PRINTMeaningless clutter or treasured heirlooms?
How people deal with the possessions that inhabit (or take over) their lives
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May 20, 2009 | 12:00 p.m. CST
People hate getting rid of stuff. So much so that the self-storage industry in this country did more than $20 billion in sales last year. The gaming industry did $21 billion.
The Self Storage Association, created in 1975 to monitor the industry, estimates that 7.4 square feet of storage space exists for every American. This nation’s entire population could fit in all of the self-storage space within our borders.
MU doctoral student Alex Gunz, who researches materialism, thinks this is representative of the eat-everything-on-your-plate mind-set of American culture. Nothing goes to waste.
“A lot of people have these things full of stuff they just don’t want to throw away,” he says. “It’s not like these people are interacting with this stuff. It’s not like they go spend time with it on the weekends.”
Items in self-storage are possessions people don’t have room for, don’t want to see but somehow can’t get rid of. The relationship between owner and possession is more complex than a simple question of functionality.
When psychologists talk about people and material possessions, they generally divide them into two categories: endearing involvement and materialism. Motivation distinguishes the two groups.
The motivation for endearing investment comes from within:
A person buys comic books because he or she loves comic books. The motivation for materialism comes from outside, often societal, forces. Another person buys a Coach wallet because he or she saw it on a favorite television show.
“A long-noted concept is things are essential to life and how well you’re doing in life,” Gunz says.
The thinking behind materialism, he says, is based on the idea that everyone wants to be rich, beautiful and famous. The average person can’t fathom a person like that having a bad life, so he or she imitates the lifestyle in the easiest way possible: buying stuff.
Clearly endearing involvement comes from within, but materialism is a social construct. What’s popular today is based on community standards rather than intrinsic value. Is a Coach purse constructed better than a no-name brand purse? Maybe. But what really warrants the high price tag is the value that society attaches to the Coach name.
More stuff, Gunz says, doesn’t mean greater happiness. In fact, studies have shown the opposite. In his 2005 book The Price of Materialism, Tim Kasser, a psychology professor at Knox College, wrote that people who exhibit strong materialistic desires are at a greater risk for depression.
Gunz also says materialism has been linked with anxiety. A person becomes more materialistic when he or she is anxious, and a recent study published in the Journal of Consumer Research found that people’s brand loyalty increased when their anxiety about death was high.
But what about those who fall somewhere in the middle? Say, an occasional stamp collector who sometimes splurges on a Gucci purse. The categories aren’t mutually exclusive, Gunz says. Someone can be motivated by both materialism and endearing involvement, one of the two or neither. As with most polarizing concepts, a lot of gray exists.
A third, yet drastically different, category of consumption is applicable as well. This level, Gunz says, is called compulsive consumption, and it’s where collecting and buying habits start to get out of control.
Not all interactions and relationships with stuff fit neatly into the pages of a psychology textbook, though. Real-life interactions serve as case studies for the day-to-day reality of the buying, selling, loving and loathing of stuff.
Hoarders
As a child, Christian Cepel admired a blue china set his mother had bought in the 1980s. The pattern depicted men chopping wood outside a log cabin, a train chugging down the tracks, and a horse-drawn carriage gliding across the snow. When his parents got divorced, his father didn’t want the china; his mother didn’t want the memories. So Cepel took the china.
Eight years later, Cepel’s own marriage is struggling, and he has listed the set on Craigslist. But the decision wasn’t easy. Cepel is a self-diagnosed hoarder, the more pedestrian term to describe compulsive consumption.
Although he is self-diagnosed, Cepel has been diagnosed with other conditions including mild obsessive- compulsive disorder. Hoarding was once seen as a symptom of OCD, but recent studies have shown that the conditions can be separate.
“My hoarding wasn’t just a desire to acquire to satisfy needs or wants but also a desire to anticipate future needs and wants,” he says. “I also retained things I thought might have value or use at some point in the future. In many ways, I think some sort of fear was at the back of things.”
His latest struggle revolves around the china set. “I have listed and unlisted it four or five times,” he says. “I don’t think I will unlist it again because it’s a growth process. The first time was very difficult, and it wasn’t very long before I had unlisted it. I got very nostalgic. I got to a place of peace and enjoy the nostalgia instead of letting it control me.”
