I swear you are in my brain reading my mind. I’ve been feeling the same way recently. I have so much stuff that I’ve collected and hoarded and it’s so overwhelming. I’m definitely participating in this!
I was just talking to a friend the other day about the anxious dread that consumerism has been filling us both with so the timing on this post was wild!! Love the concept of No Junk November, will for sure be participating. (And thank you for the shoutout as well !!)
It is SO anxiety-inducing! I'm sure I've become a little insufferable about it—wringing my hands over the candy wrappers from Halloween and the packaging my dinner ingredients come in, as if I can avoid that—but I just hate that it's become normal to not put thought into where all this crap goes. Glad this could be helpful!
The hand wringing can be a good first step towards finding alternative solutions! Like I hate the packaged vegetables so I dug up a green market to shop at that doesn’t package them. I have a designated vegetable backpack and vegetable tote bag and just shove them all in there. Minimizing is valuable, just because it isn’t perfect doesn’t mean it’s not useful!
This has come to me at the most perfect of times!! We have just moved and I threw away SO MANY THINGS!! It was genuinely humbling. Most of them looked totally unrecyclable and unsalvageable. I donated and gifted what I could and I left the useful stuff downstairs for other tenants to pick through but there was still an absolutely mortifying amount of garbage.
It made me think - imagine if everything you bought actually stayed with you? If you couldn’t throw things away and have them just leave your sight, imagine how super careful and clever we’d become with our purchases?
I've been noodling on that last point since I saw your comment pop up! I almost feel like someone should make a video game inspired by the stuff you accumulate throughout life weighing you down, lol.
I was at an Indigenous-owned coffee shop last year when I noticed that they put all of their iced coffees in paper cups, not plastic ones. I mentioned that I loved this choice and the barista told me that their grandma, who lives on a reservation, has to be super careful with the waste she disposes of because there isn't trash collection on the rez where she lives—if she produces trash, she has to burn it. Plastic obviously is far less pleasant to burn than paper, hence the cup choice. It really made me aware of 1) how much of a privilege it is to not think about where your trash goes once you've tossed it in a dumpster and 2) that even these tiny choices like coffee cups can make a big difference.
I really feel you on the clutter accumulation, too—my partner and I now "clean out the house" once a year, and I'm like, WHERE DID ALL THIS CRAP COME FROM?! Who bought this? Oh, right—it was us.
Yes it is a massive privilege. Every friend I have who has a garage has a garage FULL of random crud. One has, like, a whole spare fridge and freezer ‘because it was a good deal’ that are just sitting there. It feels like a horror movie in some weird way, this stuff just piling up and pressing in on you more and more.
The problem is that the alternative to stuff is usually effort, and nobody wants to put in the effort, partially because we’ve learned we don’t have to and partially because we’re exhausted by other crap in our lives… but, like, convenience is painfully wasteful. I used to order the ‘Good Food’ things that bring you the exact ingredients to put together a recipe and the main thing that turned me off from them was the MASSIVE amount of packaging. Everything is in its own little baggie or bottle and then there are massive ice packs in plastic bags.
I’m obsessed with the idea of stuff libraries. We have a tool library here, and it’s awesome, I borrowed a wet saw instead of buying it to cut my tiles and that’s so cool. When we were packing up in our old place we had so many things I’m sure people could use but there’s no normal way to give it to them. Or if there is it takes a ton of effort. Imagine if every neighborhood had a simple dry perpetually unlocked shed provided by the city where you could take your unwanted furniture/ appliances and people could take them. I don’t see a downside to it.
Same with repair. Husband’s electric toothbrush stopped working and we were pretty sure it was just the battery that died. We managed to pry it open and swap out the batteries even though it took unsoldering the old ones and soldering the new ones but it didn’t work because the new batteries we got were dead on arrival apparently. We couldn’t find any other place to order those same batteries and finally he threw the whole thing in the trash on moving day, I felt horrible.
I feel like we need to rapidly reinvent our relationship with stuff.
I swear you are in my brain reading my mind. I’ve been feeling the same way recently. I have so much stuff that I’ve collected and hoarded and it’s so overwhelming. I’m definitely participating in this!
