Quoth Paul Graham:
Once
you've accumulated a certain amount of stuff, it starts to own you
rather than the other way around. I know of one couple who couldn't
retire to the town they preferred because they couldn't afford a place
there big enough for all their stuff. Their house isn't theirs; it's
their stuff's.
And unless you're extremely organized, a house
full of stuff can be very depressing. A cluttered room saps one's
spirits. One reason, obviously, is that there's less room for people in
a room full of stuff. But there's more going on than that. I think
humans constantly scan their environment to build a mental model of
what's around them. And the harder a scene is to parse, the less energy
you have left for conscious thoughts. A cluttered room is literally
exhausting.
I'm often asked how many blogs I read. The
answer: increasingly few, especially after this morning. I've just
burnt a chunk of time reducing the number of feeds in my RSS reader
from 30 or so to 19. This wasn't the first round of cuts; when started
RSS-reading, I piled everything under the sun in there, aiming, I
assume, to construct some sort of bustling informational paradise.
Needless to say, this setup rapidly grew hopelessly cluttered. Wielding
the shears with merciless abandon, I've trimmed my blog garden down to
the following:
- The delightfully varied 3Quarksdaily, which I happen to write for myself
- Still the finest curated collection of general fascinating internet things, Jason Kottke's blogioneering Kottke.org
- Paul Graham — like, doi
- Ben Casnocha: The Blog, as if you couldn't already tell by the frequency with which I reference him
- My longest-standing daily read, Marginal Revolution
- The ceaselessly-championed-by-me but somewhat rarely updated Waggish
- Merlin Mann's 43Folders, and though it hasn't been particularly update-y lately, the recent posts merit dozens of re-readings
- Neat-stuff accretion Cool Hunting, which I've for some reason been ignoring until very recently when I happened to take a glance and think, "Hey, this stuff is pretty neat"
- Information Aesthetics, which holds me over between Tuftes
- Robin Hanson's Overcoming Bias, for when I need a hit of humanity perceived as a bunch of mating signals (and I often do)
- Less Wrong, the community version of Overcoming Bias where I'm only a tantalizing eight "karma points" away from posting myself
- Roger Ebert,
who has proven to be just as articulate and thoughtful a blogger as he
is a film critic, and who is particularly astute on the subject of
midcentury midwestern childhood
- Edward Champion's Reluctant Habits, because he has the capacity to get a lot angrier than I can (read: angry at all) about stuff
- The Documentary Blog, as I loves me some documentaries
- The Sound of Young America, for which I also happen to write myself
- The Elegant Variation, the first litblog I ever read
- The ambient trifecta: Ambient Music Blog, Low Light Mixes and AmbientBlog.net
I haven't gone far enough. Nor have I gone far enough trimming back any
of my life's gardens. Nor do I believe I could ever afford to stop:
where my mind once sought a steady ideal and tried to come up with
strategies to realize it, it's now in the simpler mode of constant,
continuous winnowing. This is as true for RSS feeds as it is for the
rest of my media diet — its print journalism component, for instance,
is basically down to The Economist and the New York Times Book review, and I've semi-failed to pay much attention to either in the past few months — as it is for writing — not for nothing is "the maximum amount of information within the minimum word count" my credo — as it is for day-to-day schedules, physical environments and the stuff that fills them.
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But
this is a difficult mental routine to maintain, and mastering the art
of cutting detritus loose — let alone separating the detritus from the
valuable — is even tougher, given the human brain's overperception of
loss. When I interviewed Merlin Mann on The Marketplace of Ideas,
we discussed a modern fantasy: hiring guys to take all your things away
and bring back only what you actually use over the following weeks. How
much of our junk would any of us, in all honesty, get back? A third? Maybe
half? Moving house, to an extent, provides a natural opportunity for
this sort of procedure, which may be why my internal
countdown-to-relocation clock seems to be calibrated on a three-ish
year cycle. Too much time in one place, and it fills with kipple.
As
for time, so for space. I suppose I'm lucky that, while I'm a
mid-twentysomething and thus relegated to a succession of small
apartments, I also prefer a multiplicity of small,
minimally-designed spaces, both aesthetically and intellectually. I
fear not that my next place will have too little room, but too much; I
worry not that I will have too few possessions to my name, but too
many. My dream is to have several available dwellings, absolutely no
larger than I require, in select locations across the globe. The homes
I desire bear no nooks or crannies amenable to the accumulation of
tchotchkes, knick-knacks, whimsicalities and other material of
nightmares, nor do they present sprawling stretches of open wall or
floor that sing siren songs of "fill me, fill me." While I find the
look of smaller, emptier rooms pleasurable, what's more important is
that I myself am actually better — sharper, more capable, deadlier — when I'm in them.
