All things carry their weight. Sometimes, old possessions can become evergreens, whereas stuff some consider junk could be other people’s precious finds.

We’re finally coming to terms with this. Or, in poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s words:

“If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for the Creator, there is no poverty.”

One concern has grown, especially this time of the year: barely used (and unused), meaningless stuff overflows everywhere you go.

I know many people who only accept presents from others as a way of showing appreciation for whoever took the time and energy to think of them. Most of them have peace of mind when they use those same things as presents to others —a fancy bottle of wine or food delicatessen can be the ideal thing to bring to somebody’s house when invited over for dinner.

But what happens if they bring the present they’ve been given to the house of the person who bought it? It may happen more than we imagine, and classy hosts won’t get sour at it, especially if they themselves do it.

At least, the age of abundance has a market for quality items that people don’t use or stop using, in what has been called a “resale revolution” —at least for pre-owned prestigious items. Even second-hand gifts are a sizeable thing now.

Garages meant for storage

There’s not enough mental and physical space to keep storing the many items that we buy or get from others as presents, finding it difficult to get any utility from them and, hence, justify the space they occupy in paid storage boxes, garages, crawl spaces, sheds, or just sitting around the house. Stuff takes room, mentally and spatially.

The average American spends two and a half days looking for misplaced household items every year. It adds up. As we can observe at home and around us, there’s a reason why a third of homeowners say their garage is too cluttered with things to use for actual parking. Also, 11% of the population rents storage units.

There’s a hoarding paradox taking place: as credit card debt has climbed (and US credit card defaults jumped to the highest level since 2010 due to high inflation and, also, the power of buying things we don’t really need) and the average size of houses has risen from 1,500 sqft in 1973 to 2,200 sqft in 2023, many people feel overwhelmed by stuff to the point of seeking help.

Growing families with children also deal with less-voluminous-but-growing electronic junk that, in one way or another, we keep holding on to. There’s hardly enough time to factory-erase old computers and electronics to dispose of them or give them away safely. They wait for their day somewhere, waiting for their vindication day.

1st Generation iPod in perfect condition… Today

There’s a story around this that should bother me more than it does. When Apple released the very first iPod in late 2001, I lived in Barcelona, where I worked at a tech publishing company; the place where I worked had an agreement with Wired to sell a translated version of the magazine for the Spanish market, and we used to get lots of things to try.

I saw the first iPod and, being a music freak, I bought the one-thousand-euro brick (1st Generation, 5 GB), having a modest salary (priorities in one’s early twenties, I guess); it held 1,000 songs at a decent sound quality (not Neil Young-grade, but it was the best digital compression possible at the time).

The steel-and-white-plastic brick with flywheel was great for a few years. I really used it until telephones engulfed the new category of portable music players, as I was commuting at the time from a town near Barcelona to the city’s World Trade Center by the water, where we had an office with a terrace overlooking the statue of Columbus at the bottom of the Ramblas.

Then, I stored it in its original box and forgot about it at my parents’ house. I and my two siblings quit our parents’ home by that time, and my parents, as it happens so often, didn’t change much of their empty nest setup for years. Our rooms kept having most of our leftovers, and the attic collected even more of our stuff. In our case, hundreds of cassette tapes, CDs, DVDs, books, academic documents, etc.

As it happens, years went by, and when my own family and kids ended up having our own house in France, then Spain, I brought many of those things along, “editing” many boxes of useless, hard-to-get-rid-of stuff along the way. But the 1st Generation iPod stayed at my parents’ house. Then, my parents did an overhaul at their two-story house (not that big by American standards, though quite spacious by European ones). However, it is big enough and with enough storage for me to lose track of the iPod.

Then I did something I should have never done: I went to a couple of online sites to see the actual resell value in 2022 or 2023 of a 1st Gen iPod in perfect condition, with its original cable, little book, and original box. And I saw a few being sold for over 15,000 euros (as in checks, I’ll write it down in letters: fifteen thousand dollars). I will never do such a thing again. Some perceived junk, it turns out, becomes valuable over time, and there are even electronic “heirlooms,” it seems.

