April 15, 2022 • 27 mins
Why do you have all that stuff?
What drives us to get and keep so much stuff - even objects that we rarely, if ever, use? Psychologists working on cortisol levels found that living in a messy or cluttered home may correlate to higher rates of depression and that conspicuous consumption may be affecting our well-being. When does your stuff start to own you?
Dessa talks with experts about how animal hoarding behaviors compare with our own, and speaks to a money-saving guru who might make you rethink your relationship to things.
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Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
That is the zipper of my suitcase, and it is
one of the most emotionally loaded sounds of my life
as a touring musician. That noise means its van call,
your morning deadline to meet all your bandmates in the
hotel parking lot, and you are frantically packing, running mental checklists, toothbrush,
who bearings, water bottle, sleep mask thing, and you're zipping
(00:24):
your suitcase hoping that the seems hold as you lean
on it, smashing your entire life like a Panini, trying
to fit all the possessions you'll need for the next
span of weeks or months into a two inch wheely
carry on and a Duffel bag okay, and yet living
out of only a couple of bags. I almost always
(00:45):
packed something that never gets used, address that doesn't make
it on stage, a book I don't end up cracking,
which begs the question, if I don't really need all
this stuff in this carry on, then what the heck
is all the stuff at home for the drill that
I can't find? The power cord floor, the velcrow curlers,
the box full of power chords, none of them fitting
the drill. Living light for a while can make an
(01:06):
apartment feel like a walk in junk drawer of heart
to part with bits and pieces. I'm Dessa. This is
deeply human. Presuming you're not a hardcore ascetic tuning in
on a d I Y crystal radio, you probably have
some stuff you don't really need, maybe even more than
you want. So why are humans so driven to a
(01:30):
choir collect and even horde? Why do you own so much?
And when does your stuff start to own you? The
Royal Charter was a ship which sank off the coasts
of Wales actually on this route to Liverpool from the
gold fields of Australia. Sank in eighteen fifty nine and
I think loss about six lives. What made this tragic
(01:53):
According to reports, many of the people who drowned they
were the miners who were carrying the gold on them
and money belts. They drowned because they wouldn't let go
of all the gold that they were carrying. And that goal,
by the way, is washing up on the shores of
North Wales as we speak. Prospectives are going out to
try and retrieve it. That is Bruce Hood, professor of
developmental psychology at the University of Bristol in England, Bruce
(02:17):
wrote a book called Possessed, which explores why humans strive
to own so much stuff. But before we can examine
the motives buried in our golumy little hearts, we've got
to get some terms straight. Possession versus ownership. Bruce, possession
is the physical control of an item, usually a material thing,
whereas ownership is a convention of social contract, whereby people
(02:42):
are recognized to have control over something in perpetuity even
when they're not there. So it's like, this is my
spoon when it's in my best possession, This is my
spoon when it's in the drawer and I'm asleep. Ownership,
that's it. As a general rule, the rest of the
animal world doesn't own item in the same way we do.
Possible exceptions might be the California sea otter, known to
(03:05):
store one stone in a special little pouch, a handy
tool for whatever they've got, a crack open a mollusk shell,
and some birds like rooks or Jay's are known to
play with bottle caps, marbles, and other shiny treasures and
bury their personal cash for safe keeping. But usually even
if animals possess an object, a stick used for termite
hunting say, they just discard it when they're done with it.
(03:28):
When humans are young, they don't really get the idea
of ownership either. They think if you can't control something,
you can't own them. So yeah, so if they think
you're a sleeper in a comor you're tied up, you
can't own something, because they have used this issue of
control as a basis for establishing possession and for the
basis of later ownership. We enter the world with no stuff,
(03:51):
only a little plastic hospital bracelet announcing the names. Somebody
just bestowed upon us our first bit of intellectual property,
I suppose. But so somebody sets it up with a blanket,
a passive fire, a stuffed bunny. You learn the word mine,
and you wear it out, and the great acquisition has begun.
Before long, we're outgrowing shoes, sleeping on our very own
(04:12):
big kid bed, maybe cruising around and a sweet rides
on training wheels. Even in modern homes of pretty modest means,
there's usually a bunch of stuff. Then you're full grown
and it's time to move out, find a gig, maybe
partner up with somebody and get a place of your own.
(04:32):
We had two front seats in the volks fucking and
then wait to put all of our worldly goods in
the back. It was the most exciting time in my life.
I would say that's Candy Hyatt for counting her experience
of this particular life stage to go out and make
a home for thine self. Part She'd grown up in
New York, but headed out west with her guide Jack
(04:53):
to start a life together. And they set off with
only a car load of essentials, but she brought a
handful of precious items with her too. And I played
violin all the way through high school and then just
for enjoyment, and I had an antique box with diaries
in it. They landed in Colorado, bought some land on
(05:14):
Sugar Loaf Mountain, and Jack started to build a house
using all sorts of salvage materials. We had the bumper
car pavilion floor from ilitch Is, which was an amusement
park in Denver, and we had radiators from Shannon's, which
was a biker bar in Boulder. They were those old
metal banded up with a one of a kind home
(05:36):
full of red stuff and unusual features stories built right
into the walls. They had a little girl and the
boy went into family mode, the years unspooling as years do,
but then everything went off script. In nine we went
on a vacation. We were watching the news and we
(05:58):
saw I think it was CNN, they said a fire
is raging out of control in Boulder, Colorado. I said, wow,
that looks like our road, and I'm known to catastrophize.
So Jack said, no, that's not our road. That's further
west than us. Everything's fine, don't worry, but not too much.
