I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Saturday Reflections, I take time out to reflect.
I woke up this morning to a big box on my front porch — a Hoover PowerScrub Deluxe Carpet Cleaner Machine. My daughter is moving in next week as she prepares to graduate with her master’s of social work. She’ll be living in my basement, and I want to get the carpet freshened and clean for her.
This makes five carpet cleaning machines of various types I own now including a $1500 Miele canister vac, a battery-operated LG CordZero stick, a RoboRock robot, and an old Oreck upright that my mom left here when she moved out.
A minimalist I am not!
I don’t need all five. I only regularly use the CordZero and the robot. They are so much easier and more convenient than the Miele or the Oreck. There is progress in life, and often the progress happens when you buy new things!
Of course the rug cleaning machine is a completely different paradigm.
I feel uncomfortable, though, with my consumerist tendencies. Last weekend, I bought $50 worth of body wash from Bath & Body Works on a whim. They were having a Mother’s Day Sale so I got eleven bottles! Recently, a friend had given me some Eucalyptus Spearmint Stress Relief body wash from B&BW and I just loved it so much, I wanted some more. And I wanted to try lots of other scents (most of which have turned out to be too perfumey for me). I did give one bottle to my mom for Mother’s Day but kept the rest for myself, and I am enjoying trying a different one each day for my afternoon shower.
But I love the Spearmint Eucalyptus the best so maybe I didn’t even need to try other ones.
Valuing material goods more not less?
Nick Thorpe writes in The love of stuff that you should consider valuing your material goods more not less:
[Remedying] our troubled relationship with material possessions is no easy matter. One knee-jerk response is to cultivate a sort of blanket disdain for consumer goods….
And yet when applied to my whole life, such a hair-shirted response is ultimately as unsustainable as the position it challenges. I inhabit a material body in a material world, and have only to look around me to see the material things that nourish me: the delicious falafel wrap on my plate, the art that brightens the café wall, or even my tablet screen that responds so elegantly to the stroke of my finger.
He suggests that we might cultivate “a healthy and balanced relationship with the material world that sustains us in all its delicate, interconnected beauty.”
This is the “new materialism,” which “challenges us to love our possessions not less but more — to cherish them enough to care about where they came from, who made them, what will happen to them in the future.”
New materialism calls for buying things which last longer and can be endlessly re-used, which seems not to be the case with my succession of vacuums and one carpet cleaner. When I went from the heavy Miele canister to the light LG CordZero stick vac, there was no going back.1
Is it ever enough?
I read a Tweet this morning about how crazy it is in the SF Bay Area right now, with some people having suddenly acquired generational wealth ($50 million+) via stock options in companies like Nvidia. And then those left behind are feeling like they’re barely scraping by on a salary of only, say, $400K a year.
The weird thing is that where we anchor what we think is “a lot” or “a little” only makes sense in terms of the current value of the dollar and how we compare to other people around us.
My initial reaction to the stories of the generational wealthsters is: “Wow, I’m really deprived. I should have more money. I don’t have enough.”
And then I reflect on my life and I wonder why I feel like I don’t have enough. I have far more than enough. I have five carpet cleaning machines! Only three of which I even use!
And let’s not forget, I have carpet on which to use them! Quite a bit of it, though most of my house has hardwood floors, thankfully.
The experience of having more than enough
I have so much stuff.
I look at my desk and see all the things I own that make my life better:
- Reading glasses, including one pair on my face right now, with saran wrap over the left eye because of my swiftly progressing macular pucker
- A book about abstract expressionism that I usually only read to look at Hans Hoff=mann or Franz Kline’s work. Maybe Frankenthaler. Not a fan of the Joan Mitchell that was selected for inclusion.
- A ceramic mug with a dragonfly design that my son picked out for me at a craft fair. The dragonfly is my spirit insect, for its long period of immaturity before becoming an adult.
- Many many charging cords and a power strip, an Amazon Echo Dot circa 2017, and a wireless charging caddy for phone and watch
- My computer and monitor, of course, and my phone, and a mouse and a keyboard too
- A book about professional commodity trading
- A Ryobi lawn mower operating manual that I was consulting before buying a Ryobi electric leaf blower to make sure I bought the one that uses batteries I already have
- A packet of Pike’s Peak giant sunflower seeds, which I will plant today
- A crocheted bunny from the Van Gogh museum, also from my son, and evocative of the emoji that my kids use to refer to me
- A clipped out section from my old Honda Odyssey bumper with my Hawaii registration on it — the people rebuilding my car after it was totaled thought I might want it — and they were right!
I’m not sure I cherish all these items, though the gifts from my son probably qualify.
As I walk around my house this morning, I notice the incredible amount of stuff I have, but I don’t feel bad about it, not today anyway.
Instead, I feel an incredible sense of abundance and fortune to be living in a time when I can so easily have almost any need or desire met.
To me, this is possibly the foundation for cultivating a sense and lifestyle of radical abundance in which every day I affirm my good fortune and how I’m supported in and by the material world.
This doesn’t mean I will go wild and start loading up on things I don’t need. I’ll still rely on my $5 Goodwill hoodie, my $17 Walmart jeans, and one of my dozens of t-shirts as my standard spring or fall uniform. I’ll still shop at Goodwill when it makes sense to do so.
Affirming abundance
Because I’m a mathematician and I’m also trained in psychometric theory, I think a lot about quantifying things like “enough.”
When I ask myself, “Do I have enough?” I’m putting what I have onto some measuring stick where there is a cutoff point between “not enough” and “enough.” Is one carpet cleaning machine enough? I suppose no vacuums or rug cleaners could be enough, if you have no carpets, or if you hire a cleaning service for those you have? Or if you just let your carpets get progressively dirtier over time.
I want to leave that world of saying whether what I have is enough or not. I want to live in the affirmative, not in a space of constantly measuring, seeing if my life measures up.
I resonate with Nietzsche’s idea of eternal recurrence, that you say yes to what happens in your life, you say yes so strongly that you wish for what you experience (and what you have) to recur over and over again into eternity.
In the setting of eternal recurrence there is no question of what is enough. There is just the question of what is, and are you going to say yes to it or not?
Today I say yes to my rug cleaning machine, into eternity.
- Though I did just use the Miele to get the downstairs carpet ready for its shampooing. ↩︎