What's with all these things?

Everything this guy owned sat in a pile in the middle of his room. Not just at some snapshot in time, but all the time. It was on a sheet so that if he had to leave at a moment’s notice, he could just tie the corners together, pick up everything, and go.

In retrospect, I guess he had a past that was always threatening to catch up with him. Or maybe he was insane. Or both.

I had just moved out of my parents’ house. I was eighteen and still in high school. It was my senior year, but once I turned eighteen, I started staying out with my friends after midnight, my teenager curfew. Then my mom said, “Hey, as long as you live in my house, your curfew is still midnight.”

Oh. Well, that’s fair. So I took the unexpected solution and moved out two days later.

I moved into an efficiency apartment that was $250 a month, got a sofa and some bookshelves from a thrift store, and I was on my own. I shared a living room (with a payphone,) kitchen, bathrooms with all these older guys that this was as much as they needed or wanted or had. Including crazy Joe with his two pairs of pants held up by a piece of rope and his other stuff on a sheet, ready to go.

Time passed, I learned new skills, I “moved up.” Meaning I got more stuff.

The peak, if you can call it that, was when I had a 4200 square foot house with a three car garage into which it was difficult to fit cars. By that time I had the stuff from me, my wife, three kids, and my mother-in-law. It seemed more things came into my house daily.

Then my wife said she hated living in the area and then I was in this huge house alone, trying to sell a place where you could almost measure room sizes in acres. The houses back in Maryland after that were smaller, but felt fuller.

The worst things moment for me was a few months after I left behind basically everything I had, including my wife. That night, I was down to only what fit in a Dodge Avenger. The trunk is surprisingly roomy, but that’s not very much.

Now I was living in a warehouse. The office area was enclosed by what was basically a big wooden box and I set up a bedroom above it. After a night where I got a nasty splinter in heel from the bare plywood floor, I went to a thrift store to find some kind of cheap area rug.

Piled up with a bunch of them was a Chinese area rug with a distinctive light purple border. I recognized this exact rug. I’d bought it for $750 at an auction and an appraiser friend had marveled at the price, as she said it was worth at least $4000.

After a year or two, it was dirty from less than careful use and my wife said it had to go, and a different donation group took it away. Now I was looking at it rolled up in a thrift store pile priced at $60.

I could stop thinking about the hours of work I’d put in to make the money to buy that rug. It was a notable event when I bought it because I also learned some things about how to tell the difference between “good” and “bad” Chinese rugs.

When it came home and I unrolled it, my mother-in-law turned to my wife and said, “Did you ever think we would have such nice things?” That was one of probably only five positive things she said during the thirteen years she lived with us.

I felt just horrible at a time that I already was feeling horrible. But how ridiculous is that? These are just things. I elected not to buy it back.

I don’t buy very much any more. It was weird going into Ikea and buying more dishes the other day. Of course, with a new wife that likes cooking for other people, it made sense. Ladling pho into a guest’s hands doesn’t seem like that’s going to work.

We’re going to move again soon. I’m spending more than I can afford even on this one bedroom apartment because of where it is. This move should be pretty easy, because I’m good with not taking things that aren’t easy and there isn’t all that much anyway.

Today, I want to collect experiences, not things. Those will last forever. Some even make for a good story to tell others, like about crazy Joe, or the guy that would get high with his cat, or the two Chinese communists who had so little they shared an 8x8 room comfortably.

Every object I buy has opportunity cost for the experiences I could have instead. Look around. How much lost experience is tied up in things that sit in a box on a shelf for months or years at a time?