Later the phone rang. One of my best friends who
(06:20):
lived in town in Boulder called me and said, is
Jack there, which is never a good question. You know
you're going to hear some bad news and maybe pass out,
so they want they want somebody there with you. I
said yes, and she said there's a fire in your neighborhood.
Everything is not fine. And I had a picture in
(06:41):
my mind of a corner of the house being gone,
or maybe the curtains having caught em fire. But then
she said it's gone, it's all gone. Oh gosh, the
house exploded before the flames even got there because it
was so hot. Wow. I have a few tears in
my eyes. Um. When we came back, we stood at
(07:03):
the foundation and looked down into the hole that was
left the house Jack built, my hand gone, the antique violin,
all her diaries gone, and everything had fallen down into
the foundation, and you could still see the words on
the pages, even though everything was all burned, and some
of that was my journals. Oh my god, I'm so sorry.
(07:24):
It was quite a lot. Candy and Jack had less
than when they started. And I would also say that
the fire was kind of the beginning of our splitting
up to their marriage didn't survive the fire. Candy says
that was partly because Jack's connection to the place was
incinerated along with all their stuff. The emotional link was
(07:47):
broken when the material anchors gave way, and he wanted
to leave, to go someplace new. Candy wanted to stay,
to start again where they were in normal life, you know,
without the extremes of like fires and floods. Think it
can be kind of tempting to imagine there's the world
of stuff and then there's the world of our personal relationships, right,
But it sounds like those two worlds aren't completely as
(08:09):
strictly separate. No, they're not, particularly when some of that
stuff is a house that you've put your heart and
soul into and your stuff is part of the picture
that you have, and the picture has your relationships in it,
and it has your stuff in it. But when all
of that stuff has gone and the picture has changed
that dramatically, it changes your personal relationship as well. I
(08:31):
think years and years ago, I found a half used
yellow legal pad at my mom's house. On the top page,
neat straight line had been drawn down the middle, and
there was a short list of stuff on either side,
elemental stuff like car or house. I don't remember all
(08:53):
the items exactly because they're obscured by the big wave
of feelings that hit me when I realized what I
was looking at. I was looking at my parents divorce.
I'd know only hadn't hired a lawyer to expense it,
but I'd never considered the mechanics of a d i
y version of marital dissolution, like two people sitting at
(09:13):
a table with a pen and a pad, dividing all
their worldly possessions on either side of a sketched line.
It was such a sad and humble piece of paper,
but also deeply moving to me because it was their
alternative to court dates and legal battles that would have
divided the assorted possessions of twenty years together. For a while,
(09:35):
that sheet of paper itself was really precious to me.
We keep things for all sorts of reasons. One of
the most powerful emotional reasons is sentimental value, where people
will really value something which is of no worth to
anyone else, but objects form part of our identities. That's
(09:56):
Bruce again, our developmental psychologist, who, for what it's worth,
has a soft spot for horror movie posters and golden
eraw Hollywood stuff and a sidebar. If his voice rings
familiar to you die hard, deeply human fans out there,
it's because he made an appearance on the Spooked episode
in season one, or maybe you just went to high
school with him or something. He says that our ability
(10:17):
to own things and to catch feelings for him is
historically linked to the way we grow our food. So,
you know, when we transition from hunter gatherers into sort
of settling down and farming and raising cattle and things
like that, and then going off to fight wars, we
had to have a system of rules, which meant that
when we came back from the wars, we had our property.
Is it the case that throughout history we've had really
(10:38):
different understandings of what kinds of things are eligible for ownership. Yeah,
so that's absolutely true. So that was the origin of
a lot of the misunderstandings with the invasion of North
America because the indigenous people didn't have a concept of
anyone owning the land. That seemed ridiculous. And that's why
they sold something like Manhattan for forty two hours or
(11:00):
whatever it was, because they didn't have a kind of
understanding how that could ever be a binding agreement. And
now in that same Manhattan, we've expanded our concept of
ownership to encompass almost mythical realms. You can own other
people's debt or soybeans that haven't been planted yet. You
can shot for shoes twenty four hours a day without
(11:22):
putting on any to leave your own house. You can
order custom bubbleheads or a bag of Ladybugs delivered to
your door front of twenty bucks. Our world is a
veritable bonanza of sale stuff and ownership. I worked with
(11:46):
one lady, very complex lady, for about ten ten years
after she had the miscarriage. She was acquiring and awarding
baby clothes and baby toys in response to that loss.
That is Joe Cook. She's the director of Hoarding Disorders
UK and she works with people whose stuff threatens to
(12:07):
overwhelm the rest of their lives. She got into the
business of organizing and decluttering because of her own experience
with her dad. After my father died, it took me
four months to clear the family home out. He was Polish.
He grew up during the war. He remembers his parents
sacrificing their food to give to him. He hated any
(12:29):
kind of food waste, but he also hated throwing anything away.
There are people that have emotional attachments to things where
they find it difficult to let go of an empty
Chris packet a newspaper from thirty years ago. Acquiring and
keeping stuff can be a self soothing maneuver, a response
(12:50):
to loss or uncertainty or scarcity, the emotional installation, as
I call it. I think we can all relate to
how we responded to the pandemic. I mean, who didn't
go out and buy more petrol, Who didn't go out
buy more Loo rolls or extra tins of soup? In
terms of responding to anxious times. But by the time
(13:11):
a prospective client calls Joe. Their lives have usually reached
a crisis point. People might not be able to sleep
in their bed, cook on their oven, or be able
to use a bath, or it might well be that
the hoarding has attracted vermin. It can be hard to
ask for help because hoarding has been so stigmatized in
pop culture, but that's changing. The World Health Organization now
(13:33):
treats hoarding behaviors as part of a medical condition. But
letting go of stuff can be hard for a lot
of us. The declutterer Maria Condo is like an international superstar.
