The Last Days of "Stuff" and the New Age of Digital Pack-Ratism
if you never have to throw anything away, would you do it?
Posted Jun 11, 12:17 pm in consumerism, culture, economics, experiences, human nature, marketing
There was a time near the end of my undergraduate days— probably around a time that I was moving— where I realized that I hated stuff. And by stuff I mean all the trinkets, knickknacks, bric-a-brac, mementos, curios, and souvenirs that filled my house and my closets, and littered my floor and acned my walls. What is notable about this revelation was also the realization that even though I hated stuff, I had a weird, irrational attachment to stuff as well.
These were things that served no function, yet were impossible for me to get rid of, for a variety of reasons. Some of them had too much personal significance for me to just throw out, like the hilarious and baffling—but non-fitting— “God Loves Ukraine” t-shirt my friend had given me in high school. Other things seemed too substantial and useful to someone else to just throw into a garbage can just because I no longer wanted it in my presence, like books I no longer needed but which no one would buy. Yet others I felt like I had paid too much money for to just discard; these things needed to be sold— even though nobody would ever bother to come all the way to my house just to buy them.
Around this time, I took a very long trip to India that kept me away from my stuff for nearly half a year. I remember thinking as I gazed into the deep blue Indian Ocean that if my house burned down while I was away, I wouldn’t really miss any of my stuff except for a couple of things here and there, items that would easily have fit into a small box. In a perverse way, I wished that my house would burn down so I wouldn’t have to deal with the unpleasant and conflicting emotions that I had to confront when discarding stuff myself. Also while I was away in India, a new-agey book suggested to me that if you can’t bear to part with something, you no longer own it— it owns you. This I found rather unsettling. I decided that when I got back, I would just get rid of all my stuff somehow.
Much of it I was able to get rid of by packing into boxes and offering on Craigslist. Some I put in boxes and laid on the street, stating that they were free. Some stuff I was able to sell. It was a difficult process. Even the stuff I knew I would never miss, I still had a very hard time discarding. I would think 4-5 times before putting something in “the box,” for all the reasons I stated previously.
Yet, despite all this, getting rid of stuff actually had a surprisingly strong psychological effect on me. I felt lighter, like I had lost 20 pounds, and somehow a kind of psychic burden was lifted as well. It was weird; it was almost as if these things took up space not only in my house but on my person as well, and shedding them had the simultaneous effect of emptying my house and also decluttering my person.
But there was an interesting aspect to this decluttering process that I’m still trying to come to grips with. Since I was quite young, I had been obsessed with music. I collected many, many cassettes, compact discs, and records, and listened to them constantly. I enjoyed them, but they also took up a lot of space. While I was getting rid of all this stuff, I realized that I had some 150+ CDs that I was rather nervous about parting with. Some were rarities, some would be expensive to replace, and some just felt like an affront to good taste to even consider selling. But I was committed to this winnowing, and wanted to make every effort to get rid of anything I absolutely didn’t need to have (within reason). But instead of going to my favorite haunt Amoeba Records to sell them off without looking back, I did something else first, and it’s something that I’m trying to contemplate whether violates the very premise of my efforts in divestment. At this stage, the early 2000s, I was living well into the age of digital music, and I could simply copy all that music to my hard drive without much effort. Which I did. And I bought a new hard drive to house it all too. At the end of it, I had some 40 gigabytes of music on my hard drive, and made (well, more like recovered) $300 selling my records back to Amoeba.
My question is, are digital files also stuff or do they not count because they don’t literally take up any space? If I collect files on my hard drive, is it any different than collecting junk in my closet? As someone who wants to absolve myself of the sin of stuff, do I have to clear out my hard drives and delete music that I don’t listen to?
At first glance, clearly. Whether stuff is physical or digital media makes no difference. The concept of pack-ratism is about irrational attachment to possessions. It’s about an unwillingness to give up that which does not really serve you. It is about carrying stuff around for no other reason than because you are terrified to throw it out because you might need it.
So far so good.
But where it starts getting very convoluted is the idea of how much this stuff interferes with your life. We consider pack-ratism problematic because we believe that there are serious consequences to the neuroticism of never throwing anything out. People become unhealthily obsessed with their things; they develope debilitating fears of losing their possessions; their living conditions become defined by squalor and filth. The Collyer Brothers, who epitomize compulsive hoarding, were found dead amidst the 103 tons of garbage that literally flooded their entire Manhattan home (at least one of them ‘drowned’ when a pile of garbage fell on him). That’s a pretty strong cautionary tale. But chances are pretty slim that you’d experience anything similar with a few extra gigs of junk on your hard drive. In fact, if you are able to keep your files well organized, you’re unlikely to experience any problems related to clutter; and actually, with advances in search technology, you’re don’t even need to organize all that much. In other words, you can be a total, complete pack rat and never feel any particular consequences.
I believe that we’re all moving in the direction of digital pack-ratism. Short of wiping embarrassing pictures away, we don’t have much reason to delete things off our hard drives— except, of course, clearing up some free space. But this problem likely won’t be so prevalent in the future. Hard drive sizes are getting exponentially larger while prices are dropping dramatically; meanwhile, the sizes of MP3s, photos, and documents will likely not be exploding on the same scale as hard drive sizes. Therefore, hard drives will be getting much bigger while file sizes will stay relatively stationary; on average, each file will make up a smaller and smaller percentage of the total hard drive space. Concern over space and efforts towards space-saving will become increasingly irrelevant for the average computer user.
Also, as people move from computer to computer, they will likely just copy their entire old hard drive over to their new ones every time they switch; this is to avoid the risk of losing potentially important information by selectively copying certain files. There is not a large penalty for doing this, as hard drive sizes will be continuously growing. Thus, computers will serve as warehouses for peoples’ lives (which increasingly will revolve around their computers): their record collections, their writings, their emails and letters, their photos— everything. And they’ll have no urgent need to delete anything.
Does this mean we will all be digital pack rats? It could be, depending on how much industry pushes this idea, and how much they can manage to reframe the concept (e.g. “It’s not an obsessive and neurotic behavior; it’s just common sense that can protect you and the things that matter to you!”). Hardware manufacturers have the ability and motivation to promote this idea that people will never have to get rid of any of their files; and amazingly, they can even truthfully claim that there will be little to no consequence for engaging in this type of behavior, short of occasionally having to make a cheap upgrade to a bigger drive, which probably won’t be necessary very often for most people.
Of course, there will probably always be people who are neurotically fearful of running out of space, and will never become digital pack rats. For some of these people, this is a consequence of living in through a technological age where drives often did fill up, and at inopportune times. For others, it’s just a fundamental lack of understanding about what hard drive space means. My dad informed me yesterday that he deleted an important 20k Word document off his computer because he was afraid of filling up his 120Gb hard disk. His drive is not even 10% filled.
For the rest of us, there might be no stop to our obsessive data collecting, except for the dreaded hard drive failure, which may indeed serve as the new devastating house fire.
Yo DUDE, SEND ME YR GOLDFRAPP MP3s YO!
I GOT
GOLDFRAPP LIVE AT BUDOKAN
GOLDFRAPP COMES ALIVE
GOLDFRAPP: FRAPP OUT OF HELL
USE YOUR GOLDFRAPP: I and II
— YO DUDE · Jul 16, 01:06 am · #
I don’t listen to that crap!
— Rahul · Jul 16, 11:32 am · #
You don’t listen to that FRAPP you mean!
WHAT WHATTT!
— Yo Dude · Jul 16, 07:05 pm · #