Stuff (2007)
paulgraham.com
paulgraham.com
I'm exaggerating, but I've got a core point:
There are two things that I spend a LOT of time on and get a lot of enjoyment from:
* cooking
* wood and metalworking
I've got two meticulously organized sets of things that reflect that:
* a great kitchen with all sorts of implements, frozen stocks, a hundred spices, etc.
* a great workshop with all sorts of tools and supplies
I keep those two areas perfectly organized, because this increases my enjoyment of them on a daily basis. ...and I have no desire to prune them. My workshop has a long tail: I may not need the #3 dental pick every month, but when I want it, I really really want it. So it's in a drawer with a label. I may use it just three times a year, but I use SOME long-tail item every day or two.
Outside of my kitchen and shop, though, I abjure clutter. I own one coat, one sweater, five shirts, etc.
I entirely agree with Paul that one of the biggest expenses is the mental expense of keeping things cataloged.
My advice: if there's something you really enjoy that requires tools, get them and use them. ...but aside from that, yes, be a minimalist.
My two cents.
I gave away all of my 68HC11 gear, the boards, the chip programmers, the data books, the spare chips, everything because I realized I was never going to build another robot with a Motorola 68HC11 at its core.
Now of course, I don't miss it, but at the time, shipping it out to the silly silly folks who offered to take it off my hands it felt like giving up some precious treasure. And I realized the 'treasure' was the memories of what I had done with this stuff, not the stuff itself. I've been slowly reconstructing my robotics site to honor those memories.
I also find that I have a hard time with stuff that "could" be useful to "someone" but I can't just throw it away. I put a box of stuff like that on the table at Hacker Dojo with an exhortation to use it to hack cool things, but there was no one there to "accept" it so I don't know if it was useful or not. It was sufficient for me though to create the possibility that it "might" be useful.
And yet when I got back I didn't discard so much as a box of it.
Throw away a perfectly good rotary telephone? I might need that
one day.
There's also the compunction against discarding something that still works or is still useful. For example, I know quite a few people that have old computers gathering dust because their owner has subsequently replaced them with faster machines, but hasn't discarded the old ones because they're still operable and might be useful for a side project or something.
I'm not really sure what the solution to either of those things is. Perhaps we need some sort of market where stuff is more of a liquid commodity than it is now - if there's less of a financial penalty to selling and repurchasing, and if it's easier for perfectly good items to be sold for another's use, it might enable people to have the option to have less stuff.
Garage sales! Seriously, though, garage sales exist because most stuff is so cheap and disposable to begin with that if you tried to sell it for what someone would actually pay for it, you'd be lucky to break even after any shipping, transaction fees and the value of any personal time/effort you put into the process. So, you have a garage sale: you sell it (or at least show it) in all bulk, all at once to minimize effort, with zero transaction or shipping fees. Of course, making the effort to visit a garage sale has a non-negligible cost for the (potential) buyer.
There are already thriving markets for stuff that's not cheap and disposable - electronics/phones, recreational/sports equipment, furniture, cars, etc.
As for the compunction against discarding something that still works, my solution is to donate it to Goodwill (whatever you do, don't throw it away if it's "perfectly good") and take it as a lesson learned - think harder before buying this item, or an item like it, again.
That said, I bought my HeNe laser at a garage sale nearby for $15. It is of course much less convienient than a laser pointer and at 2mW not very bright, but scores for me on the coolness factor. I always wanted a laser as a kid and being able to acquire one scratched that itch.
Economy is a leaky abstraction, it is ultimately subject to physics and it will break down if we push it too far hoping that market will correct all side effects of bad decisions.
Also, you confuse quality (good) and fragility. Most of the stuff I have is very high quality, which is why I use it every day and I don't have to worry about it falling apart.
The reality is knowledge is even cheaper than food these days, and books are backbreaking whenever you move. A rational cost/benefit analysis will tell you to rid yourself of books before clothes. A favourite shirt is nearly irreplaceable, a favourite book can be replaced in a day.
I almost added books as a third category above.
A year ago I had 10,000 books. Now I have 5,000.
It'd be nice to cut that in half every year for a few years. There's no reason I can't get it down to 500 or 1,000 WITH EASE.
Do that a few times a month, and after a few years you end up with full bookshelves :)
That's the thing- I own many, many books (CLRS, Tufte's work, Graphics Programming Black Book, and dozens of others in the same vein) that I'm never really "done" with because I refer to them at least several times a year. As a researcher/engineer/professional, they're as valuable to me as some of other of my tools (computer, arduino, breadboard, etc.).