Joe notes that a history of scarcity might make someone
afraid to toss out even extraneous items, and grief might
make throwing away a loved one's bathrobe feel like a
(13:55):
denigration of their memory. People are now recognizing that actually,
body isn't about people that are lazy and dirty. It's
getting people to recognize and to understand and look at.
We call it the meaning and the mess, the meaning
in the mess. Well, let's turn back to Candy, who
we left standing over a particularly meaningful mess, looking into
(14:17):
the ashes of her home with Jack. Their split was
hard and messy at first, but over time, temper is
cool and Candy moved into a house outside of Boulder, Colorado,
near enough to Jack's new place, but on the days
the kids spent with her, they could see him flashing
a mirror from his porch to say hello. And after
a walk one day, Candy and a friend stood talking
(14:38):
in her new home when something caught their eye. We
were standing oh by a window, and we looked up
and she said, oh, my god, is that smoke. My
landline was ringing and it was a reverse nine one
one call saying you need to evacuate, And I said,
I think we need to go over to Jack's and
(15:00):
get stuff out of his house. Another fire was headed
their way, and both Candy and Jack's new houses were
in its path. Jack, at that time was headed out
of town on vacation with his new wife, but Candy
caught him on the phone. Do you want me to
go over and get anything? Jack just kind of rolled
his eyes into there she goes again, catastrophizing it was
(15:23):
it was a pattern in our relationship. Everything is not fine.
And then about twenty minutes later he called back and
he said, well, maybe there's a few things you could get.
Candy and her friend raced over, and it was already
so hot that they were afraid the paint on the
car would melt. Jack's house sitters had already fled. They
(15:45):
left the door open, so Candy and her friend just
ran in started putting stuff in boxes, two computers, Jack's briefcase,
which was essentially his office, the art hanging in the
kid's rooms. By the time we left, I could see flames.
We then, probably three hours um, someone called me and
said that they had heard the propane tank at his
(16:05):
house explode. It burned to the ground. He lost everything.
Oh my god. Not everyone would drive into the smoking
heart of a wildfire, risking life and limb to save
a few boxes of stuff for her ex husband, even
after being dismissed as overreactive after the hard divorce. But
Candy understood what was really at stake, and she knew
(16:26):
exactly what losing a home and all the things inside
it could do to somebody's whole life. I think it
was us against the fire. In my mind, it was like, God,
damn it, this is not going to happen a second time.
We are not going to lose everything a second time.
Bruce Hood argues that our strong compulsion to own and
(16:47):
keep things is a basic impulse potentially driven by evolutionary forces.
Collecting property might be a way of signaling our status,
that our stuff was essentially proof of our fitness. Chest
pass to Bruce think that humans are inclined to competition
because of well, we were competing to reproduce. And the
(17:07):
more that you have, the more that you're signaling your
competence or your ability to provide for future generations. So
there's a kind of real imperative to China accumulate as
much as you can control. According to this theory, our
possessions were one way to signal status, dominance power. But
of course our attachment to stuff isn't driven only by
(17:29):
ancient forces. It's also driven by ads on Instagram or
the fancy window displays on Fifth Avenue. The TV commercials
were the hottest. A list actor looks into the middle
distance with an expression of sensuous boredom to help selk alone,
like it's marketing man, think about something like a celebrity endorsement.
All right, that was something which was meant by John
(17:51):
Watson is a psychologist academic footnote here. John Watson American
active during the first half of the twentieth century known
for advertising campaigns that appeal to consumers. Deep psychological means
if you realize that if you pair certain desirable things together,
people make the association that owning one will achieve the other.
And so he just figured, let's get all these celebrities,
(18:11):
these heroes that people worship to smoke certain brands of
cigarettes or use certain toothpastes, and then that's why people
would buy it in an attempt to emulate their heroes. Hi,
I'm Dessa, host of the self referential hit program Deeply Human,
and fans often ask Dessa, with your dulcet voice and
(18:31):
poignant insights on human behavior, what sort of nonstick cookwear
could you recommend? Is there anything that's easy to clean
an oven safe? Well, let me tell you. When I'm
not cooking up another episode of Deeply Human, you can
find me at the stove using Dessa's Deep Dishes brand
cookery items. I'm too busy cleaning up of the podcast
(18:52):
to words to worry about cleaning up pots and pants.
Enough already, James Faub. When you've got your own brand
of cookery items, holler. Big ad agencies launch huge campaigns
trying to link consumer goods with status and prestige and
then pushing in exactly the opposite direction. Is a blogger
(19:15):
named Mr Money Mustache, a dude who has been called
the Frugal Guru by The New Yorker. What I realized
at one point is that I hadn't just started a blog.
