I Want Off the Accumulation Treadmill
By: Beth Bruno
Tags: Mindfulness, Lifestyle, Minimalism, Life, Self

I Want Off the Accumulation Treadmill

Things I am learning from helping my mom clean out her house

Photo by freestocks.org on Unsplash

Crawling out from under the pile of a lifetime of accumulated possessions can be a challenge. Most of us own more than we have ever needed and in the end, someone has to dispense with all of it. Many people are rethinking their relationship to material possessions, as is evidenced by the “simplicity” movement and “tiny” homes. I am among them.

I have been helping my mother clean out her house. She is 80 years old and is ready to start letting go of things. She doesn’t want me to have to do this task on my own after she is gone, so we have been pecking away at it for almost a year now.

We have made some progress, but have so much further to go. As I loaded my car up again this weekend, I found myself thinking about what we would be doing if we weren’t boxing her things up to haul off. Maybe we would have watched a movie together. Or gone to lunch. Or looked at pictures that we have set aside to look at.

Mom is like so many of us, me included. She has a house full of things she does not need. Things that were once useful no longer are, and much of it was never really useful in the first place. Her cabinets and closets are full of things that felt necessary at one point in her life. Now, as we open another door to the contents of a lifetime, we are filling boxes and trash bags and clearing it out.

I am glad I am able to help her do this. It is hard work, and I know sometimes it is hard for her to let go of things, but I don’t mind. And I love hearing the stories I would not otherwise hear.

Like the story of the dishes that I decided to take home with me. When she bought those dishes, she had just bought her first Cadillac. The porter at the swanky department store who carried her dishes out swooned when he saw her car. He said, “I just KNEW you would have a car like this!” Mom was so pleased that he thought she looked like someone who would own a Cadillac. This is a story I would never have known if I had been doing this by myself.

I am grateful that mom is still here to do this with me. But how many of us end up cleaning out someone else’s possessions when they die? And how much of that stuff ends up in the trash or the donation bin? My father-in-law had two huge barns stuffed to the gills when he died. He always said all that stuff wasn’t his problem — he would be dead. But someone had to clean it out.

These thoughts were on my mind when I took a big load to the Goodwill. I was astonished at how much stuff was piled up in large dumpster-sized bins at the donation center. So much stuff! All this stuff that someone really thought they needed at one time. This looks like insanity to me.

After I unloaded all Mom’s boxes, I got in my car and drove over the mountains home. I live three hours away and had lots of time to reflect on the waste of our materialistic society, and my participation in it. I spent that whole trip thinking that I do not want to spend the rest of my life storing, cleaning and organizing a bunch of stuff that I will just get rid of in the end anyway.

I buy things to get rid of them, and then go buy some more.

The cycle of accumulating and purging has been a regular part of my life for a long time. I have moved many times in my life and every time I say, “Never again! I will never have more stuff than I need!”

But every time, I forget. I get lulled back into the idea that it would be nice to have XYZ, or life would be easier with a different ABC.

And having our devices listen to everything we say doesn’t help either. All you have to do is have a conversation with a friend over lunch where you mention that you are ready to replace your kitchen faucet, and after lunch when you check your phone, you have 3 notifications from faucet companies. No wonder we can’t resist buying things.

We are encouraged at every turn to buy, buy, buy. Accumulation is supposed to make us happy. But the only people really getting happy from our accumulation are the people selling us the stuff.

I thought a lot about all the money I have spent on things that I ended up getting rid of in the end. All the money I could have saved instead, creating a nest egg for my retirement, or to go to Italy. I think of how many times I have cleaned out the shed and had a garage sale, or taken loads to a donation center. I buy things to get rid of them, and then go buy some more.

How much of my life’s precious resources — time and money — have been squandered because I have bought into the advertiser’s mantra that their product will make me happy? I want to turn this paradigm on its head and find a way out of the vicious cycle of accumulation and purging.

Here is my manifesto of owning less:

1. I want to have only what I need, love and use.

2. I want to develop a stronger sense of what is enough.

3. I want to be satisfied with less.

4. I want to have space in my closets and cabinets. Empty space. Not so I can fill it, but so I will feel like I can breathe. Space for the sake of spaciousness.

5. I want to have very little stuff that will need to be dumped in the landfill or donated when I die.