A Theory on Stuff

Life, the ratrace. We think it’s a race to the cheese but it’s really a race to the death; and along the way, there are a few things that matter in how we in the 21st century define a life well lived (the only time in history where so many of us can measure life by the subjective concept of fulfillment rather than a very cut-and-dry you’re dead-or-alive survival): how much you make, your relationship status, how big your house is, where you’ve travelled, and don’t forget this last part because if you do, the rest doesn’t count; how much of this is documented on Instagram for all to see. And if you’re not successful and feeling #blessed, then you probably need some serious self care.

I want to talk about stuff. Not stuff as a placeholder for all the things I knowslanglicized. Stuff as in literal stuff, the stuff of our lives, the material objects, the tangibles, the things we have, the things we hold. Everyone has it and formed some kind of relationship whether guilt or obsession or disgust or even complacency, sometimes a complex conglomerate of all of the above.

The people who make our stuff today are a strange melting pot of artists, designers, entrepreneurs, corps, craftspeople, and, we can’t forget the true heroes: people just trying to survive and put food on the tables for themselves or their families. Not all heroes wear the capes of fame, purpose or art. Like food and music; stuff is all around us, so innately tied to our memories, our feelings, our attitudes. It’s the dressing to a life not void of the punctuation a good meal or a great song brings, the kind that moves our hearts, stirs our spirits, activates our impulses. Stuff is unique in that it’s the only ubiquity that can’t easily be discarded like shit down your toilet or a song that floats in on the radio, and then out of mind. Except sometimes we act like it.

We’re at a special time in human history, where we’re learning to navigate the waters between a world peppered with the plight of dropping dead from famine, disease, childbirth or war (pick your poison) and a new world where we’ve been incepted with a new, slow-acting kind of poison: the paradox of choice and the once reserved-for-gods ability to conjure up anything our hearts desire, and have it shipped to our doorsteps with same day delivery. We live in pixels more than we live in the physical world, our bodies just vessels for our minds to experience life through our phone screens. All the time we used to spend on packing our entire lives (a series of births before death) into 40 years is now spent doing whatever the heck we want. Here, we are like teenagers experimenting and trying to figure out who we are. We consume and discard, every purchase to cater to every whim of mine because I didn’t know well enough who I am when the world is telling me that I can and should be everything.

I’ve worked in retail — the industry of selling goods — since I was a teenager, like many do. Before that, I grew up getting to witness firsthand the shopping experience evolve over time, a long road from where I started as a kid. We used to scale each floor of now ashes and dust department stores with fervour during the holidays, in absolute wonder. I could spend hours at the library or at the mall, finding in the former an escape into things I could learn and in the latter things that I could have, both of which would be a part of who I’d want to become in my fantasies. Sundays were for church and then shopping, my parents taking us to outlet shops to window shop and more, sometimes for the most mundane things: mom pants or vacuum cleaners. I’d go anyway. There was never a reason not to wander off to see what I wanted to see, our beige minivan a weekly train to the paradise of consumerism.

I know, like everyone in the retail industry does, that markups are arbitrary and have zero relation to value as cost. Now, the value of a brand as a complex cluster of human experience distilled into a business entity that you can participate in, that has very real value. I’m not going to get on a high horse and make the kind of claim I’m sure we’re all tired of: that brands don’t matter, that value is straight-up cost and that’s it. Because: art. I think brands are empathy and humanity in action. Values in motion, philosophy to trade, something to say yes or no to.

There’s the woman who came to the discount department store I used to work at every week without fail with a cart full of clothes, only to return like clockwork the following week to return said cart of clothes. This is common. Stealing is also common. When we see security guards in stores, yeah, we think “Isn’t that a bit much?” Not if you’ve worked retail. I left that corporation to work at independents not out of a philosophical mismatch at first but because I wanted to get off the sales floor for good; I declared my retirement from retail at 19. Alas, it ended up being a catfishing type of situation, job style: Yes!! A part-time job where I don’t have to talk to people all day! Kidding. You’re now talking to brides, people making shopping decisions for the most important day of their lives. Damnit. (By the way, most brides aren’t bridezillas. That’s made up. Most women getting married are happy, excited, creative and perfectly pleasant.) I see how hard moms and pops work and how behind the shiny storefronts, there is always angst, tears, fear, insecurity, human struggle compounded by the cycle of retail sales. If you’ve never worked in retail, you may think “mom and pop shops” are cute in theory — but there is, as I discovered, a reason many life partners venture into business together: it’s hard to do it yourself, even harder to do it with someone you only kind of like. I can tell you that the things you love and look forward to in retail — the sample sales, the deep discounts—these were the symptoms of something breaking in the industry and causing heartache for so many business owners. It’s like being in a Stepford wife-like relationship where you’re always putting on a happy face, hiding the messy, scared, imperfect layers underneath. And this was happening to almost everyone in waves. When we thought we were winning, we were really losing. And newsflash: the people selling your goods generally don’t want to be there. Maybe they want to be the makers, sure. But no one dreams of being the checkout girl or being the storefront greeter to the hundreds of folks that pass in, many of them awkwardly avoiding eye contact. It’s usually a part-time job, a job on the way to something else. We are all just trying to make it here.

Save for a stint working at that discount department store, all my retail jobs, not out of design but a strange serendipity, followed a familiar sequence “first comes love, then comes marriage, then comes baby in a baby carriage”: lingerie, weddings, babies. I might’ve run away faster if things hadn’t turned out this way, where I was a part of the experiences that celebrated moments in our lives. Fun stuff.

When I look back at my twenties, I see how closely my life was reflected in my stuff. When I think about the moment I left a broken relationship, I see the first suitcase I packed as the metaphor for my escape and the moment I walked out the door. When I realized that I didn’t need a car but still wanted to get around, I let go of the idea that success meant car ownership. Now I car-share my way around town. When I had an identity crisis, together, Marie Kondo and a box of peach hair dye saved me; it was really an aptly titled life-changing kind of magic. When laolao, my grandmother, passed in a freak accident last year, I stole a porcelain jewellery box that I was sure no one would miss, and in the safekeeping transport process, I shattered the box and as soon as I did, I felt my heart shatter the same. When I turned 30, I found myself with nothing. Not less than nothing, and not much more. Just neutral, blank, both powerless and powerful. And with the first $3000 I had managed to save post my own life recession, I decided to purchase a $2600 handbag plus tax, just a mere few dollars short of my total net worth. Maybe that speaks to my innate materialism, that I’m too far gone in the descent of my own vanity. But, I had seen dollars cycle in and then out of my life in the support of others’ dreams that I wanted something permanent to celebrate a new life. The permanence of an object, the utility of a handbag, made it more real to me than the blurred lines of our faded memories and a number in my checking account.