I started sort of a fake ironic cult. Pete aideny
a k a. Mr. Money Mustache is like a cross
between a cartoon gold prospector and a counterculture warrior fighting
(19:37):
conspicuous consumption. He got Internet famous by advocating a low
spend lifestyle and a really aggressive saving strategy. But before
Pete had any money or a mustache, he was a
boy in a small town of Caledonia in Canada. It's
a working class community with a simple lifestyle. You don't
really have much to compare yourself against. And I think
(19:58):
that's a really healthy thing, because human nature is to
compare ourselves with the richest people and then wonder why
we can't have that. My dad was a frugal guy
and he liked to keep things reasonable, So we were
always like the last family to get the cool stuff,
the last one to get a microwave, of and last
one to get a nicer TV or VCR, all these
nighties things that other people had. But what I realized
(20:21):
later they were fairly well off, like, you know, fairly
middle income, probably higher than some of my friends. But
we had a lot less stuff. And Pete made note
it was important not to spend too much of what
you earned. When he first got a tech job in
the US, he thought he was making a killing. But
(20:42):
my co workers are like, oh, yeah, it's just enough.
You know, things are so expensive these days. But he
built his life to cause less. He biked the commute,
for example, instead of leasing sleek new wheels. The reason
I could do that is because I chose to buy
a house that was, you know, within ten miles of
work or less. And they were driving their mw is
in from a super distant suburb because like, we looked
(21:03):
the same and we had the same salary. But I
was just able to save like more than half of it,
and they were saving sometimes zero, going further and further
into debt over the years. Meanwhile, he was going in
the other direction, saving and investing a considerable chunk of
his take home pay, which was possible because he wasn't
buying a ton of stuff, and within about seven or
(21:26):
eight years that was enough to live off forever, just
passively off of the you know, the dividends and income
from owning a few shares. Those of you familiar with
the Fire movements are no doubt yelling at the radio
by now, But for the uninitiated, Pete is one of
many finance writers connected to a lifestyle trend sometimes referred
to by the acronym fire financial independence retire Early devotees
(21:50):
save up to sevent of their annual earnings and are
generally very eager to talk with you about it. Individual
mileage berries. But our good rule of thumb is you
can retire or in about ten years if you're willing
to live humble and stay super disciplined. The savings at
up and according to Mr money Mustache, that doesn't have
to mean crazy sacrifices. Just think of it this way.
(22:11):
Whatever you're spending is, does anybody in your country live
on half of your level of spending? And I'm sure
that answer is yes. And then is it possible that
any of those people are happy, having like fulfilling, great
happy lives, maybe even more fulfilling than your life. Well,
you know there's millions of people in every country, so
you're damn right there is. The fire movement has definitely
(22:34):
received some heat from being cheap, but Mr money Mustache
explains it's really about clarifying your priorities. Does buying a
new wide screen TV really make you happier than if
you just played with your kids for all the hours
that you spent working to buy the TV. Mustachio Ism
isn't about self denial, and the lifestyle isn't all that monastic.
(22:56):
I like to use the term slightly less ridiculous because
it's still ridiculous. Like Mustachians, we all live luxurious lives.
We can do air travel, we live in climate control houses,
we even have cars. But we're just being slightly less
ridiculous than other people. It's not a life spent in
recliners either were Early retirement is about it. It's not
about quitting work. It's about freeing you to do your
(23:18):
best work. At the heart of the Mustache there is
a message that is as much about ethics as it
is about finance. My goal with Mr Ronie Mustache is
to make it a marketing project, to make frugality be
an aspirational thing. For rich people. That's positive on on
the world, the earth, and the ecosystem, as well as
your your wallet. There's a photo you might have seen
(23:45):
it online that's supposed to be a complete inventory of
Gandhi's possessions at the time of his death. Spectacles, two
pairs of sandals, a pocket watch, a prayer book, like
a dozen or so items laid neatly on a piece
of cloth. You could fit the entire estate into a
kindergartener's backpack. People quibble over whether or not he owned
(24:06):
a mattress or a desk in addition to the pictured items,
whether his iconic spinning wheel was still in his possession
at exactly this time. But looking at this photo, the
man's commitment to a simple, spare existence is like genuinely breathtaking.
A pair of Gandhi's sandals sold at auction for just
north of dollars, and the new owner, one presumes, wasn't
(24:30):
gonna wear him. It was the thrill of owning a
piece of history. Humans are an owning animal in part
because we can be settled lives allow us to keep
more than we can carry, and in part we acquire
our cash of things to compete with one another, maybe
for mating rights other forms of social status. The ever
(24:52):
present title pull of advertising pressures us to spend more,
to own more, and then to upgrade to the new model.
And in the hardest times of our lives, we might
keep things because it's just too hard to let them go,
even if they don't make us happy anymore, even if
we have more than we can use, Even as the
water rises around us, our fists want to hold tight
(25:15):
to the objects that might weigh us to the bottom. Okay, guys,
I have got to get some rest before van call tomorrow.
So for parting thought on stuff and our complicated relationship
to it, let's go back to candy. Do you think
about stuff and material possessions differently than other people? Do
I do? I pack up some things, put them on
(25:38):
a bed close to the front door, and alert a
few of the neighbors, and the box says in case
of fire, and all they have to do is run
in and grab a few things. But every year that
box gets smaller because there are fewer things that I
think are really that important. Every year I think I
would just start over. I don't owned that there are
(26:00):
things that I really am so attached to that I
couldn't go on with life without them. Deeply Human is
a BBC World Service in American public media co production
with I Heart Media. It's written and hosted by Medssa.
Find me online at dssa on Instagram and Dessa Darling
(26:22):
on Twitter, and you can find my cookwear on your
next holiday whish list. Hey, every cooks wish desas Deeps.
I'm worried about you. Shut up, James, I hate you.
(26:43):
Those three words were forbidden in my house when I
was a kid. There were just too serious, too mean.