New things and old ones, new places and old ones

There’s some hidden lesson in this because no middle-aged person is unaware of the infinite intricacies of serendipity and Murphy’s Law: keep stuff “just in case,” and it will never seem to make sense to do so. Get rid of or lose track of “some” of that stuff, and there will be surprises and one will miss something when it’s too late.

No, I never found my 1st Generation iPod at my parents, and it’s probably buried somewhere among other people’s junk. In Spain, as in the US, one disposes of electronics in a different manner, so there’s a possibility that someone, somewhere in Catalonia, found it on time and got some use of it. One could even buy a second-hand car in good condition for 15,000 euros across the European Union, for popular vehicles are significantly smaller than the most popular in North America’s second-hand market. Oh well.

While we all have to acknowledge that accumulating stuff that we barely need isn’t healthy nor carries any useful utility on our end (it does benefit the distribution companies pushing producers to make things ever-cheaply and as fast as possible, to sell them to us under conditions we won’t refuse, thanks to a tailored algorithm that knows our amygdala cravings more than we probably consciously do), stuff can have a sentimental value and carry “meaning.”

This young Generation X member speaking to you moved companies not much later than he impulse-bought his precious 1st Generation iPod. The next office was at Passeig de Gràcia, the grand boulevard in Barcelona, designed after the big streets in Europe and with little to envy any street in Paris or Vienna. The avenue’s hexagonal tiles, public lights, and two of its iconic buildings were designed by Antoni Gaudí.

From the bachelor pad I lived in back then, the commute to work was a pleasant five-minute walk across beautiful pedestrian streets and Passeig de Gràcia wide’s sidewalk. My place was a small but charming attic apartment in mansard at Carrer dels Boters, a narrow street in the Old City connecting commercial Portaferrissa to the esplanade of the cathedral, site of a well-preserved Roman wall portion and, just in front, a somewhat schematic mural depicted by Picasso at the frontispiece of the modern-brutalist headquarters of the city’s architects.

I didn’t spend much time at the apartment during the week, and on the weekend I visited friends and my parents, and also profited from the city’s activities (not far from the apartment, for example, the district installed a cinema screen to project cinema classics outdoors, free to attend, so I read a lot (heavily borrowing from public libraries), attended plays and concerts—rarely paying, thanks to my work—, and walked everywhere, occasionally taking the train to “leave the city” and venture into neighborhoods that had been autonomous towns before being engulfed by the metropolis.

A constellation of things over the years

There was no time nor intention to collect precious possessions, for I was interested in the content of many cultural artifacts. Still, I didn’t have the time or money to buy art or furnish a comprehensive wardrobe, library, art collection, or discography packed with heirlooms and stuff for keeps. Despite my intentions and early admiration for things I had read about some frugal authors and personalities, from Gandhi to Thoreau and the rest of the usual suspects, to add to my pose as a youngster, I ended up collecting a great deal of stuff.

I met Kirsten when living at that particular bachelor apartment that I didn’t own but rented at an already onerous rate, paying 750 euros for it, or almost one-third of my salary back then. It did the trick, for Kirsten seemed to like my young-Sartre-from-the-Midi facade, LOL. Despite the pose, I still managed to waste a great deal of money on things I didn’t need, from designer clothing to random music albums and DVDs, which added up.

When I moved to that apartment, I got rid of my car; the 1984 VW Golf L (the original, tiny and squared one, five doors model) I had purchased when living outside Barcelona didn’t make sense at all, for I could walk or take the train and metro to do everything, from visiting my parents to go to work, amenities, or the airport, and I didn’t miss a thing of feeling responsible for gas, tickets, insurance, and the cost of maintaining a clunker just for the sake of playing into the conventions and social models of our age.

That part made sense and felt great, and the timing couldn’t have been better, for having fewer expenses allowed me to visit Kirsten in New York City, where she lived at the time, and many more things, like saving money to buy my own bachelor apartment not far from Boters in late 2004. An apartment so small that it made one realize how much stuff we collect by just living a conventional existence adapted to one’s place and time.

That doesn’t mean that we should (or are required to) vow to the conventions of the zeitgeist we fell into and forget that we can decide how we live, where we work, and which people and stuff we decide to have around. Back then, I started to visit natural environments more and more often and also learned about Gaudí’s bad reputation among architects, holistic approaches to human habitation (including permaculture), and many things that I felt were reinstating some of my natural predispositions. For, despite having grown up in the city, both of my parents were born and grew up in rural Spain, so I was drawn to artifacts like old utensils and almanacs like Don Quixote and cavalry books.

