stuckinstuff

100 Thing Challenge Moves

Hey all.  Just want to let you know that in my efforts to blog in one place for now, the 100 Thing Challenge has moved locations.

I'll be building out the new and improved 100 Thing Challenge page over the next few weeks.  More radical than ever!  That's my motto.  Challenge Stuff!  Get life back from consumerism.

See you soon :-)

Please Feel Free To Come Over

A few of you have noticed that I've been shifting my blogging focus.  Basically I'm consolidating my three blogs into one.  I'd love for you to come over.  Subscribe to my feed.

There are about 250 readers of StuckInStuff.com.  You all are great.  In fact, it was one of you (sorry, I cannot find the comment now), who encouraged me to do what I'm doing.  One kind follower suggested that I ought to spend more time coming up with positive solutions to the problem of being stuck in stuff.  I tucked away that comment and then took it to heart.

So I'm consolidating my blogging life at guynameddave but also starting the more positive version of StuckInStuff.com - "ChallengeStuff.com (.org)."  For now, Challenge Stuff will be a category at guynameddave.  I might expand that to a tumblelog in the near future.

Do you want to be involved in making something out of ChallengeStuff.com?  Let me know.

Oh, and I'll be updating guynameddave with the news of how our intervention garage sale fared.  See you soon...

Stuff Is Disappearing Soon

There's going to be some missing stuff soon.  We're having a garage sale this weekend.

My wife and I spent a little too much time tonight heatedly discussing what items might not get sold.  My  plan is to sell a lot.  And she wants to, too.  It just turns out that I need to avoid selling any of our wooden German toys.  To be honest, I'm fine with that.

The goal is to rid our house of hundreds of items.  Pretty much everything is going to be priced at either $1 or $5, with a few high-ticket (but still amazingly inexpensive) items thrown in for good measure.

What's left will be swapped... more on swapping soon.

Fun for Families with Giants

What 30 something parent could resist a new video podcast from They Might Be Giants?  Not this one.  Seriously, your kids will love it.  Uh, you'll like it, too if you went to high school or junior high school in the eighties.  This is well worth a few minutes each Friday night.

Update #7 100 Thing Challenge Considering Intervention

Crazy!  I just noticed that there has been no 100 Thing Challenge Update since January!  Absolutely no excuse.  My apologies, Sam.

Ok, so image yourself in your chair with your clipboard in hand and I’m on the couch - the therapist’s couch that is.  Our conversation goes something like this:

Doctor, we have piles of stuff all around our house.  We don’t use it.  We’re not sure how most of it got here.  It just is.  Like an ontological theory for consumerism.
If you don’t use it, why don’t you just get rid of it?
We try.  I’m not sure.  Maybe I just dream that we try.  Maybe I’m delusional.  But I think we try... (dreamily) I think we try.
Perhaps you need an intervention?
(Softly) Yes.  Yeah, doc, perhaps we do.

There it is.  We’re considering a stuff intervention.   A running idea is a massive garage sale where everything is priced $1 - from junky toys to broken vacuums (why do we have 2 in the garage?) to clothes to unneeded furniture.  AMVETS has been good to pick lots of stuff up this year.  But we still have too much.  And honestly eBay really only works on an occasional basis.  It’s not the best place to unload hundreds of unnecessary items.

Any other ideas for a massive stuff intervention?

Billions and Billions - Are We Talking the Poor or the Cellphone Sales?

Sara Corbett has written a fascinating (long) article for the New York Times Magazine, Can the Cellphone Help End Global Poverty?  Hmm.  I just don't quite know how to react.  For example, read this from the article.  It's a paragraph describing the responses that anthropologists from Nokia received when discussing possible cellphone features with people in developing countries,

Jung and Tulusan said they’d found this everywhere, the phone representing what people are aspiring to. “It’s an easy way to see what’s important to them, what their challenges are,” Jung said. One Liberian refugee wanted to outfit a phone with a land-mine detector so that he could more safely return to his home village. In the Dharavi slum of Mumbai, people sketched phones that could forecast the weather since they had no access to TV or radio. Muslims wanted G.P.S. devices to orient their prayers toward Mecca. Someone else drew a phone shaped like a water bottle, explaining that it could store precious drinking water and also float on the monsoon waters. In Jacarèzinho, a bustling favela in Rio, one designer drew a phone with an air-quality monitor. Several women sketched phones that would monitor cheating boyfriends and husbands. Another designed a “peace button” that would halt gunfire in the neighborhood with a single touch.

So does Nokia see billions of cellphone customers or billions of impoverished people when it designs a cellphone that can withstand the rough and tumble conditions of a developing-world slum?  Does it matter if they see both?

I suppose one reason that stories like Corbett's sit tentatively on my mind and heart is that my experience has been that cellphones and other technology gadgets are as much a conduit to unnecessary consumption as they are a means to economic subsistence.  What will Nokia or partners of Nokia do with their billions of new customers?  Market them, says the cynic in me.  If corporations can sell a poverty stricken person a cellphone for $25 surely they'll be tempted to sell that person a brand name pair of shoes for $18.  To a point, of course it is better to have a nice pair of shoes instead of no shoes at all.  It's just that most of us in the West have passed that point.  A nice pair of shoes is not enough to celebrate.  Nor the nicer pair of shoes we want after we see an advertisement.