Although the causes of hoarding are unknown, scientists have discovered patterns. For instance, hoarding tends to run in families. Cepel’s mother was a hoarder, too.
His inability to keep the china on Craigslist represents another pattern: indecisiveness. A study published in 2004 in the American Journal of Psychiatry found that hoarders had low activity in a part of the brain involved in decision-making.
A computer programmer, Cepel used to take apart old computers and keep the parts to fiddle with. He collected animé books and movies that he never read or watched. Cepel suffers from what he calls, tongue in cheek, “Musical Instrument Acquisition Syndrome,” a sub-type of obsessive consumption. He has played highland bagpipes; built dozens of flutes out of PVC pipes; constructed a practice set of Uilleann pipes, the national bagpipe of Ireland; and is currently building a hammered dulcimer.
“Collections are wonderful things for hoarders,” he says. “It’s a way to put immense value on things that have no value. And it can ruin your life.”
Cepel decided to fight back and is working at weaning himself away from hoarding behavior.
“I’m trying to strip down, scale down and find what’s important,” he says. “I now know the pattern, and I can replace it.”
Where 15 unused musical instruments used to clog closets and rooms, three remain. Where a dozen firearms once hung, Cepel now clings to only four. His possessions once filled his 2,000-square-foot house. Now, he says, they fit in a small bedroom.
He tries to stick to a general hoarding rule: If you haven’t used it in two years, haven’t seen it in six months or have moved it more than two to three times without using it, get rid of it.
“It’s all about refining down to what’s really important,” Cepel says. “Once you’ve done that, you can really enjoy what you have left.”
Cepel’s experience echoes in research: Material possessions do not make a person happy. In fact, Gunz says, it’s generally accepted that being wealthier does not make a person feel better.
Collectors
In the late 1980s, Amelea Ross’s mother purchased her first Lladro figurine — a long and lean solitary female figure. Her mother had collected Madonna figurines for years, but this one was different. Her mother repeatedly visited the figurine at the store before she bought it and fretted about the California earthquakes that could shake the porcelain from its case.
Lladro is a world-renowned Spanish company that produces popular porcelain figurines — the name isn’t without social value. Lladro figurines are expensive, ranging from $250 on the low end to $2,000 today and come with a certain prestige. Ross’ mother’s passion for Madonna figurines (endearing investment) included the desire for status as well (materialism).
When her mother died in 1998, Ross inherited her collection of 20 figurines — including three Lladros. She continued to collect Madonna figurines and added a few; her mother’s original collection serves as the foundation.
Ross recently listed one of her mother’s Lladro figurines on Craigslist to thin the herd. Her motivation for selling was one that Alex Gunz recognizes: her desire to have the object appreciated.
“I prefer it to go to a collector, someone who wants it and would appreciate it rather than someone who just wants it for the name,” Ross says.
Ross’ mother also collected art glass eggs — a collection of a dozen eggs made from Mount St. Helens’ ash.
“I have really taken and run with it; I have so many more than I started with,” Ross says.
The collection prompted her to work primarily with glass eggs when she decided to become an artist. Ross now has her mother’s original collection, the pieces she has added and the pieces she has made. Ross admits to visiting eBay once or twice a week to search out the Mount St. Helens eggs. Because the eggs are expensive, she buys new ones infrequently.
Garage Sales
On a windy Saturday in northern Columbia, Sandy Mueller tries to keep her garage sale fare from blowing off tables and into her yard. Rusted license plates rattle in a tin garbage can, and wooden headboards pound against the garage door near her checkout table.
Mueller and her family hold garage sales once every 10 or so years or when the closet-relegated items start spilling out. Even though the objects to be sold have been sitting on a shelf for months or even years, an emotional attachment still lingers.
“You put stuff in the pile to be sold, and when you start pricing stuff, you say ‘I might use that,’” she says.
This is a common excuse. So much so that the idea of needing something as soon as it’s been thrown out appeared in The Meaning of Liff, a dictionary for words that don’t exist yet. A “nottage” is something you find a use for as soon as you’ve thrown it away.