On the next Deeply Human, we're investigating hatred, that verbot
and emotion, its role in culture wars, difficult family dynamics,
and the cesspool of social media. And we'll get some
hopeful psychological insights too. Why do we hate? And how
(27:05):
can we stop? And if you've been enjoying the podcast
so far, take a moment to pin a little review
we read each and everyone. Thanks for listening, and I'll
meet you back here for the next round.
That is the zipper of my suitcase, and it is
one of the most emotionally loaded sounds of my life
as a touring musician. That noise means its van call,
your morning deadline to meet all your bandmates in the
hotel parking lot, and you are frantically packing, running mental checklists, toothbrush,
who bearings, water bottle, sleep mask thing, and you're zipping
(00:24):
your suitcase hoping that the seems hold as you lean
on it, smashing your entire life like a Panini, trying
to fit all the possessions you'll need for the next
span of weeks or months into a two inch wheely
carry on and a Duffel bag okay, and yet living
out of only a couple of bags. I almost always
(00:45):
packed something that never gets used, address that doesn't make
it on stage, a book I don't end up cracking,
which begs the question, if I don't really need all
this stuff in this carry on, then what the heck
is all the stuff at home for the drill that
I can't find? The power cord floor, the velcrow curlers,
the box full of power chords, none of them fitting
the drill. Living light for a while can make an
(01:06):
apartment feel like a walk in junk drawer of heart
to part with bits and pieces. I'm Dessa. This is
deeply human. Presuming you're not a hardcore ascetic tuning in
on a d I Y crystal radio, you probably have
some stuff you don't really need, maybe even more than
you want. So why are humans so driven to a
(01:30):
choir collect and even horde? Why do you own so much?
And when does your stuff start to own you? The
Royal Charter was a ship which sank off the coasts
of Wales actually on this route to Liverpool from the
gold fields of Australia. Sank in eighteen fifty nine and
I think loss about six lives. What made this tragic
(01:53):
According to reports, many of the people who drowned they
were the miners who were carrying the gold on them
and money belts. They drowned because they wouldn't let go
of all the gold that they were carrying. And that goal,
by the way, is washing up on the shores of
North Wales as we speak. Prospectives are going out to
try and retrieve it. That is Bruce Hood, professor of
developmental psychology at the University of Bristol in England, Bruce
(02:17):
wrote a book called Possessed, which explores why humans strive
to own so much stuff. But before we can examine
the motives buried in our golumy little hearts, we've got
to get some terms straight. Possession versus ownership. Bruce, possession
is the physical control of an item, usually a material thing,
whereas ownership is a convention of social contract, whereby people
(02:42):
are recognized to have control over something in perpetuity even
when they're not there. So it's like, this is my
spoon when it's in my best possession, This is my
spoon when it's in the drawer and I'm asleep. Ownership,
that's it. As a general rule, the rest of the
animal world doesn't own item in the same way we do.
Possible exceptions might be the California sea otter, known to
(03:05):
store one stone in a special little pouch, a handy
tool for whatever they've got, a crack open a mollusk shell,
and some birds like rooks or Jay's are known to
play with bottle caps, marbles, and other shiny treasures and
bury their personal cash for safe keeping. But usually even
if animals possess an object, a stick used for termite
hunting say, they just discard it when they're done with it.
(03:28):
When humans are young, they don't really get the idea
of ownership either. They think if you can't control something,
you can't own them. So yeah, so if they think
you're a sleeper in a comor you're tied up, you
can't own something, because they have used this issue of
control as a basis for establishing possession and for the
basis of later ownership. We enter the world with no stuff,
(03:51):
only a little plastic hospital bracelet announcing the names. Somebody
just bestowed upon us our first bit of intellectual property,
I suppose. But so somebody sets it up with a blanket,
a passive fire, a stuffed bunny. You learn the word mine,
and you wear it out, and the great acquisition has begun.
Before long, we're outgrowing shoes, sleeping on our very own
(04:12):
big kid bed, maybe cruising around and a sweet rides
on training wheels. Even in modern homes of pretty modest means,
there's usually a bunch of stuff. Then you're full grown
and it's time to move out, find a gig, maybe
partner up with somebody and get a place of your own.
(04:32):
We had two front seats in the volks fucking and
then wait to put all of our worldly goods in
the back. It was the most exciting time in my life.
I would say that's Candy Hyatt for counting her experience
of this particular life stage to go out and make
a home for thine self. Part She'd grown up in
New York, but headed out west with her guide Jack
(04:53):
to start a life together. And they set off with
only a car load of essentials, but she brought a
handful of precious items with her too. And I played
violin all the way through high school and then just
for enjoyment, and I had an antique box with diaries
in it. They landed in Colorado, bought some land on
(05:14):
Sugar Loaf Mountain, and Jack started to build a house
using all sorts of salvage materials. We had the bumper
car pavilion floor from ilitch Is, which was an amusement
park in Denver, and we had radiators from Shannon's, which
was a biker bar in Boulder. They were those old
metal banded up with a one of a kind home
(05:36):
full of red stuff and unusual features stories built right
into the walls. They had a little girl and the
boy went into family mode, the years unspooling as years do,
but then everything went off script. In nine we went
on a vacation. We were watching the news and we
(05:58):
saw I think it was CNN, they said a fire
is raging out of control in Boulder, Colorado. I said, wow,
that looks like our road, and I'm known to catastrophize.
So Jack said, no, that's not our road. That's further
west than us. Everything's fine, don't worry, but not too much.
Later the phone rang. One of my best friends who
(06:20):
lived in town in Boulder called me and said, is
Jack there, which is never a good question. You know
you're going to hear some bad news and maybe pass out,
so they want they want somebody there with you. I
said yes, and she said there's a fire in your neighborhood.