For us, it never ends.  For the developing world, it's just beginning.  With what I trust is genuine humility and concern, I'd say there is hope for our world to get consumption right.  It will be hard.  Very hard.

StuckInStuff Tip #3 - Losing a Day or Week is Fine, Anything More Is Not

This week our family has been battling sickness and busyness.  My wife commented that she "lost the week."  With all my guy wisdom and sympathy I replied, "That's ok."  (To my credit, I was nicer than that.  I'm just playing it up to make a point for my Stuck In Stuff tip.)

Hence Stuck In Stuff Tip #3 - Losing a day or a week in the fight against stuff is tolerable, anything beyond that is inexcusable.

Look, we all succumb to shop therapy - the irresistible urge to comfort buy.  And some people have weaknesses for gadgets.  Others like too many books.  Consumption pressures are always present.  Advertising, more than New York City, never sleeps.  It gets to us from time-time.

When I give in or when I feel too tired from a rough day or week to fight back, I chalk it up to a "lost day" or, in extreme cases, a "lost week."  More than that, though, and I'm going to fight back.  Spending weeks or months giving into stuff will not do.  So if you "lose" a day or a week for whatever reason, let it go.  Leave it behind and move on... without stuff.

Consume Responsibly

Came across Kaibar's Anti-Consumerism blog today. What a great idea. Looking forward to monitoring the effort.

Sometimes It Just Makes Sense

My circumstances this weekend have allotted me some spare time for reading and watching videos on my computer.  My content intake included the fifth DVD in the series Planet Earth, “The Future,” which addresses questions of conservation and sustainability of our planet.  Of course I also made time for Wendell Berry, reading “Feminism, the Body, and the Machine” and “Solving for Pattern,” both in The Art of the Commonplace.  Both Planet Earth and Wendell Berry reminded me of an epistemological commitment I have: sometimes we know something is true simply because it makes sense.

A couple of weekends ago a friend doubted the usefulness “it just makes sense” for gaining knowledge.  He likes evidence.  I do too.  But “it just makes sense” is a form of evidence, I contend.  It’s an epistemological tool that smart people (I reveal my bias and pride all at once) use.  Yet is is not a tool for the lazy.  Believing in something that “just makes sense” takes a lot of work.  Here’s why.

When we say that something “just makes sense” what we are actually saying is something closer to this, “As I take in this new information, all that I know to be true and expect to be validated affirms that I ought to believe in this new information.  On that basis of knowledge and expectation, I’m going to believe this new information because it just makes sense.”

Now I hear, for example, a lot of both sides of the environmental debate.  As a Christian, many of my peers are skeptics of our environmental problems.  They feel like the science does not support things like global warming.  I’m suspicious that they get their information mostly from the likes of Rush Limbaugh.  As a Christian who dislikes Rush Limbaugh, I’ve tried to get my information about the environmental debate from the likes of Planet Earth or World Resources Institute or books or magazines.  I say all this to make a point.  “Sense” is directly proportional to the quality of the knowledge and expectation that invokes it.

Thus “it just makes sense” is an epistemological tool that works for the hard working knowledge-seeker and fails miserably for the lazy knowledge-wanter.  Knowledge-seekers work hard to develop their discernment.  They take in a lot of information from a lot of sources and check and double check that information.  And so they are able to develop a sense of what seems true.  Knowledge-wanters let another person do their work for them.  Knowledge-wanters usually rely on one (or very few) sources for their information, and thus dull their discernment.

Look, what’s my point here?  Don’t be lazy!  Don’t just consume because so-and-so says to consume.  Look around a bit more.  Find out if other people think that consuming is not helpful.  Don’t just write off environmental concerns because so-and-so says it’s bunk.  Find out if there is genuine reason to be concerned about the environment.  Work hard.  Pretty soon things might start to “just make sense.”

StuckInStuff Tip #2 - Let The Last Words Be, “Let Go”

A conversation came up last night at church during a Justice Committee meeting, and I thought it would be worth mentioning on Stuck In Stuff.  Here’s the point: Sometimes you cannot justify yourself.  Sometimes you have to let go of the last word, stop trying to explain your point, and move on.  That’s a life skill that will revolutionize your relationships.  It’s the skill of being able to be intimate with people who do not know and understand you completely.

The idea of being close to someone who does not understand you completely is debilitating for many people.  It is utterly frightening.  As an example, for some people who have strong political opinions, they feel compelled to painstakingly explain why they hold a particular viewpoint.  When their friend responds, “I just don’t see it that way.  I don’t understand why you would think that way,” they feel a compulsion to attempt to explain again.  They exhaust every metaphor known to man.  They try every angle.  And when their friend still does not agree with them, they pause briefly and then attempt to explain themselves again and again and again.  People like this have a hard time with relationships.

In our consumer culture I believe that stuff plays into this problem.  Many people use stuff much the same way that people attempt to justify themselves.  More stuff often functions the same way as needing to get in the last word.