the-fu.com: Materials, Materialism and Me

Materials, Materialism and Me

“Is someone moving out?”

I hear my roommate’s friend, who had taken a peek at my side of our apartment, ask her this question. If you walk into my living room, admittedly this may be the first impression you get. In this room that is all white from ceiling to floor, all I have is a cyan-blue Ikea love seat, a white credenza, an end table from a flea market and a chair I rescued from the street. There is nothing on the walls except an outline of a mural I am in the middle of drawing.

My bedroom is not much different: it is about 200 square feet but I only have 4 pieces of furniture: a mattress (I haven’t yet found an affordable bed I like), a large table which is my work desk as well, another refugee chair and a nightstand. Next to my bedroom is a walk-in closet with clothes I actually wear, my favorite books and a few other items. You would also be surprised at how few clothes and shoes I own for a single woman working in the city.

I was not always such a minimalist. It has been an on-going process to eliminate the unnecessary and live with only what I want and need. The purging and rebuilding process has happened twice in my adult life; firstly when I arrived in the U.S. back in 1997 and secondly when I left Brooklyn to return to San Francisco two years ago. Though I wasn’t fully aware of it then, the move back to San Francisco was when I started a dialogue between myself and my material belongings and began trying to find a balance between the amount of things I own and my relationship with consumerism in the cluttered world where we live today. This process has helped me to make discerning decisions in other areas as well.

There are a lot of self-help books about organization and how it helps to refresh your mind. I had never bothered picking up these books, thinking it common sense to leave old stuff behind to make room for the new. But while writing this article I wanted to find out what “experts” had to say. At a bookstoreI quickly skimmed a few books and they assured my belief. For instance,in her book “When Organizing is Not Enough Shed Your Stuff, Change Your Life,” Julie Morgenstern (a New York Times bestselling author) reveals how “shedding” - a transformative process for letting go of things that represent the past – will help you to grow and move forward (a core idea that echoes my own but with lots of extra useful tips for me so I ordered a copy. God bless these self-help books!) So it’s a common sense concept that is widely written and talked about, but the actual doing part has not been so easy.

When I came to this country from Japan, I landed in San Francisco alone, with only one suitcase of clothes (enough for one week), a laptop and just a few family photos. I had left an art-consulting job in Tokyo, thinking that I would take a break and think about what to do next. I used to wear the same clothes for a week, wash them all and then repeat. This continued for half a year and I did not mind that at all. I was just happy to have the luxury of time to study English and wander around the streets of San Francisco, away from my old routine and clutter. I remember how light and free I felt back then. My summer visit turned into a few years when I decided to go back to school and then I found a job in New York. I accumulated stuff over the years and before I knew it, the clarity of my future vision had gone away and I was living in physical and emotional clutter.

When my relationship ended after five and a half years, I took it as an opportunity to clean and organize my life again. I got rid of everything but several boxes and moved back to San Francisco but ended up returning after only 9 months. I noticed that having less stuff had helped me to move on but at the same time I was missing an idea of “home”, which I associated with having my favorite things in it. I did not feel the same contentment from having very few belongings as when I had first arrived. This time I found myself feeling unsettled and alien. I began thinking about what the things I owned meant to me and concluded that as I became older, my sense of self came, in part, from owning things that I liked.

So there was a fine balance I needed to discover: having too little served a purpose but it wasn’t personal enough. But having too much clutter would overwhelm my sense of self. I felt as if the materials I owned were like a little garden, which requires constant maintenance: planning additions, seeding new growth, watering, cultivating and weeding, in order to enhance my life, rather than become overwhelmed by wilderness.

Here in New York I got my old apartment back and began training myself to only add items I truly needed or wanted. I also began to monitor information I was absorbing from media messages. With my occupation as a consumer product designer playing a role, I wondered if it was possible to become impervious to ubiquitous commercialism. I had never been the one to proudly bear brand-name or fancy items - but nevertheless, I wondered whether I was really the ‘smart shopper’ I thought I was. Some critics have argued that commercialism in the industrialized world takes away our ‘freedom’ as adults – that we are being subconsciously controlled by marketing messages constantly sneaking into our brains via public media (such as advertisements in the park) and even education materials. Benjamin Berber in his book Consumed, argues that the global economy no longer creates goods but needs. “The freedom of the free market undermines the freedom of deliberative adult citizens,” he claims.

On the other end however, there is the view that consumers have become so accustomed to such exposure that we are no longer affected by advertisement efforts at all. According to a recent survey, 66% of US consumers think that they are “smart shoppers.” Analysts say we are now able to see through marketers’ intentions; therefore we no longer buy into them. I agree most with a middle view by Rob Walker, a New York Times columnist who says we still are affected by marketing messages but that the traditional advertising model is declining. Instead, other ways of non-traditional marketing are becoming more powerful - such as word-of-mouth and consumers themselves becoming tutors of certain products, like computer programs. So according to Walker, we are no longer just buyers, we are also marketers ourselves. This is even scarier perhaps!

In spite of everything that has been written on this topic, as a consumer who is also involved in mass-producing goods, I think it is possible to make conscious choices when it comes to what you buy into. It is not possible (nor is it healthy) to completely cut off the media, but what is possible and healthy is to control your exposure and what you take in. Filtering is possible and it does work. For instance, I do not own a TV and even turned down a free one from a friend. I am perfectly fine without one, watching programs online if I want to, although I do not even get around to watching my Netflix movies.

In a larger sense, by living in Park Slope here in Brooklyn, I am able to support local businesses and restaurants instead of nation-wide franchises. And by doing my grocery shopping at the local Food Co-op, my money goes to local farms and smaller organic food producers instead of giant retailers. I have also been able to downsize my once-overwhelming amount of social activities, leaving time for the activities where I am most comfortable and help develop the core of my being. In this way, what started as a dialogue between me and my material goods has expanded to the other areas of my life. My once over-trimmed garden has started to grow back with a natural life-cycle - but this time I am carefully watering and weeding out what I don’t need. Currently I am working on cultivating this balance in my career as well, in the belief and hope that soon I will find myself completely surrounded in a garden of equilibrium.

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