Hoarder’s Gene

I came from a family of hoarders. My parents’ house are filled with things: dilapidated second hand furniture, stacks of old newspapers and magazines, scattered books, cardboard boxes, computer scraps, etc. It’s always messy, ugly and dirty, and full of mosquitos. I never took my friends home because I felt embarrassed.

Ibu (mother) always told me it’s because we are poor. We can’t afford to buy beautiful things to decorate our home. I believed her. I spent most of my life believing that life’s problems can be solved by money. I fell in to the consumerist adage: more is better.

When I started working in my early twenties, I suddenly have disposable income. My salary was not bad for an entry level job, but I lived from paycheck to paycheck. I was in a phase of experimental consumptions. Trying to buy my happiness with things.

Fortunately, I did not have a credit card at that time and I have a relatively expensive hobby: airsoft. These two prevented me to be tangled in a debt. I only spent the money I have, albeit not always wisely, and I focused my major spending on things that related to the hobby I actually love. Many of my peers spent most their money on superfluous items: brand new cellphones, new car, or branded clothing which are often purchased with loans. The relatively wise entered into home ownership mortgage. Therefore, I never got into financial difficulties despite the experimental consumptions years.

Nevertheless, I realised that I accumulated so much items to the extent I was sleeping in piles of things that I never use. I knew I have to create and apply a rule to stop the creeping expropriation to my physical space by the things I own. So I made a mental image that I am ripping money bills when I buy things and failed to use it for reasonable period of time. This helped me to be wiser when acquiring new things because of the potential guilt in the future. The rule is particularly effective against compulsive consumptions on cheap trinkets.

However, I still find my space cluttered. I often buy things on the pretext of ‘I may need it in the future.’ When I realised that I never used or only used once the just-in-case items, I could not let them go. The mental image of ripping money bills daunted me. I justified the reluctance to let go of the items by clinging to the idea that one day I will use it or, at least, sell it to remedy my error in purchase.

It came to me then, I am a hoarder just like my parent. Hoarding is a scarcity mentality. Instead of focusing your resources to have items that really matters,  you take in anything on the pretext of  anticipated future use. I thought it is the opposite of the compulsive consumerist mentality, the ‘I-want-that’ mentality. It is not. It’s just the other side of the coin. The ‘I may need it in the future’ mentality accumulates material things based on the illusion of need. Similar with the wanting that masks as needing.

Enter Minimalism

I read the term  ‘minimalist living’ as a philosophy for the first time in a Men’s Health article ‘Why Guys with Less Stuff are Happier.’ Before, I thought that ‘minimalism’ or ‘minimalist’ is a term limited for architecture or interior design.

In the said article, one of the most memorable stories is about Mark Divine, an author and a Navy SEALS Commander. He lived for months in a mission deployment only with things inside his rucksack. He never felt so clear of purpose.

I understand the point: that compulsive consumption and hoarding of material possessions distract us. That there are hidden costs of owning things such as storage space and mental clutters.

I can relate to the story despite I never served in the military.

I have made travelling my hobby, even borderline life’s purpose. When we travel, we will be forced to minimise. We can’t carry everything we want. Therefore, we must consciously take the effort to sort our things: what we need and what we don’t.  I do not believe in delegating when packing since what we need is often a very personal choice. If we do the packing right and left with items that are just right for us, we can focus on the experience.

I was happy with less in London. Yes, the city is much nicer than Jakarta. But I had much less disposable income. I had to think a lot when buying things, not just because of financial constraints but also of space and time. Our flat was only a studio and obviously we needed to make time exploring and living the greatest city in the world.

Divine gave a tip to how to reduce consumptions: the two weeks test. Whenever you want to buy a thing, withhold the purchase. If you forget about it or can live without it for two weeks, then you don’t buy it. It is a good rule. Now I have a methodical approach in making a purchase. The rule significantly reduces my ineffective consumption. I slowed down the accumulation of things.

However, I missed  Divine’s most important point: to view material possessions based on their utilitarian value, i.e. as mere tools. When they serve no purpose, get rid of them. I did not comprehend the importance of letting go.