Everything is not fine. And I had a picture in
(06:41):
my mind of a corner of the house being gone,
or maybe the curtains having caught em fire. But then
she said it's gone, it's all gone. Oh gosh, the
house exploded before the flames even got there because it
was so hot. Wow. I have a few tears in
my eyes. Um. When we came back, we stood at
(07:03):
the foundation and looked down into the hole that was
left the house Jack built, my hand gone, the antique violin,
all her diaries gone, and everything had fallen down into
the foundation, and you could still see the words on
the pages, even though everything was all burned, and some
of that was my journals. Oh my god, I'm so sorry.
(07:24):
It was quite a lot. Candy and Jack had less
than when they started. And I would also say that
the fire was kind of the beginning of our splitting
up to their marriage didn't survive the fire. Candy says
that was partly because Jack's connection to the place was
incinerated along with all their stuff. The emotional link was
(07:47):
broken when the material anchors gave way, and he wanted
to leave, to go someplace new. Candy wanted to stay,
to start again where they were in normal life, you know,
without the extremes of like fires and floods. Think it
can be kind of tempting to imagine there's the world
of stuff and then there's the world of our personal relationships, right,
But it sounds like those two worlds aren't completely as
(08:09):
strictly separate. No, they're not, particularly when some of that
stuff is a house that you've put your heart and
soul into and your stuff is part of the picture
that you have, and the picture has your relationships in it,
and it has your stuff in it. But when all
of that stuff has gone and the picture has changed
that dramatically, it changes your personal relationship as well. I
(08:31):
think years and years ago, I found a half used
yellow legal pad at my mom's house. On the top page,
neat straight line had been drawn down the middle, and
there was a short list of stuff on either side,
elemental stuff like car or house. I don't remember all
(08:53):
the items exactly because they're obscured by the big wave
of feelings that hit me when I realized what I
was looking at. I was looking at my parents divorce.
I'd know only hadn't hired a lawyer to expense it,
but I'd never considered the mechanics of a d i
y version of marital dissolution, like two people sitting at
(09:13):
a table with a pen and a pad, dividing all
their worldly possessions on either side of a sketched line.
It was such a sad and humble piece of paper,
but also deeply moving to me because it was their
alternative to court dates and legal battles that would have
divided the assorted possessions of twenty years together. For a while,
(09:35):
that sheet of paper itself was really precious to me.
We keep things for all sorts of reasons. One of
the most powerful emotional reasons is sentimental value, where people
will really value something which is of no worth to
anyone else, but objects form part of our identities. That's
(09:56):
Bruce again, our developmental psychologist, who, for what it's worth,
has a soft spot for horror movie posters and golden
eraw Hollywood stuff and a sidebar. If his voice rings
familiar to you die hard, deeply human fans out there,
it's because he made an appearance on the Spooked episode
in season one, or maybe you just went to high
school with him or something. He says that our ability
(10:17):
to own things and to catch feelings for him is
historically linked to the way we grow our food. So,
you know, when we transition from hunter gatherers into sort
of settling down and farming and raising cattle and things
like that, and then going off to fight wars, we
had to have a system of rules, which meant that
when we came back from the wars, we had our property.
Is it the case that throughout history we've had really
(10:38):
different understandings of what kinds of things are eligible for ownership. Yeah,
so that's absolutely true. So that was the origin of
a lot of the misunderstandings with the invasion of North
America because the indigenous people didn't have a concept of
anyone owning the land. That seemed ridiculous. And that's why
they sold something like Manhattan for forty two hours or
(11:00):
whatever it was, because they didn't have a kind of
understanding how that could ever be a binding agreement. And
now in that same Manhattan, we've expanded our concept of
ownership to encompass almost mythical realms. You can own other
people's debt or soybeans that haven't been planted yet. You
can shot for shoes twenty four hours a day without
(11:22):
putting on any to leave your own house. You can
order custom bubbleheads or a bag of Ladybugs delivered to
your door front of twenty bucks. Our world is a
veritable bonanza of sale stuff and ownership. I worked with
(11:46):
one lady, very complex lady, for about ten ten years
after she had the miscarriage. She was acquiring and awarding
baby clothes and baby toys in response to that loss.
That is Joe Cook. She's the director of Hoarding Disorders
UK and she works with people whose stuff threatens to
(12:07):
overwhelm the rest of their lives. She got into the
business of organizing and decluttering because of her own experience
with her dad. After my father died, it took me
four months to clear the family home out. He was Polish.
He grew up during the war. He remembers his parents
sacrificing their food to give to him. He hated any
(12:29):
kind of food waste, but he also hated throwing anything away.
There are people that have emotional attachments to things where
they find it difficult to let go of an empty
Chris packet a newspaper from thirty years ago. Acquiring and
keeping stuff can be a self soothing maneuver, a response
(12:50):
to loss or uncertainty or scarcity, the emotional installation, as
I call it. I think we can all relate to
how we responded to the pandemic. I mean, who didn't
go out and buy more petrol, Who didn't go out
buy more Loo rolls or extra tins of soup? In
terms of responding to anxious times. But by the time
(13:11):
a prospective client calls Joe. Their lives have usually reached
a crisis point. People might not be able to sleep
in their bed, cook on their oven, or be able
to use a bath, or it might well be that
the hoarding has attracted vermin. It can be hard to
ask for help because hoarding has been so stigmatized in
pop culture, but that's changing. The World Health Organization now
(13:33):
treats hoarding behaviors as part of a medical condition. But
letting go of stuff can be hard for a lot
of us. The declutterer Maria Condo is like an international superstar.
