The Mark 2010

The human love for stuff goes beyond crass materialism. Our most prized possessions tend to be symbols, not just things.

Last week, during one of this summer’s sudden, violent storms, the finished basement of our rented house flooded. The basement is home to my partner Allan’s office, and the guy is a pack-rat. Packed bookshelves, boxes of papers, memoribilia, photos, stacks of CDs and DVDs – as we jokingly say, everything he’s ever touched.

As water poured in from all corners of the room, we frantically began grabbing everything we could, ferrying it upstairs to higher ground, then running downstairs for more stuff. I could see the fear and panic on Allan’s face. I suspected that his most precious things – mementoes of his dad, who he lost at a young age, research for his book about the 1918 Red Sox, his autographed copies of the late David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest – were probably higher up, safely stored. But you never know. He could have been searching for something last week and left an important box in the middle of the room.

In addition, there were the bookshelves, the desk, computer equipment, and everything we store in the basement. And the water was rising everywhere.

The rain stopped. The water subsided. The sun came out. And the basement was ruined.

Squishing my way around the smelly, soaked carpet, I’ve thought a lot about people who have lost everything they owned. The survivors of Hurricane Katrina, who lost their homes and all their possessions, and who often found the insurance they paid diligently for decades was little more than a scam. People whose homes are destroyed by fire. People who must flee to escape war, and can never return.

Even when faced with stark choices of survival, humans will try to save their possessions. In the novel The Joy Luck Club, by Amy Tan, a Chinese woman is fleeing after her village has been invaded by Japanese troops. The woman, well-off, cannot contemplate life without her possessions. She loads everything that will fit into a wheelbarrow, which she pushes until the wheel breaks. Now she can save only what she can carry in her own two hands. As she staggers under the weight, she makes choices, jettisoning more and more, but still tries to carry more than she can possibly retain. Her hands bleed from carrying her bundles. Finally, in order to survive, she abandons everything – including her infant twins.

The flood made me think about stuff. Humans’ attachment to stuff.

I often feel oppressed by our consumer society. I see the supermarket aisle with 40 varieties of pop and 50 different kinds of breakfast cereal, and I feel the weight of it all closing in around me. Have you bought deoderant or toothpaste lately? Every brand has 25 variations fighting for shelf space. Sometimes I feel like I can barely see a baseball game through the ads clogging up every available space. The constant exhortations all around me to buy, buy, buy – more, more, more – everywhere I turn is like noise in my head that I can’t tune out.

It’s no coincidence that the activity that brings me the most mental relaxation is walking in the quiet woods, and my favourite vacations are in national parks. No TV, no internet, no billboards. No ads.

For most of my life, as far back as I can remember, I have dreamt of traveling for extended periods of time with no fixed address. Part of the attraction of the dream is it would necessitate living very simply – owning very little stuff.

But while some of us are more attached to material things than others, very few of us are completely un-attached to the material world. I call my partner a pack-rat and myself a minimalist, but I save things, too – especially my personal memorabilia. It's organized and I've culled it down to what I consider necessities, but save it I do, packed away in shoeboxes I call my Archives. The story of my life is packed into those boxes, and I'd be horrified to lose them.

Humans, it would seem, have always been acquisitive. Early man, hunting and gathering, could not acquire more than he could carry. But since the advent of agriculture, and the village – from the earliest civilizations – humans have acquired and collected, and have been at least partly defined by the objects around them.

Throughout most of history, a person's wealth and status was defined by how much stuff he had. Only rich people could have a lot of stuff. The richer you were, the more stuff you had. If you were rich enough, you could be buried with your possessions – which often included animals, women, and slaves.

Peasants and tradespeople owned few possessions, but owning anything at all distinguished them from the completely indigent, who had only what they wore and could carry.

It's only very recently, an eye-blink in historical terms, that ordinary people also have been able to acquire stuff – and lots of it. Now, as working-class people fill their homes and lives with stuff, wealthy people acquire ever more stuff – and more outrageously unnecessary and expensive stuff. But it's funny, really, because it's all temporary. We only have our stuff during our lifetimes. The old cliche "you can't take it with you" is a basic truth. But that doesn't slake our desire to acquire it.

Even those of us who reject consumerism, who try to live simply or at least simpler, still cling to some stuff – at least stuff invested with memories, and thus is irreplaceable.

We can imagine losing, say, our furniture, our kitchens, our clothes, or our play things. If that happened, we'd be sad, and frustrated, maybe depressed. But sooner or later, most of us would get to the point where we could say, “Those are just things, and things can be replaced.”

But our photographs, our letters, trinkets of friendship – our notebooks and journals – the objects passed down from parents or grandparents or friends now gone – losing those would hurt.

For those things, too, "you can't take it with you" applies. We know when we die we'll leave all of it behind. But as long as we live, we want to keep those precious things – not because of the objects themselves, but because of the subjective feeling we have invested in them. We look at these things, and they evoke memories and emotions. They are no longer just things. They are symbols.

I think this may be universal, and uniquely human.