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A
recent epiphany — experienced, naturally, while tidying up — suggested
that one's home, as well as all the other locations one inhabits,
temporally and psychologically, is primarily an environment for
thought. As Graham writes above, clutter exhausts; I personally find
that a surfeit of discrete objects seriously get under my skin. The
less there is around, the better I think, and that holds for concrete
surroundings as well as for computing — as the above-linked Tufte once
remarked, "No matter how cool your interface is, it would be cooler if
there were less of it" — and for the sonic background — no mistake that
I link to three ambient music blogs. This is what repays, and then
some, the perpetual effort to excise stuff.
I consider the
double-edged-swordiness of possessions to go hand-in-hand with another
of the useful, far-reaching (and few) realizations of my adult life: experience
is the important factor, no matter what the entity, event or concept
considered. Perhaps a representative culinary example. I used to
believe that I simply disliked Italian food because, for most of my
life, my experience of the cuisine consisted of gigantic portions and
relative blandness: enormous bowls of monoflavor pasta; endless
punishing, indistinguishable layers of lasagna; monotonous loaves of
garlic bread stretching to infinity. Turns out I only disliked the
Olive Garden-y treatment of Italian food I'd been getting in
restaurants, which, at least in most of what I've seen in the States,
hews to quantity and away from quality. There indeed exist Italian
joints that I find choice, and they invariably serve much smaller
portions.
It's a common populist joke to poke fun at "fancy"
restaurants' tendency to charge higher prices for relatively tiny
amounts of food when compared to their more mainstream counterparts,
but it only works if you consider food to be a fungible good. I don't;
in fact, the older I get, the less I consider to be truly fungible. At
this point, almost nothing is simply a product to be purchased wherever
it's cheapest. Everything has some experience component, and in
the case of comestibles, it's a significant one. While it may well be
possible to obtain the "same" food, in that it's made of many of the
same molecules, from the convenience store down the street as from the
downtown eatery, the two experiences bear only a trivial similarity.
(The same goes for buying the "same" record in a clean, well-organized
shop versus yanking it from the bottom of the umpteenth disorganized
Goodwill bin of the day.) Not being immortal and thus obligated to have
the best experiences I can, I'm ready and willing to shell out the
bucks for a superior experience in any venue. (And in the case of food,
reduced serving size is a benefit in and of itself; cheaper restaurants
charge less for more, but they tend to serve amounts of food that
aren't large enough to produce viable leftovers but leave me on the
uncomfortable side of fullness nonetheless, so I'd gladly fork over
more money just for the superior experience of a non-distended stomach.)
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In Jim Jarmusch's The Limits of Control,
the Isaach De Bankolé-portrayed Lone Man frequents museums, viewing
only one painting per visit but experiencing that painting to the
fullest. (He also, as a matter of course, orders two small cappuccinos in two
small cups at cafés, avoiding the inferior drinking experience of a
single large cappuccino.) Perhaps that's a suitable metaphor for how
I'd like certain parts of life to be: simple, streamlined, focused,
unencumbered by obligation and admitting no room for nonsense,
vacillation or distraction. The natural enemy of such a state is the
immortal creeping kudzu of mediated attention sinks, mental noise and,
of course, stuff. I suspect the trick is to build your life in such a
way as to let as little of it through the walls as possible in the
first place; filters any closer to you are less predictable and much
more of a hassle to use effectively. Better a short, incomplete stack
in the in box than a tall, comprehensive one to sift through every time
you sit down.
When you minimize the stuff, the noise, the shiny
baubles and the like, what, then, takes on even more importance than
the massive importance it held before? Your mind. I find that the fewer
tools of distraction I've got, the greater the difference it makes
whether or not I've put my brain's house in order. Spartan surroundings
reveal, starkly, whether I'm in a strong mindset or a crappy one;
absent distractions, a focused, open mind makes a heaven and a messy,
clouded mind makes a hell. And that's the other side of the coin to the
pursuit of aesthetic and physical environmental clarity: you have to
make your mind an interesting enough place to handle it. Taking away
all the stuff that can be taken away underscores how vital it is to
cultivate all that can't be.
Such a
rule has the advantage of sifting out the present’s flash-in-the-pan
chaff so I won’t have to, sure, but a 25-year anime statute of
limitations also keeps my viewing centered on a time when the form
was... different. I’m not a things-were-better-before kind of
guy, and I won’t even claim that anime as a whole was somehow a “higher”
art back then. There’s just something special about the pure aesthetics
of the anime of the late 1970s and early 1980s that seems to have since
been extinguished. Maybe a real otaku could tell me what’s changed; I
can’t pin it down, but something has.
