A war on Stuff

The difficulty and the need for maintenance by design.

Hello friends,

I’ve been home in Singapore since the beginning of December — came back for some work, stayed for a bit.

Since 2001, I’ve lived outside Singapore. During college, I visited annually. Then, when I was at Google, it was every 18-24 months. After moving to London in 2013, the gaps between visits lengthened to 24-36 months. In 2023, things dovetailed and I came back twice. Now, not entirely by choice, I foresee being back either much more frequently or even … permanently 🫠. (This is causing a lot of discomfort which I hope will ultimately prove productive.)

This visit I’ve been consumed with planning for ageing parents. The quiet year-end weeks when Europe and America stop replying to emails made me finally face up to dealing with the astonishing (= appalling) array of useless things my parents have accumulated over decades of not really moving house.

🐒🍌

Moving all the time has downsides, but the big benefit is that it forces Stuff reduction. In 2020, after what I then believed was a particularly exhausting move, I wrote that it takes a “huge amount of work … to trim back superfluities—of Stuff, of routines, of comfort, of certainty—when they have been allowed to build up into a thick and hard-to-remove crust.” That 2020 move was as nothing compared to the last couple of weeks of dealing with Stuff in Singapore.

One reason Stuff piles up is that it is theoretically useful. It provides a strange sense of security (“Might need that, should keep it around”). This sense of security is illusory (I never need it or, if I do need it, I can’t find it). Too-abundant storage aggravates this by making it too easy to box something up and put it on a shelf, or wrap it up and tuck it into a spot at the back of a cabinet. Storage makes accretion invisible.

Another reason it piles up is that Stuff today is both artificially cheap and too easy to obtain. On Christmas Eve, while assembling a fourth enormous donation sack of crappy plastic toys, cutlery, mugs, hats, shirts, and other items mostly given away for free, I reflected that the manufacturers of inexpensive crap will be first against the wall when I am king.

While Stuff accretes for those two reasons, the Stuff-accretion problem exists because most Stuff is not worth keeping. (It is almost an exact parallel to my personal cellphone photo storage problem, and the general food waste problem in the developed world.)

At one extreme, for pathological hoarders, Stuff-accretion can become a physical and mental health problem. Put enough Stuff in a home and it will become unliveably, stressfully, unhygienic and unnavigable. But managing Stuff properly is valuable even if the problem hasn’t reached that point.

So I’ve been trying to do maintenance by design for Stuff. The basic idea is: don’t stop at periodic maintenance in the form of regularly pruning Stuff from the system. Instead actively and continually design the system to prevent Stuff from accumulating and to make it easier to regularly prune Stuff.

Moving to the mountains and leaving most of my Stuff in London for nearly two years was part of it. Being more intentional about only buying fewer, better-made things was part of it. Designing living space to have just enough storage so that accretion is more visible is part of it (this is upcoming in 2024).

This kind of maintenance by design is hard precisely because Stuff is ubiquitous and insidious — it’s still work in progress. But I’m more convinced now, fresh off two semi-traumatic weeks, that it is an essential discipline that will pay dividends both in the short and the long terms.

🤞 and very best wishes for the year to come,

VT