Pre-owned stuff

The closest public library to my home had a copy one could borrow of the very expensive (and extensive) comprehensive compilation, in several encyclopedic books, of Catalan folklore and customs, many of them attached to rural living during pre-industrial times and almost completely gone. I found out about rituals, superstitions, and everyday life. I respected Joan Amades, the author, for taking the time to carry out such monumental work on his own and with little actual help when he most needed it.

My roots in other parts of Spain brought me to read forgotten authors talking about long-gone or rapidly disappearing idiosyncrasies that had prevented the “development” of certain parts of rural Spain (which they did). Alfonso Rodríguez Castelao’s Sempre en Galiza was one such work, written by a Spanish Republican and exiled due to the Spanish Civil War.

“Stuff,” I came to realize, was also a part of who we are. And, when some of us have been stripped of tradition when our parents left their backward world for a better life in sterilized, interchangeable urban non-places, we realize if we’re lucky enough to visit the remains of the lost world we never experience, that the little things in everyday life build a character, a way of being. People with weight, not only physical but also spiritual.

Back in the early 2000s, I met a graphic designer who had very particular ideas about the things and goods around us. His particularities were quite pronounced despite that time being a pre-social media epoch of innocence, years before conspiracy theories got to spread like fire, eating our brains out. I remember getting a second-hand piece of cloth (it must have been a jacket or coat, though I can’t confirm this because I don’t remember anymore). When I told him that the clothing item was second-hand, he asked me whether I was bothered by it. The conversation must have developed as follows:

“What do you mean?”
“That item was used by somebody before you. You don’t know anything about that person, do you? His life, his intentions, his circumstances.”
“The store where I got it had washed it before putting it for sale again.”
“I know that. But doesn’t it bother you not knowing anything about the life of what you wear now before it was yours? It would make me uneasy.”

Wearing old clothes

I laughed and brushed the comments off. But something must have bothered me, for I still remember the interaction, even though that particular co-worker was never a close friend. He must have had back then the age I have now, so I probably took his comments as something mentioned with some authority by a professional who was knowledgeable about the look of things, books, people, etc. He was an Italian national living in Barcelona, so he was also more well-traveled at the time.

When I met Kirsten, I was already envisioning quitting my conventional office job to create something along the lines of *faircompanies, even though there wasn’t yet any user-driven video platform like YouTube. By that time, I bought a few books I couldn’t find at the local library, like Yvon Chouinard’s 2005 autobiography and sustainable business manifesto Let My People Go Surfing.

Since by that time, I was the chief editor of a bunch of professional publications, among them one dedicated to fashion that followed the transformation of the garment industry taking place in Europe from locally-produced slow fashion to fast fashion manufactured overseas, I decided to lend my copy of the book to the editor of the fashion publication.

Instead of getting (or inheriting) nice clothes and complements of timely design and capable of transcending seasonal fads, people were impulse buying clothes to such speed that I got word that, sometimes, people never washed the cheap stuff they were buying, simply tossing their sweaters or pants a month or so after buying them. I collected some clippings about attitudes towards fashion that, quite the contrary, advocated for fewer quality-driven items capable of conforming to a decades-long wardrobe.

Among the articles I remember clipping, there was a Vanity Fair or New York Times piece on the Agnelli family and its patriarchal figure, Gianni Agnelli, nicknamed l’Avvocato, head of FIAT and influential figure of Turin, Northern Italy, and Italian industry in general during the so-called years of “Il Sorpasso,” when Italy proudly surpassed the United Kingdom in aggregated GDP.

L’Avvocato, I read, was an elegant gentleman, though an unflashy one; he prioritized sober, sharp clothes of the best quality, and his taste was so timeless that—the article explained—when his grandson grew up to become an adult, was happy to inherit his grandfather’s clothes, wearing them not out of respect, but because how timely and elegant they still felt. Si non e vero e ben trovato (ma è vero in questo caso).