I was just talking to a friend the other day about the anxious dread that consumerism has been filling us both with so the timing on this post was wild!! Love the concept of No Junk November, will for sure be participating. (And thank you for the shoutout as well !!)
It is SO anxiety-inducing! I'm sure I've become a little insufferable about it—wringing my hands over the candy wrappers from Halloween and the packaging my dinner ingredients come in, as if I can avoid that—but I just hate that it's become normal to not put thought into where all this crap goes. Glad this could be helpful!
The hand wringing can be a good first step towards finding alternative solutions! Like I hate the packaged vegetables so I dug up a green market to shop at that doesn’t package them. I have a designated vegetable backpack and vegetable tote bag and just shove them all in there. Minimizing is valuable, just because it isn’t perfect doesn’t mean it’s not useful!
I love this! I'll be making a lot of my gifts this year with art supplies I already have! 💕
Yayayayay! I want to do this, too—I just need to figure out what to make, lol. (Maybe we can swap ideas?!)
This has come to me at the most perfect of times!! We have just moved and I threw away SO MANY THINGS!! It was genuinely humbling. Most of them looked totally unrecyclable and unsalvageable. I donated and gifted what I could and I left the useful stuff downstairs for other tenants to pick through but there was still an absolutely mortifying amount of garbage.
It made me think - imagine if everything you bought actually stayed with you? If you couldn’t throw things away and have them just leave your sight, imagine how super careful and clever we’d become with our purchases?
I've been noodling on that last point since I saw your comment pop up! I almost feel like someone should make a video game inspired by the stuff you accumulate throughout life weighing you down, lol.
I was at an Indigenous-owned coffee shop last year when I noticed that they put all of their iced coffees in paper cups, not plastic ones. I mentioned that I loved this choice and the barista told me that their grandma, who lives on a reservation, has to be super careful with the waste she disposes of because there isn't trash collection on the rez where she lives—if she produces trash, she has to burn it. Plastic obviously is far less pleasant to burn than paper, hence the cup choice. It really made me aware of 1) how much of a privilege it is to not think about where your trash goes once you've tossed it in a dumpster and 2) that even these tiny choices like coffee cups can make a big difference.
I really feel you on the clutter accumulation, too—my partner and I now "clean out the house" once a year, and I'm like, WHERE DID ALL THIS CRAP COME FROM?! Who bought this? Oh, right—it was us.
That game would be awesome ⭐️
Yes it is a massive privilege. Every friend I have who has a garage has a garage FULL of random crud. One has, like, a whole spare fridge and freezer ‘because it was a good deal’ that are just sitting there. It feels like a horror movie in some weird way, this stuff just piling up and pressing in on you more and more.
The problem is that the alternative to stuff is usually effort, and nobody wants to put in the effort, partially because we’ve learned we don’t have to and partially because we’re exhausted by other crap in our lives… but, like, convenience is painfully wasteful. I used to order the ‘Good Food’ things that bring you the exact ingredients to put together a recipe and the main thing that turned me off from them was the MASSIVE amount of packaging. Everything is in its own little baggie or bottle and then there are massive ice packs in plastic bags.
I’m obsessed with the idea of stuff libraries. We have a tool library here, and it’s awesome, I borrowed a wet saw instead of buying it to cut my tiles and that’s so cool. When we were packing up in our old place we had so many things I’m sure people could use but there’s no normal way to give it to them. Or if there is it takes a ton of effort. Imagine if every neighborhood had a simple dry perpetually unlocked shed provided by the city where you could take your unwanted furniture/ appliances and people could take them. I don’t see a downside to it.
Same with repair. Husband’s electric toothbrush stopped working and we were pretty sure it was just the battery that died. We managed to pry it open and swap out the batteries even though it took unsoldering the old ones and soldering the new ones but it didn’t work because the new batteries we got were dead on arrival apparently. We couldn’t find any other place to order those same batteries and finally he threw the whole thing in the trash on moving day, I felt horrible.
I feel like we need to rapidly reinvent our relationship with stuff.