I suspect that that's what Paul implies in his essay, and that he refers to such books rather than "50 shades of grey".
(but sure, when it comes to novels or such books, yeah you can just give them away after you've read them).
You can also rip out and burn each page as you go along, as a Spanish writer had his protagonist do habitually. I shuddered the first time I came across that, but it may have its advantages ...
(Detective Pepe Carvalho in books by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán. Only book-reading detective that comes to mind besides Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe. Also cooks, if memory serves.)
Even better: Request a copy from the local library, and you'll get it for free, and be rid of it when you're done.
On another note, my parents passed away awhile back, and the single most overwhelming day-to-day challenge was how much stuff they had, which in effect meant how much stuff I had. It didn't really hit me all at once, though, since every single object was its own epiphany. By no voluntary effort of my own, I own a chainsaw! A shotgun! A bookshelf filled with deranged right-wing books! A C-band satellite dish! Another chainsaw! Another shotgun!
Fortunately, there's such a thing as an "estate sale" where other people will actually come in and sell all of your stuff out of your house for you. All you have to do is go through and pick out the things you actually want to keep, as well as papers and photographs. The trick to this is, you don't actually have to be dead to have an estate sale, although you probably need to have so much stuff that it's worthwhile to take the time whitelisting the possessions you want to keep rather than blacklisting the ones you don't want to keep. Ironically, this only exists on the backs of the hoarders pg writes about. You can get amazing deals on "perfectly good" stuff at estate sales.
The papers and photographs alone, though, can be overwhelming. Easily most of the stuff I kept were papers and photos. [1] I could justify all the advances ever made in computing simply by looking at an attic full of papers and photographs and contemplating the fact that they would all fit in my hand were they digitized.
[1] The rest were either items of genuine sentimental value or--my own weakness--"perfectly good" "vintage" computers, including a pair of NeXTs! If anyone here knows of a good Apple museum, by the way, please email me, because I don't want my attic to be it.
Unless you're talking about my NeXTs. I'd rather make a personal connection with someone who would appreciate them more than I would than just let anonymous hooligans on Ebay buy them.
I suppose a garage sale might be worth the effort since you can do everything at once.
"Do you need it, or do you want it?"
Books are big, heavy and don't hold much value#. They cost a lot to store and a lot to move from place to place. I got rid of almost all mine, and now use the local library extensively, which is very enjoyable.
# Unless you have a signed first ed. or something, in which case you're collecting antiques, not books
But it does not end there. Pure information (stored in the cloud or wherever) is also "stuff" and should be constantly cleaned. Keeping pure information does not cost as much as physical stuff, but it still has quite some overhead: you have to index it, back it up, remember how to access it etc.
It blows my mind that most houses I drive past every day have two cars, a boat, an RV, a snow machine (or two), a quad, skis & snowboards and that's just what I can see when they have their garage door open in spring.
Not only do people have lots of stuff, they have so much they have to pay people to store it for them (self-storage). I had completely forgotten about those, because they simply don't exist in places where people don't have excess stuff.
I highly recommend getting out of the developed world for a while to get perspective on how much stuff everyone has.
Ever watch that show where they get people to bid on abandoned self storage lockers? It's so weird that people pay money to store a bunch of junk. Not that the people are weird, just that humans are wired in such a way that we'd pay $150 a month to store a comparable dollar amount of stuff, because of the way it makes us feel. Maybe it's to avoid the way it makes us feel to get rid of it. That's what people are paying for. So they're basically being held ransom by their stuff I guess.
Stuff is generally like lines of code in software: writing it (acquiring it) is fun, but the real fun starts when you figure out how to delete it. A good refactoring with a net negative number of lines brings me great joy, just as getting rid of this stuff on craigslist has.
In fact, it brings me so much joy that for the forseeable future, I have a new rule: if I buy something, I must figure out how to sell/recycle/trash something of equal or more mass. This will force me to physically reduce the amount of stuff in my life. Obviously, mass isn't a fantastic approximation, but neither is the number of lines of code.
Watching this as a child and eventually as an adult, I've put the collection of "stuff" on a 10 point scale. 1 being a pure minimalist and 10 being an extreme horder. We all fit somewhere on that scale. I'm probably a 3 or 4. My father is a 10. Understanding where you are on this scale is important to de-cluttering your life.
Sometimes value gets set by factors other than price. Value & price are not equally correlated. Value can be translated as functionality, prestige, vanity, security, companionship, etc. People get value of things beyond price and each person sees a different value for each product based on their psychological needs.
