The sad T-shirt
Enough is enough
Are you resetting with me?
Are you joining me for January Reset?
Here are some frequently asked questioned if you’re unsure.
The sad T-shirt
A pair of stonewashed jeans made of stretchy denim fabric hung in the Edgars in Church Street and presented itself to fifteen-year-old me as an item of extreme coolness.
Edgars was a major clothing retail store in South African back in the day. A friend whose father worked there all his life said he often used to think South Africa didn’t need a Home Affairs department because every South African over 18 had an Edgars account. Ha ha.
The jeans were never going to be mine, I knew, but on the same day – this is back in the Eighties – not far from the jeans, was a rail of those sad leftover items of clothing no one wanted. One of them was an enormous cap-sleeve pink T-shirt with a picture of the Eiffel Tower whose tip produced the i on the word ‘Paris’, which was picked out in sequins above it.
Where would this ugly thing go once it became clear that not even at the sale price was anyone going to purchase it? And if I, who loved those stonewash jeans, didn’t buy them, who would and what would happen to them if no one did?
This must have been the first time I thought about ‘stuff’ and associated ‘stuff’ with ‘worry’ because I think about the XXXL pink Paris T-shirt with sequins quite a lot.
What’s really worrying now is that, whatever state it is in, that particular top still exists in some form or another here on earth. It didn’t disappear because I am no longer in the same space as it feeling sorry for it for being so obviously unwanted.
Magically thinking that thrift will save me from disaster
I am decluttering. I’d hoped never to have to do it again because getting divorced gave me a fresh perspective on belongings, space, privilege, necessity, want vs need, and waste. I’ve been strict, frugal and disciplined this past decade.
Then something happened to me almost sneakily.
As a result of increased attention to pared-down living driven by climate anxiety, drought and watching people lose everything during the Covid years, I’ve become a bit hoard-y.
Saving used-but-clean tinfoil, glass jars, orange rinds for cleaner, buckets of bathwater and candle wax (ffs!) is one thing. But when you long ago made peace with the fact that you are also a nostalgic hoarder of books and notes and letters — which you’ve tried to keep under control by being strict about storage and organisation — there’s very little room left for actual living in amongst all the storage and organisation.
Anxiety drives acquisition.
But stuff causes anxiety.
I-kean’t
I only broke one thing in the flat we were staying in in Berlin: a plain white coffee mug from Ikea. So we tootled off on the train, got out three stops later, and walked to Ikea.
I was quite excited. We don’t have Ikea in South Africa.
South Africa has no idea how lucky it is.
It’s a disorienting and inescapable maze. You walk in and you cannot walk out without first trailing through corridors and corridors, and more than one floor, past 17 ‘children’s bedrooms’, 29 ‘kitchens’ and 33 ‘living rooms’ and an infinity of baskets and shelves with products on them.
You literally cannot get out. You have to follow the path from the entrance to the exit – and it’s a very, very long path. We found the mug after what felt like about three hours into the ordeal and then we still had about two hours to get to a till.
This shop-floor planning is praised as genius by many. It is meant to be disorienting — real life seems very far away when you’re inside — and to force you to be there for long even if, like us, you were just there to get one thing.
I felt vaguely sick when we finally escaped, and I was wiped out. We went home and lay down from a deep tiredness that went beyond the physical and entered the realms of ‘what, actually, is the point of humans?’
How much is enough?
I read somewhere that the ‘right amount of stuff’ is ‘the stuff you fully and regularly use’. Trying to define what ‘enough’ is, has become quite an academic exercise, and an important one, considering that too few people have way too much and too many people have way too little.
My mother last week reminded me of an Afrikaans saying, which is a great guideline for how to manage the fabric in your home (clothes, towels and bedding):
Een aan die bas; een in die was; een in die kas.
It means ‘one on the body, one in the wash, one in the cupboard’.
Here some memorable articles I’ve read in recent times about property and ‘stuff’.
This academic article is the result of researchers trying to find out what a set of material requirements are for achieving human flourishing. What, exactly, does a household need for its well-being?
This is a well-referenced article listing statistics about how consumed we are by stuff. Most of the statistics are from the US (for instance, there are 300 000 items in the average American house — and one out of ten Americans still rent storage space), but since the rest of the world takes its lead from that large-looming place, they do paint a more wider picture by extrapolation.
The writer Anne Patchett, whose novel The Dutch House I recommended last week, wrote an essay almost three years ago about wanting to get rid of her possessions. It came quite soon after helping my mother pack up the house she and my father had lived in for 45 years so it really made an impact.
Here’s an article about whether we can change our addiction to consumerism.
Look forward to the January reset. And stuff. I am surrounded by stuff, a part of me wants to get rid of Everything.
“Had I imagined that, at some point, twelve people would be in my house wanting champagne?
Everything about the glasses disappointed me: their number, their ridiculous height, the idea of them sitting up there all these years, waiting for me to throw a party.” I loved the Ann Patchett piece. The entire section of confronting the glassware was just so accurate.