This time around, the objects Mueller couldn’t part with were her sons’ fishing poles. Even though her boys are grown-up and married, memories and promises of future use prevented Mueller from slapping on the small round price stickers.
Gifts are also hard to sell, she says. A Christmas lamp sits on a table in the garage with a green 50-cent sticker on it. A dusty bear rides a brown rocking horse. The still dustier box behind the lamp bears a ripped and faded Target tag — an homage to the gift’s former store.
Mueller originally was reluctant to get rid of a gift, but her practical side won, and she eventually put on the green tag.
The bulk of the Mueller’s sale items this year came from a trailer left on land they bought. The previous owner’s husband had died, and she couldn’t bring herself to sort through the belongings.
Abandonment replaced an estate sale, and the Muellers inherited a trailer full of old sewing machines, furniture and various collections. Having no attachment to the items, Mueller tagged everything and placed it all on the driveway for sale.
Garage sales are big business in Columbia — The Columbia Daily Tribune averages 80 garage sale ads in late spring and more during the summer. The paper has a special deal for garage salers who buy a $20 ad: a kit that includes signs, price stickers, arrows, a record form and tips. The Missourian has a similar program. On Fridays and Saturdays, orange signs adorn street corners in Columbia despite the fact that the city ordinance prohibits them from being placed off the sale’s premises.
The city also mandates how many garage sales a resident can have each year (two), how many days the sale can last (three) and when a sale can start (7 a.m.). Just like the ordinance doesn’t stop people from putting out signs, it doesn’t stop some from starting early.
Pawn Shops
At Tiger Pawn on Business Loop 70, new tires lie in front of the entrance, air conditioners fill the shelves to the right, and lawn mowers sit to the left. A few customers mill around the store and look through stacks of used DVDs and walls of guns.
Luke Hicks, who has worked here for almost five years, stands behind the counter. Having three or so customers in the store at a time is pretty typical for a Monday afternoon, he says. The poor economy has brought in more new customers, some who pawn, some who buy and some who sell.
Pawning an item means that someone gives the item to the store as collateral for a loan. The store’s average loan is about $50. The customer then pays interest on the loan to retrieve his or her item. A $100 loan would cost someone $120 in a month.
When most people pawn something, they come back for their stuff, Hicks says. The store’s average pickup rate for the past 10 years is 68.54 percent. For every 10 items pawned at the shop, seven people have come back and paid the original loan plus interest to retrieve their items.
The longest loan on file is from 2005. The original loan was for $70, and after a few months, the person has had to pay $14 a month to keep it at the pawn shop. The person hasn’t had the full amount to retrieve the item but refuses to default on the loan and lose the purchase.
A lot of times, Hicks says, people will pawn seasonal items when they don’t need them. Take, for instance, the lawn mowers that line the entrance. People will sell them in the winter for the money and buy them back in the summer when they need them. They get their money, and they don’t lose their items.
A young man comes in to claim his videogame system that he says has “been here forever.” In reality, the system has only been at the shop for a month.
“It’s because you haven’t been able to play it,” Hicks jokes.
Owner Dan Trim says that each pawning situation is different.
“People are selling stuff because they want it out of their hands, “ Trim says. The store has seen women come in to sell rings from broken engagements and couples come in to sell rings because they need the money.
Physical things hold a weird place in people’s lives: Some people can’t get enough, and others can’t afford to hold on to things.
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A good article Abby, and I think you hit a lot of it right on. I've been a bit worried since giving you the interview(s)... wondering if I made the right decision to be as candid as I had been. I'm generally pleased with your rendering of my experiences. I do wish your editor had honored my request to be discrete and not mention my mother or firearms. I felt confident that she was responding in the affirmative to my request, but perhaps I was mistaken. Two of the four firearms are up for sale now. The two remaining have the most emotional history/attachment and rate highest on the 'fun & fits my personality and I actually use and enjoy them' scale, but they might very well join their brethren in the near future in finding new places to dwell. Cheers.
Posted by Christian Cepel on May 21, 2009 at 12:49 p.m. (Report Comment)