All PG seems to be saying is to question an objects value before you purchase it. Otherwise, you could end up with a house full of junk that you and no one else will ever use again. In other words...Question everything, including value.
Stuff [2007]
Only thing I disagree with in this essay (I have many many bookcases that have gone back and forth across the US multiple times.)
I am quite jealous of the younger gen: Their bookcases will be an iPad.
When a book is requested at my local library they'll either purchase it to add to the lib catalog, or they'll borrow it from any other library in the country that has it so I can borrow it.
Perhaps, but they don't live on startup time. Or perhaps I'm an impatient beast. Both are possible.
Interestingly, I've always found impatience to be a huge factor in stuff accumulation.
i.e. Can't wait for something-or-other, so just buy it.
I live a just as luxurious life as I did before. I just find solutions to stuff that doesn't require owning the physical goods. Keep in mind half of this stuff is only possible because i'm living in the US now. And the rest is pretty obvious. eg.
- Rent a furnished apartment.
- Use car sharing services
- Buy ebooks instead of physical books
- Use Netflix/Hulu instead of owning a tv
- Use pdf digital signing software instead of owning a printer/scanner/fax
And really the only physical things I need now are some clothes and my laptop.
you are living in the US
AND
you have money.
I don't mean this as a criticism of you, but instead the minimilist movement in general: There is something self-indulgent about middle class, talking about how "cool" it is to throw away stuff, and be minimalistic... It's almost a statement about how privileged you are.
- Rent a furnished apartment.
This one you do need more $$ for. I don't have a furnished apartment, but I've spent less than $100 on my furniture (including getting some off the side of the road). I will feel no qualms about leaving it on the side of the road when I move.
- Use car sharing services
This depends. If it's more economical to use a car service, do it this way. For me it's not, so I own a car (but not a nice one, which keeps insurance and body-work costs low).
- Buy ebooks instead of physical books
Here there's no privilege either, since in my experience e-books cost about the same as regular books. (Maybe slightly less, but that will only offset the cost of the reader.)
- Use Netflix/Hulu instead of owning a tv
Again, no privilege. A reasonable cable subscription in the US is going to be $30, a hulu plus subscription is $10. Plus, you can sell your TV.
- Use pdf digital signing software instead of owning a printer/scanner/fax
This doesn't work all the time, because you still do have to print stuff every once in a while (trust me, I've not owned a printer for the last 7 years). However, usually you can just print stuff at work, or in a pinch, at kinko's. I've probably spent less than $5 over the last seven years at professional printing places, and their printers are much nicer than the crappy ink jet you get at best buy.
> - Rent a furnished apartment.
You have your own place to sleep at night, with (nice) furniture.
> - Use car sharing services
You have access to cars!?
> - Buy ebooks instead of physical books
> - Use Netflix/Hulu instead of owning a tv
> - Use pdf digital signing software instead of owning a printer/scanner/fax
You have access to high speed internet, and advanced electronic devices, and live in a society that supports them.
Most of the people in the world, don't have these things. It's easy for us to sit in 1st world countries and talk about how we aren't privileged because we didn't go to private school, or we buy cheap ebooks on our iPad... but even these things are out of reach for most of the world... that is what I define as "privilege".
> You have access to cars!?
> You have access to high speed internet
Let's be fair - relative to the people around him he's abated his consumption of things considerably and relies on services that are shared or transferable. Sure, if he wanted to be super edgy he could live in a mud hut and write code on a paper pad, testing it out whenever he can access the local community center computer. But relative to the people around him, his consumption profile is conservative and doesn't deserve ridicule.
Even if harping on about it is self-indulgent, it is not nearly as bad as the conspicuous consumption and hoarding that so many 1st world citizens take part in.
I didn't downvote your previous post in this thread until I read this one. Almost everyone who can read this website is privileged by your standards. Everyone in my apartment block here in Shanghai is privileged by your definition. Some of them are from Anhui province, or other poor ass provinces, where there are people in the Bottom Billion, people who live on less than a dollar a day.
If you are politically tone deaf, you should confine the use of political/sociological terms of art to arenas where you will be understood by everyone or where everyone agrees with your already.
My definition is based on fact, I realise those facts are confronting, but not invalid.
Privileged people who think they aren't just have blinders on.
Life isn't fair. VERY few people are raised in a life privileged enough to move country.
Your post makes me angry. You are privileged and you have no idea. You're on the goddamn internet. You have the opportunity to make a lot of money if you get your shit together. STFU
Sorry to have upset you like that. I meant the comment as something to reflect on (I myself have thought "How can I be more minimal")...
