The Stuff Of Life

Moving house has been a bit of a wake up call.

First, let me say that this isn't the first time I've moved in a while. In fact, I'm almost ashamed to admit that in the last 10 years, I've moved house 10 times!

It came as a surprise, therefore, that I had so much useless stuff. You know the "stuff" I mean. Robert Kiyosaki, in his book "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" calls them "doodads". They are the useless things we seem to spend money on just because we feel we need to, as though some retail therapy is going to make our lives better.

I had boxloads of "stuff", some of which was so useless it was still in the boxes it had been in when I moved into my apartment. In fact, some were still in the boxes they had been in when I moved back to Sydney from Perth in 2003, which ought to tell you what sort of contribution this stuff was making to my life.

All of it had to be moved, and moving ain't cheap.

There's one box filled to overflowing with those little packets of film negatives you used to get from the photo shop before electrons replaced silver as society's primary visual memory storage medium. These aren't "important" negatives of life changing events. Most of them were work related, and were pictures of mind numbingly dull ferry, cruise ship or container terminals. I kept them because... um... I'm sure there was a reason... I'll get back to you...

In another box, there are ten 1000 piece jigsaw puzzles, all of which had, at some stage, been properly assembled and then packed neatly back in their boxes, and each of which had cost less than $10 at the local supermarket. These were kept because... um... no... I don't think I ever envisaged doing them again so... um... I'll get back to you...

I have enough glassware to pull on a Presidential or Prime Ministerial post inauguration bash (that's aussie for 'party'... the fun kind, not the political kind), much of which had been whittled down to one or two odd pieces out of sets of 6 or 8. Some are chipped. Some even have vague shadows where the printed image used to be before the dishwasher did its work. I kept these because... um...

I have one not terribly attractive glass platter about 18" across, still in it's original box. It had been a wedding present from my first marriage, more than 25 years ago. I kept it because... um...

There's another box full of enough of those little toiletry kits you get in business class to start my own ariline.

There are boxes of electrical things... headphones, walkpersons, an outdated cable modem, two dial-up modems (one of which, I'm reasonably sure, is broken), two old dot matrix printers, one old bubble jet printer and two antiquated computers, one of which had been hard wired with an obsolete version of an obscure rendition of Linix. All of these were kept under the misguided rationale that perhaps outmoded technology might come in handy for some as yet unknown task at some point in the future. Next to that was a box of floppy disks... not the cool hard shell 3.5" kind, but the utterly useless 512kb 5.25" soft ones, containing obsolete programs, data or games. And I bothered moving them?

Oh look. There's my old kettle.

There was a box containing the microscope I had been given for my 11th birthday. Actually, I rather liked this box, useless though its contents might have been. It also contained my old N guage train set (sans transformer, so I don't even know if it still works), a game called Qubic, which I was given for my 9th birthday and which, while looking a little worse for wear, still has all its bits. My giant lego set is there too. I suppose these are connections to childhood, so maybe they're important in my life though for what, I'm yet to figure out.

There were old sheets... really yuck ones that were probably kept because I thouight they might make great dropsheets (the ones you put down when you paint the house). Unfortunately, I'm not well known for painting houses.

The point is this... all this crap... and largely, that's what it is... cost me a bloody fortune to shift, and has taken days to sort through here in my new place. Some of it might have been useful once. Get over it... in most cases, it will be cheaper to replace than move and store.

Some of it had been kept because I felt it formed a part of the history of my life... arrogantly (and somewhat delusionally) thinking that anyone would care.

And then it occurred to me. We spend our meaningless lives accumulating worthless posessions that tie us down. We part with our hard earned money acquiring the latest fashion dictates, and when the fashion passes, the storehouse swells to make room for the next "must have" thing. And in between time, we spend precious days packing and moving such stuff, and yet more precious days unpacking and storing away at the other end. For much of it, that's the only time it will be touched by the light of day until we do the moving thing again.

Really. This is life for 21st century civilisation... I Have Therefore I Am.

Are we mad?

Gotta go. I need to get up to the Sony shop... they're having a sale on wireless noise cancelling headsets...