Then I remember one of my closest friends mentioned that she’s organising her closet with the KonMari method. I read the Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo[1]

and learned that the method is not limited to organising closet, but the individual’s entire living space. Marie Kondo’s principle in tidying-up is only keep things that you need and spark joy to your life. She elaborates the step by step instructions on minimising in that book.

The first step is always discarding. Kondo’s simple explanation on the not-so-hidden costs of storage directly addresses my inability to let go. I realised that the ripping money bill cannot stand alone as it only focuses on the acquisition costs.

Subsequently, I learned to let go the I-may-need-it-in-the-future items and to accept the fact that I have made mistakes of making bad purchases. In a way, it is like forgiving myself. I got rid of unused things and useless items: donated clothes and books, discarded cables and miscellaneous trinkets.

I felt freer.

How much is too much?

Kondo and Divine are consistent in the benefits of having less things. However, does Divine suggest that we can only keep things that have practical value? How about mementos or a comfortable sofa? We can survive without them, but they are nice. Does minimalist is essentially a pauper by choice?

I believe the answer is ‘it depends.’ While Divine insist on a ‘practical value’, from what I read, Frogmen do not travel light. They carry what they need, but their battle gears are pretty heavy. Many of them bring mementos or trinkets to keep their morale up. In that sense, those mementos serve a practical value despite they have no direct utility value to the mission. This is the equivalent to Kondo’s spark joy principle. The Minimalists, Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus, also came up with equivalent terms: things that add value to your life.

Millburn and Nicodemus further provides useful categorisation of things: essentials, non-essentials, and junk. Essentials are things we need that we cannot live without. Non-essentials are things we can live without, but can augment our life experience. Junk items are the one we need to discard. It’s relatively easy to determine which of our items are essentials, the trickier part is to classify non-essentials and junk. It is a personal choice. The key is experimenting how much is too much for you.[2]

If one is content living in as a homeless by choice, then yes that pauper is a minimalist. However, if one owns a sports car because he truly enjoys driving it and can afford it—with no intention to impress—he is a minimalist (although I believe it would be difficult to satisfy the last criterion).

This is the minimalism I understand and subscribe to.

Minimalism as an ‘-ism’

While minimalism in a way is a counter consumerist philosophy, I do not believe it can address the systemic inequality in capitalist-consumerist societies. It is a personal development/self-help/spirituality kind of ‘-ism.’ The modern secular version of asceticism spirituality such as the Ancient Greek’s Stoicism, Buddhism’s Zen, Hinduism’s Samana, Islam’s Zuhud, and Christianity’s Jesuit.

Consumerism always finds a way to commercialise anything that has become a popular culture. Like Yoga or even Che Guevara, minimalism is no exception. Consequently, there are minimalists—people who are genuinely trying to live a better life by having less—and there are…hipsters with minimalists style—people who are simply obsessed with minimalist design (those simple, sleek, light and often expensive things). If one thinks that definition, label and/or look represent the exact actual matter, it may be difficult to see which one is which.

Maybe minimalism is reactionary and nothing revolutionary. But I won’t call it so far as ‘a quasi-religious anti-poor bullshit’.

I am applying minimalism to my life simply because they seem to be working for me.[3] I have less clutter, zero debt. I can walk away from a job that I hate. And there is a power in it. When I shun over people who lost their civility in Black Friday, that does not mean I am anti-poor. I am just distressed to see how consumerism can effectively nudge us as individuals. And we need a counter measure—even it is only reactionary and works at individual level.

YWCA Colombo: Jesuit minimalism architecture and interior design.

[1] Marie Kondo, ‘The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying-Up: the Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing’ (Ten Speed Press: 2014).

[2] I found the Konmari method provides the most structured guidelines to ‘decluttering and organizing’, such as sorting by category not location, to discard instead adding storages, how to decide what items to discard (and how to discard with no hesitation), how to arrange our items, how to fold our clothes, etc. However, the Minimalists’ blog and podcasts are great source for many life hacks.

[3] Despite my conscious effort to minimise, I am reluctant to call myself a ‘minimalist’. The term is often misunderstood because of the close association of the word ‘minimalist’ with ‘austerity’. This gross labelling give rise to many criticisms against minimalism which are based on the misunderstood premise that minimalism prohibits you to own things other than the essentials.