As a side note:
Australia (in general) doesn't have 'shitty public schools'. If you were to compare its schools on a global scale. You were born into privilege and became more privileged. It is difficult to see it that way (as I'm sure things were never 'easy') but the "bottom" in Australia is much much much, higher than the bottom elsewhere in the world.
EDIT: I'm 32 now
In some cases I would live somewhere only 6 months, so I've moved a LOT.
I am now completely allergic to stuff. I throw things out wantonly and refuse gifts. I buy things only when they are something I critically need, and even then I wait a while.
There is not only the mental cost of stuff that PG mentions, but the cost of transportation, storage and disposal (a cost which has become much more significant - garbage tip costs in Australia seem to have gone up several orders of magnitude faster than everything else since I was a kid).
I'm not sure if you can achieve a cure vicariously or if you actually have to go through the mentally scarring process of moving the same 12 old PCs that you'll freecycle one of these days through 8 houses, but try asking yourself "If I buy this now ... How would I feel about moving it?"
EDIT: several typos (after moving off my mobile keyboard)
My grandmother used to save everything starting from plastic bags, strings, plastic food containers, used nails and screws to electricity, water, heat and money. I suspect it is because when she was young there was a serious lack for everything from food to building materials.
I can see the same attitude in my parents except that they hoard a bit more expensive stuff like books, tools, electronics, music containers and furniture.
I used to collect electronics, music, comic books and MTG-cards but at some point I just stopped. The need to collect more stuff that I had learned from my elders wasn't useful anymore. It is also apparent that some companies are trying to market and exploit this behaviour for their own gain.
I still own too much stuff to fit in my apartment. I find it extremely hard to throw away 'perfectly good' stuff if I feel that it could be useful to someone. Yet it is quite laborious to sell it or to find someone who needs it.
From http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0137523/quotes
"Man, I see in fight club the strongest and smartest men who've ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war... our Great Depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off. "
Does this mean that the first rule of Hacker News is nobody talks about Hacker News?
But seriously, the movie (and Paul's article) hits a nerve because we are indeed consumed by our stuff. There is a carrying cost for everything - every idea in our head, every physical item, every piece of clothes.
Similar to what others have said, going abroad helped me realize how little I really need. I remember shipping all these boxes with me, only to not open most of them after I arrived. If I didn't think of something back home in storage over 6 months, would I ever need it? But it's still hard to avoid the weight of possessions.
In reality, it's very hard to sell random stuff yourself, especially if you want even a fraction of the "market price" someone would pay to get the equivalent object at the store.
Apple products are the only things that this has been true for ultimately.. And honestly, having a laptop around enables me to make money so it's a no brainer.
What I have discovered is that there are some things that are almost universally worthless (e.g. CRT tvs and monitors), not so surprising, but there are also a lot of people out there who really are quite desperate for very basic things, front yard full of cars or not.
95% of the time I've completely forgotten about it when I get home.
Also, obligatory Geeorge Carlin bit on stuff: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLoge6QzcG
"Four variety of items: Beautiful things; emotionally important things; tools, devices and appliances that efficiently perform some useful function; and category four, everything else."
http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2011/02/transcript-of...
telling relatives "don't get me anything" never ends up working, so if they're going to get me something, at least it will be delicious.
I just read this article, glad I did in a point of my life where it really makes a huge difference.
--- Larry Wall
I'm wondering if, on average, "rich" and "poor" people have a similar amount of stuff/junk, but the rich have higher-quality junk and more room to spread it out so it looks cleaner or more minimalist.
I'd also be interested to see better numbers, but the observation seems to make sense.
My assertions are A) more that richer people generally just have more than they realize, and B) having help decluttering is huge. It is easy to have the appearance of less stuff when you have a 5 bedroom house. Or, multiple houses. Not so much when you live in a 2 bedroom apartment. Similarly, if you can hire cleaners, it is not shocking that you can stay clean. Even relatively inexpensive cleaners. ($50 every two weeks, for instance. Easily doable for anyone wiling to drop cable. So, not exactly reserved for the super rich.)
I'm greatly comforted by his opinion on books though. I never sell my books (except really bad textbooks). So, I've already accumulated a somewhat large library. I was considering donating it to a library, but I'll think more about that now.
Planning the trip, the trip, and reflecting on the trip provides far more happiness than the instant temporary gratification of a new thing. Not the greatest support for my argument, but there it is: http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/02/10/happiness.possessions/i...
Now, a portable gas range won't get you the massive HN/San Francisco cred you'll get from a house full of books, that's a given.