maimysantiago99 replied to your post
Nov. 8th, 2019 02:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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maimysantiago99 replied to your post “materialism”
I have no helpful suggestions but I totally feel you on this stuff, especially the buying everything or nothing and wanting to get rid of stuff but knowing you will be upset by it later. Just yesterday I was lamenting donating a pair of pajamas that didn’t fit anymore. It’s been almost a decade, but I loved them. But they’re just pajamas.
Yes! Oh my gosh!
I feel like… there’s so much pop-cultural awareness of hoarders from the awful TV shows, but nobody seems to really understand *why*. I don’t have a house full of garbage and dead cats like on the shows, but I do have really deep and inexplicable sentimental attachments to objects, to the stories behind objects, to the physical presence of objects, and it’s impossible to explain that, I don’t know how to. They’re not “just things”, they’re parts of my life and parts of my physical reality and parts of who and what and where I am in the world, they’re part of how I orient myself, they’re part of the landscape of sensations that mark my passage as a physical being. My memory is unreliable, and one of my poorly-understood coping mechanisms is stuff, and where I left stuff, and sometimes it’s self-defeating and sometimes it’s all that works to get me to interface with the world.
And literally all of the advice I can find, for organizing or cleaning or living, or whatever, is about how to get rid of as much stuff as possible, and I know that’s counterproductive– I don’t want to live in an empty space, I don’t want to have only essential things, I really like having things and it is a genuine wrench to dispose of stuff, and I clearly do not feel the same way about things as most people do. Yes, I am often trapped by my own possessions, yes I suffer from not being able to find things I need under the layers of things I can’t use, but discarding everything and starting over doesn’t sound like freedom at all to me, it sounds like a horrible nightmare.
But I can’t find any advice, or help, or anything, that isn’t predicated on the idea that clearly, I ought to discard almost everything I own, and if necessary, buy new replacements if it turns out I got rid of too much. And ironically, this advice is meant to be anti-materialistic, anti-consumeristic, and yet it’s predicated on generating a bunch of garbage and then buying new stuff. Always!
And not being good at managing buying stuff is kind of like… it’s a more dangerous path to addiction, I think, for me, than drugs or alcohol, because– well, it’s sort of like food– eating disorders are the worst because you can’t just opt out of food entirely, you have to think about it regardless of what it triggers. And it’s sort of the same with buying stuff– you can’t live without buying things sometimes, and so you have to deal with your broken ability to manage money and possessions no matter what it dredges up, and it’s just got to be messy and you’ve just got to figure out the best you can. IDK, man.
This isn’t very articulate and I don’t know how to make it make more sense, but– it’s just one of those things, where I realize that I absolutely do not relate to the world in the way that most people do, apparently. It’s so fundamental I don’t even know how to talk about it, let alone how to analyze it in any way.
maimysantiago99 replied to your post “materialism”
I have no helpful suggestions but I totally feel you on this stuff, especially the buying everything or nothing and wanting to get rid of stuff but knowing you will be upset by it later. Just yesterday I was lamenting donating a pair of pajamas that didn’t fit anymore. It’s been almost a decade, but I loved them. But they’re just pajamas.
Yes! Oh my gosh!
I feel like… there’s so much pop-cultural awareness of hoarders from the awful TV shows, but nobody seems to really understand *why*. I don’t have a house full of garbage and dead cats like on the shows, but I do have really deep and inexplicable sentimental attachments to objects, to the stories behind objects, to the physical presence of objects, and it’s impossible to explain that, I don’t know how to. They’re not “just things”, they’re parts of my life and parts of my physical reality and parts of who and what and where I am in the world, they’re part of how I orient myself, they’re part of the landscape of sensations that mark my passage as a physical being. My memory is unreliable, and one of my poorly-understood coping mechanisms is stuff, and where I left stuff, and sometimes it’s self-defeating and sometimes it’s all that works to get me to interface with the world.
And literally all of the advice I can find, for organizing or cleaning or living, or whatever, is about how to get rid of as much stuff as possible, and I know that’s counterproductive– I don’t want to live in an empty space, I don’t want to have only essential things, I really like having things and it is a genuine wrench to dispose of stuff, and I clearly do not feel the same way about things as most people do. Yes, I am often trapped by my own possessions, yes I suffer from not being able to find things I need under the layers of things I can’t use, but discarding everything and starting over doesn’t sound like freedom at all to me, it sounds like a horrible nightmare.
But I can’t find any advice, or help, or anything, that isn’t predicated on the idea that clearly, I ought to discard almost everything I own, and if necessary, buy new replacements if it turns out I got rid of too much. And ironically, this advice is meant to be anti-materialistic, anti-consumeristic, and yet it’s predicated on generating a bunch of garbage and then buying new stuff. Always!
And not being good at managing buying stuff is kind of like… it’s a more dangerous path to addiction, I think, for me, than drugs or alcohol, because– well, it’s sort of like food– eating disorders are the worst because you can’t just opt out of food entirely, you have to think about it regardless of what it triggers. And it’s sort of the same with buying stuff– you can’t live without buying things sometimes, and so you have to deal with your broken ability to manage money and possessions no matter what it dredges up, and it’s just got to be messy and you’ve just got to figure out the best you can. IDK, man.
This isn’t very articulate and I don’t know how to make it make more sense, but– it’s just one of those things, where I realize that I absolutely do not relate to the world in the way that most people do, apparently. It’s so fundamental I don’t even know how to talk about it, let alone how to analyze it in any way.
no subject
Date: 2019-11-08 09:05 pm (UTC)My most recent post started with a message to you, but then I thought it would be better generalized. But as a carrot, if you manage to get the donation box off your kitchen table this month, I’ll pay your annual dreamwidth membership as soon as you tell me it’s done.