Joe notes that a history of scarcity might make someone
afraid to toss out even extraneous items, and grief might
make throwing away a loved one's bathrobe feel like a
(13:55):
denigration of their memory. People are now recognizing that actually,
body isn't about people that are lazy and dirty. It's
getting people to recognize and to understand and look at.
We call it the meaning and the mess, the meaning
in the mess. Well, let's turn back to Candy, who
we left standing over a particularly meaningful mess, looking into
(14:17):
the ashes of her home with Jack. Their split was
hard and messy at first, but over time, temper is
cool and Candy moved into a house outside of Boulder, Colorado,
near enough to Jack's new place, but on the days
the kids spent with her, they could see him flashing
a mirror from his porch to say hello. And after
a walk one day, Candy and a friend stood talking
(14:38):
in her new home when something caught their eye. We
were standing oh by a window, and we looked up
and she said, oh, my god, is that smoke. My
landline was ringing and it was a reverse nine one
one call saying you need to evacuate, And I said,
I think we need to go over to Jack's and
(15:00):
get stuff out of his house. Another fire was headed
their way, and both Candy and Jack's new houses were
in its path. Jack, at that time was headed out
of town on vacation with his new wife, but Candy
caught him on the phone. Do you want me to
go over and get anything? Jack just kind of rolled
his eyes into there she goes again, catastrophizing it was
(15:23):
it was a pattern in our relationship. Everything is not fine.
And then about twenty minutes later he called back and
he said, well, maybe there's a few things you could get.
Candy and her friend raced over, and it was already
so hot that they were afraid the paint on the
car would melt. Jack's house sitters had already fled. They
(15:45):
left the door open, so Candy and her friend just
ran in started putting stuff in boxes, two computers, Jack's briefcase,
which was essentially his office, the art hanging in the
kid's rooms. By the time we left, I could see flames.
We then, probably three hours um, someone called me and
said that they had heard the propane tank at his
(16:05):
house explode. It burned to the ground. He lost everything.
Oh my god. Not everyone would drive into the smoking
heart of a wildfire, risking life and limb to save
a few boxes of stuff for her ex husband, even
after being dismissed as overreactive after the hard divorce. But
Candy understood what was really at stake, and she knew
(16:26):
exactly what losing a home and all the things inside
it could do to somebody's whole life. I think it
was us against the fire. In my mind, it was like, God,
damn it, this is not going to happen a second time.
We are not going to lose everything a second time.
Bruce Hood argues that our strong compulsion to own and
(16:47):
keep things is a basic impulse potentially driven by evolutionary forces.
Collecting property might be a way of signaling our status,
that our stuff was essentially proof of our fitness. Chest
pass to Bruce think that humans are inclined to competition
because of well, we were competing to reproduce. And the
(17:07):
more that you have, the more that you're signaling your
competence or your ability to provide for future generations. So
there's a kind of real imperative to China accumulate as
much as you can control. According to this theory, our
possessions were one way to signal status, dominance power. But
of course our attachment to stuff isn't driven only by
(17:29):
ancient forces. It's also driven by ads on Instagram or
the fancy window displays on Fifth Avenue. The TV commercials
were the hottest. A list actor looks into the middle
distance with an expression of sensuous boredom to help selk alone,
like it's marketing man, think about something like a celebrity endorsement.
All right, that was something which was meant by John
(17:51):
Watson is a psychologist academic footnote here. John Watson American
active during the first half of the twentieth century known
for advertising campaigns that appeal to consumers. Deep psychological means
if you realize that if you pair certain desirable things together,
people make the association that owning one will achieve the other.
And so he just figured, let's get all these celebrities,
(18:11):
these heroes that people worship to smoke certain brands of
cigarettes or use certain toothpastes, and then that's why people
would buy it in an attempt to emulate their heroes. Hi,
I'm Dessa, host of the self referential hit program Deeply Human,
and fans often ask Dessa, with your dulcet voice and
(18:31):
poignant insights on human behavior, what sort of nonstick cookwear
could you recommend? Is there anything that's easy to clean
an oven safe? Well, let me tell you. When I'm
not cooking up another episode of Deeply Human, you can
find me at the stove using Dessa's Deep Dishes brand
cookery items. I'm too busy cleaning up of the podcast
(18:52):
to words to worry about cleaning up pots and pants.
Enough already, James Faub. When you've got your own brand
of cookery items, holler. Big ad agencies launch huge campaigns
trying to link consumer goods with status and prestige and
then pushing in exactly the opposite direction. Is a blogger
(19:15):
named Mr Money Mustache, a dude who has been called
the Frugal Guru by The New Yorker. What I realized
at one point is that I hadn't just started a blog.
I started sort of a fake ironic cult. Pete aideny
a k a. Mr. Money Mustache is like a cross
between a cartoon gold prospector and a counterculture warrior fighting
(19:37):
conspicuous consumption. He got Internet famous by advocating a low
spend lifestyle and a really aggressive saving strategy. But before
Pete had any money or a mustache, he was a
boy in a small town of Caledonia in Canada. It's
a working class community with a simple lifestyle. You don't
really have much to compare yourself against. And I think
(19:58):
that's a really healthy thing, because human nature is to
compare ourselves with the richest people and then wonder why
we can't have that. My dad was a frugal guy
and he liked to keep things reasonable, So we were
always like the last family to get the cool stuff,
the last one to get a microwave, of and last
one to get a nicer TV or VCR, all these
nighties things that other people had. But what I realized
(20:21):
later they were fairly well off, like, you know, fairly
middle income, probably higher than some of my friends. But
we had a lot less stuff. And Pete made note
it was important not to spend too much of what
you earned. When he first got a tech job in
the US, he thought he was making a killing. But
(20:42):
my co workers are like, oh, yeah, it's just enough.
