remember I already have such an item and do not need a duplicate. So, no new teapot if I already have five of them ( for different sorts of tea ;) )and no new coffee mug, however funny, either unless I am ready to toss one of those I already own.
And no freebies either.
The desire to acquire is something that sometimes makes it difficult to resist new stuff knocking at your door.
Case in point, several years ago my parents had to dismantle the household of a very dear cousin after her death. Now, this cousin had, all her life, liked to invite people over, and she had owned several twelve-settings sets of expensive china, crystal glasses and cutlery for the purpose.
My father offered me one of the china sets. I did hesitate at first, because I genuinely liked the former owner and it was part of her inheritance, after all. But then, I don´t do invitations, and the beautiful china would, for us, have become just another white elephant  to store and care for, a source of guilt because I don´t do the society life my parents had brought me up for.
So, I declined. But I declined with a heavy heart. I also declined most of her kitchen utensils that my father tried to give me, apart one pot, one small ladle and an ingenious twist-off-cap opener I had always coveted.
These things I have in my kitchen, I love them, use them often, and they remind me of Cousin Mary every time I use them.
And the others things have, instead of saddling me with the problem of how to store them, gone on to a better life with another relative who will actually use them regularly.

So, it´s not about saving money. That is just a side effect. It is about defending our precious space from the influx of stuff that mindlessly acquiring things creates, and about consciously deciding what we want in our lives.

Because in the end, it´s not the one who dies with the most toys who wins, but the one who got to play the most. And the number of items one has acquired over a lifetime may just end up as a measure of the amount of work dumped on the people who will have to dismantle one´s household someday.

Think about that for a moment.
Someday you will die. Life has been found to have a 100 percent lethal outcome in laboratory mice, and the findings are applicable to humans, too.
And then somebody will have to go through your belongings.
Think of that somebody.
Did you just catch yourself pitying him? Or even think "serves him right"?

And now think about how much of your own life you spend on your belongings. Acquisition, storage, care.
Count the time you have to work for your stuff, the time you have to take care of it, once acquired.
Don´t forget to think about what else you could have done with that time, with that money. Think about places you could afford to see, experiences and memories you could have.
For people who have children, there´s also the intention of leaving something good for them. But demographics have changed, just as the quality of merchandise has changed.
In the olden days, things were made to last for several generations, handed down from father to son or mother to daughter. I, too, have some items that did once belong to my great-grandmother.
But today, most things do not even come with a one-lifetime warranty. Mass-produced goods are not supposed to outlive their owners. And- which is in and of itself a good thing- people get to live a lot longer than they used to.
And that means that, if parents live to be eighty or ninety years, their children will have to build a complete household from scratch without relying on any heirlooms coming their way.
So, without any bad intention, they will in all probability not have any use for most of the things they find in their late parents´ homes, just because they had to acquire what they needed to live long ago.
Thus, acquiring things in the hope of passing them down to offspring someday does, in most cases, not make any sense.
For those of us who do not have any offspring, the question never even comes up.

So what do you want to do? Live your life, which means having experiences and building memories, or spend it on stuff?

To me, that is not a question. But I know that those acquisition reflexes die hard, and I must always be on guard against stuff taking over more of my life than I care to miss.



Julia