Important books about the “stuff” that makes us, and the world

The book I borrowed for the fashion editor working for the team I led back them was a then-obscure (at least in Spain) book by a German author living in the United Kingdom as a creative writing professor, W. G. “Max” Sebald, called Austerlitz. I probably wasn’t quite ready to read it back then. I gave it a try again shortly after, and I was blown away.

It’s much more than the story of Jacques Austerlitz, one of the many kids of Jewish descent sent to the United Kingdom to escape Nazi-occupied Europe during an event known as Kindertransport. We meet Austerlitz as an adult, as we follow him across the impossible task of trying to make sense of his fragmented accounts of a world that disappeared during World War II: the intricated, rich patchwork that had represented Mitteleuropa before the world wars.

The book explores memory and identity in an erratic and labyrinthine way, very much like our memory sometimes does. I remember the book’s historical reflection crumbling when the protagonist, a very capable adult who has to reconstruct a world with few physical or human traces (cities destroyed and transformed, families exterminated, people from that time wary of speaking of events from the past or simply gone of old age) tries to decipher images, places, and elusive objects somehow connected to him. Some people, it turns out, are stripped of their most elemental connections to identity and even reality.

Today, by forcing ourselves to continuously renovate and edit the things surrounding us, we may be stripping the world we live in of any meaning. These could simply be musings belonging to a middle-aged person realizing that impermanence is a fact, and a speeding one, for that matter; however, they seem to be shared by many.

For some reason, that work colleague from twenty years ago kept my heavily highlighted and annotated book by Yvon Chouinard—I got a used copy to do the same once again not long ago—and I kept Austerlitz (in a translation published by Anagrama, a Barcelona-based house), which I must have at the old country house we fixed in Spain after following me across the places we lived in Barcelona and France.

Reading Dora Bruder in Paris

Years after, I read the short, always fragmentary novels of the French author Patrick Modiano (among them, Dora Bruder, his attempt to follow the steps of a girl through Paris in the early forties before she gets deported by collaborationists to a German camp). Once again, I found the value of “old things.” The stuff we accumulate also has a meaning. Or at least some of it.

In our obsession with getting rid of past traces, we could abandon things that have a use and are better than the stuff replacing them.

Stored things are also potential projects. Many years ago, my father-in-law, who now has Alzheimer’s and hence has lost the ability to recognize me or anybody surrounding him, including his own wife, gave me a bundle of old brushed metal knows he had taken from some cabinet somewhere; I still have those knobs in Spain but never used them. Yet. If I were to use them and install them somewhere with, say, one of my kids, that action would carry much more meaning than simply installing some old knobs in cabinets.

The stories told by Max Sebald, Patrick Modiano, and others remind us that we are also the traces we have around us and leave as a marker, an expression of who we are.

It’s not that we have to “celebrate messiness” for the sake of it as some people vindicate; it’s just that we can’t edit life away from reality or we risk to lobotomize our existence even more than contemporary society is making us do so.

The things helping people with vague/fragmentary memories

Since I read Austerlitz and a bunch of Patrick Modiano short novels while we lived in France, I always felt uneasy when walking in the street and finding a rather usual phenomenon: as people got old and left small apartments unoccupied, unscrupulous relatives and/or contractors charged of revamping dated dwellings to rapidly renting or selling them, would get rid of all sort of objects and even family pictures, which would end in the street, often soaked in the rain as people walked on the side, busy about their lives. No one seemed to care. There’s no time to reflect on the meaning of the things that are precious for some people but considered mere junk for others too busy to do anything but hyper-optimize. Too much clutter? Declutter. Too many questions? It’s none of your business.

This leads me to reflect on why this article came to be. I came to remember this due to a serendipitous occurrence that happened to me a few days ago when we were invited by friends to have dinner at their house.

Among many other things, I talked with our host (a professional of British origin who is married to an Australian and raising children in California) about identity, living far from one’s place of origin, and the bliss of keeping some objects, books, furniture, and other things from the places we’re from, the places we’ve lived, the people we love, our ancestors, etc.

My interlocutor’s father happened to be an obscure professor teaching at a second-rate British University. He also mentioned something that made an impact on me. Among his father’s friends when he was teaching, there was a creative writing professor of German origin who didn’t give much importance to the stuff he wrote. His name? Winfried Sebald.

“‘Max Sebald’?” I asked. “The W. G. Sebald of Austerlitz?'”
“Yup.”