You know, things are so expensive these days. But he
built his life to cause less. He biked the commute,
for example, instead of leasing sleek new wheels. The reason
I could do that is because I chose to buy
a house that was, you know, within ten miles of
work or less. And they were driving their mw is
in from a super distant suburb because like, we looked
(21:03):
the same and we had the same salary. But I
was just able to save like more than half of it,
and they were saving sometimes zero, going further and further
into debt over the years. Meanwhile, he was going in
the other direction, saving and investing a considerable chunk of
his take home pay, which was possible because he wasn't
buying a ton of stuff, and within about seven or
(21:26):
eight years that was enough to live off forever, just
passively off of the you know, the dividends and income
from owning a few shares. Those of you familiar with
the Fire movements are no doubt yelling at the radio
by now, But for the uninitiated, Pete is one of
many finance writers connected to a lifestyle trend sometimes referred
to by the acronym fire financial independence retire Early devotees
(21:50):
save up to sevent of their annual earnings and are
generally very eager to talk with you about it. Individual
mileage berries. But our good rule of thumb is you
can retire or in about ten years if you're willing
to live humble and stay super disciplined. The savings at
up and according to Mr money Mustache, that doesn't have
to mean crazy sacrifices. Just think of it this way.
(22:11):
Whatever you're spending is, does anybody in your country live
on half of your level of spending? And I'm sure
that answer is yes. And then is it possible that
any of those people are happy, having like fulfilling, great
happy lives, maybe even more fulfilling than your life. Well,
you know there's millions of people in every country, so
you're damn right there is. The fire movement has definitely
(22:34):
received some heat from being cheap, but Mr money Mustache
explains it's really about clarifying your priorities. Does buying a
new wide screen TV really make you happier than if
you just played with your kids for all the hours
that you spent working to buy the TV. Mustachio Ism
isn't about self denial, and the lifestyle isn't all that monastic.
(22:56):
I like to use the term slightly less ridiculous because
it's still ridiculous. Like Mustachians, we all live luxurious lives.
We can do air travel, we live in climate control houses,
we even have cars. But we're just being slightly less
ridiculous than other people. It's not a life spent in
recliners either were Early retirement is about it. It's not
about quitting work. It's about freeing you to do your
(23:18):
best work. At the heart of the Mustache there is
a message that is as much about ethics as it
is about finance. My goal with Mr Ronie Mustache is
to make it a marketing project, to make frugality be
an aspirational thing. For rich people. That's positive on on
the world, the earth, and the ecosystem, as well as
your your wallet. There's a photo you might have seen
(23:45):
it online that's supposed to be a complete inventory of
Gandhi's possessions at the time of his death. Spectacles, two
pairs of sandals, a pocket watch, a prayer book, like
a dozen or so items laid neatly on a piece
of cloth. You could fit the entire estate into a
kindergartener's backpack. People quibble over whether or not he owned
(24:06):
a mattress or a desk in addition to the pictured items,
whether his iconic spinning wheel was still in his possession
at exactly this time. But looking at this photo, the
man's commitment to a simple, spare existence is like genuinely breathtaking.
A pair of Gandhi's sandals sold at auction for just
north of dollars, and the new owner, one presumes, wasn't
(24:30):
gonna wear him. It was the thrill of owning a
piece of history. Humans are an owning animal in part
because we can be settled lives allow us to keep
more than we can carry, and in part we acquire
our cash of things to compete with one another, maybe
for mating rights other forms of social status. The ever
(24:52):
present title pull of advertising pressures us to spend more,
to own more, and then to upgrade to the new model.
And in the hardest times of our lives, we might
keep things because it's just too hard to let them go,
even if they don't make us happy anymore, even if
we have more than we can use, Even as the
water rises around us, our fists want to hold tight
(25:15):
to the objects that might weigh us to the bottom. Okay, guys,
I have got to get some rest before van call tomorrow.
So for parting thought on stuff and our complicated relationship
to it, let's go back to candy. Do you think
about stuff and material possessions differently than other people? Do
I do? I pack up some things, put them on
(25:38):
a bed close to the front door, and alert a
few of the neighbors, and the box says in case
of fire, and all they have to do is run
in and grab a few things. But every year that
box gets smaller because there are fewer things that I
think are really that important. Every year I think I
would just start over. I don't owned that there are
(26:00):
things that I really am so attached to that I
couldn't go on with life without them. Deeply Human is
a BBC World Service in American public media co production
with I Heart Media. It's written and hosted by Medssa.
Find me online at dssa on Instagram and Dessa Darling
(26:22):
on Twitter, and you can find my cookwear on your
next holiday whish list. Hey, every cooks wish desas Deeps.
I'm worried about you. Shut up, James, I hate you.
(26:43):
Those three words were forbidden in my house when I
was a kid. There were just too serious, too mean.
On the next Deeply Human, we're investigating hatred, that verbot
and emotion, its role in culture wars, difficult family dynamics,
and the cesspool of social media. And we'll get some
hopeful psychological insights too. Why do we hate? And how
(27:05):
can we stop? And if you've been enjoying the podcast
so far, take a moment to pin a little review
we read each and everyone. Thanks for listening, and I'll
meet you back here for the next round.
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