Relentless Inquiry

Cribbed shamelessly from the extremely excellent last hurrah at http://viridiandesign.org, this is my condensed version, which I’ve printed out and put where I can see it EVERY DAY. I have been working on a less-conscious version of this philosophy for the past few months, as I increasingly lose items within my home, clutter and filth accumulates, and I find myself making the wrong tradeoffs between managing my stuff and my stuff demanding maintenance from me. Bruce Sterling’s eagle eye cleaves the usual Gordian knots with his laser vision. Vivat! … And yes, I am nerdy enough that the thought of using “Clear the Accumulator!” as an inspirational rallying cry is, well, damn inspirational. (Tail-swish, grin)

The hours you waste stumbling over your piled debris, picking, washing, storing, re-storing, those are hours and spaces that you will never get back in a mortal lifetime. Basically, you have to curate these goods: heat them, cool them, protect them from humidity and vermin. Every moment you devote to them is lost to your children, your friends, your society, yourself.

It’s not bad to own fine things that you like. What you need are things that you GENUINELY like. Things that you cherish, that enhance your existence in the world. The rest is dross.

1. 1. Do not “economize.”
2. 2. The items that you use every day, should be the best-designed things you can get.
• a. Bed: You’re spending a third of your lifetime in a bed.
• b. Chair: Bad chairs can seriously injure you from repetitive stresses.
• c. Shoes: Shoes are notorious sources of pain and stress and subjected to great mechanical wear.
• d. Clothes: Forget consumer theatricality…buy relatively-expensive clothing that is ergonomic, high-performance and sturdy.
3. 3. Sell – even give away– anything you never use. … Get radically improved everyday things.
4. 4. Carry a multitool.
5. 5. Do not stock the fort … unless you can clearly sense the visible approach of some massive, non-theoretical civil disorder. The clearest way to know that one of these is coming is that the rich people have left your area. If that’s the case, then, sure, go befriend the police and prepare to knuckle down.

Now to confront the possessions you already have. This will require serious design work, and this will be painful. It is a good idea to get a friend or several friends to help you.

You will need to divide your current possessions into four major categories.

1. 1. Beautiful things.
• a. If they’re truly beautiful, they should be so beautiful that you are showing them to people. They should be on display: you should be sharing their beauty with others. Your pride in these things should enhance your life, your sense of taste and perhaps your social standing.
• b. They’re not really that beautiful? Then they’re not really beautiful. Take a picture of them, tag them, remove them elsewhere.
2. 2. Emotionally important things.
• a. All of us have sentimental keepsakes that we can’t bear to part with. We also have many other objects which simply provoke a panicky sense of potential loss – they don’t help us to establish who we are, or to become the person we want to be. They subject us to emotional blackmail.
• b. Is this keepsake so very important that you would want to share its story with your friends, your children, your grandchildren? Or are you just using this clutter as emotional insulation, so as to protect yourself from knowing yourself better?
• c. Think about that. Take a picture. You might want to write the story down. Then – yes – away with it.
• d. You are not “losing things” by these acts of material hygiene. You are gaining time, health, light and space. Also, the basic quality of your daily life will certainly soar. Because the benefits of good design will accrue to you where they matter – in the everyday.
3. 3. Tools, devices, and appliances that efficiently perform a useful function.
• a. They’re not beautiful and you are not emotionally attached to them. So they should be held to keen technical standards.
• b. You will be told that you should “make do” with broken or semi-broken tools, devices and appliances. Unless you are in prison or genuinely crushed by poverty, do not do this. This advice is wicked.
4. 4. Everything else.
• a. Anything you have not touched, or seen, or thought about in a year.
• b. Document these things. Take their pictures, their identifying makers’ marks, barcodes, whatever, so that you can get them off eBay or Amazon if, for some weird reason, you ever need them again.
• c. Store those digital pictures somewhere safe – along with all your other increasingly valuable, life-central digital data. Back them up both onsite and offsite.
• d. Then remove them from your time and space. “Everything else” should not be in your immediate environment, sucking up your energy and reducing your opportunities. It should become a fond memory, or become reduced to data.

It may belong to you, but it does not belong with you. You weren’t born with it. You won’t be buried with it. It needs to be out of the space-time vicinity. You are not its archivist or quartermaster. Stop serving that unpaid role.

Do not jump up from the screen right now and go reform your entire material circumstances. That resolve will not last. Because it’s not sustainable.

Instead, … think hard about it. Tuck it into the back of your mind. Contemplate it. The day is going to come, it will come, when you suddenly find your comfortable habits disrupted. …. Suddenly you will find yourself facing a yawning door and a whole bunch of empty boxes. That is the moment in which you should launch this sudden, much-considered coup. Seize that moment on the barricades, liberate yourself, and establish a new and sustainable constitution.

[Condensed and rearranged entirely from The Last Viridian Note by Bruce Sterling; it’s his copyright, go read the original at http://viridiandesign.org/ ]