leaving the billboards behind

The thing about alternatives. The best and worst thing. Really good alternatives are hard to see from the highway.

Now, this can be awesome. If you love venturing off the beaten path, challenging yourself, being a maverick, wandering the wild looking for answers or other paths or even the right questions to ask, you’ve probably found some really neat ideas out there. Alternatives to pretty much everything — capitalism, religion, community, work, leisure time — exist somewhere in the world.

But it can also make finding worthwhile alternatives too challenging. We don’t all have the time to go tramping around through vast uncharted swathes of mental terrain until we find the perfect idea. Sometimes it’s easier just to stop at Target on the way home, and pass the hours we would have spent on research with our families.

I’ve been thinking about what kinds of pieces I want to put up here on the alternatives blog. I know what I don’t want. I don’t want this to become an advertisement for the least worst of mainstream options. That Goodwill / Salvation Army post was relevant to many of you, but we came away from it realizing that Goodwill is nowhere near as good as it could be (even if it is better than Salvation Army, for those who care about LGBT civil rights). I’m sure there’s a value in comparing big box stores, or comparing similar products many of us use, and sometimes that’s what I’ll do.

What I really want is to use this blog to focus on the ideas people have dreamed up that actually make the world we all live in better. Define better however you want — more sustainable, more supportive, more fair, more engaging, more just, more equitable. All of those, and more.

Too often, we don’t get to see the really amazing things that are happening around the world. They’re too far off the highway, and we don’t have the time to explore what’s beyond the end of every back road and still get home by the end of the day.

So I’m going to take a little while longer between blog entries here. I’m going to dig deeper, find alternatives that aren’t just the least worst, but alternatives that are actually good. And I’ll share what I find here, along with how you can get involved with them if they call to you.

Meanwhile, let’s come at it from another perspective. What have you come across in our world that struck you as poorly designed? What seems irreparably broken? Just asking these questions, I’m thinking about politics, healthcare, homelessness, sexual assault, pharmaceutical maneuvering, student debt, that undercurrent of ownership in relationships… and I don’t know nearly as much about alternatives to those things as I want to. Maybe you have more to add — maybe you see systems that don’t work every day at your job. Here’s your invite: chime in any time.

I’ll be somewhere off the beaten path, far from the billboards, finding whatever I find.

2016: A Year Without Buying Stuff

A couple of years ago, right after the holidays, the idea of buying anything suddenly started to feel really overwhelming. I had just gotten gifts for people and spent more time than I usually do in stores. As a reward, I decided to buy nothing (except food) for a month. That month was one of the best months of my life, and I wrote about it for my business’ blog. That entry is still online here. I called the experiment “Luxury Month” because not buying stuff felt like the most relaxing thing in the world.

Last month, December 2015, I tried playing the Minimalist Game with a friend. It was a great exercise in getting rid of stuff I no longer use, and I got rid of more than 500 things during that month. I didn’t quite follow all the rules — I added a personal challenge to throw nothing away, and ended up making a couple of massive donations to Goodwill — but I stuck with the spirit of the challenge, and it was a great experience.

But.

There are *two* practices that land you in a situation like that, where you need to get rid of a bunch of stuff. The obvious one is that once you have a lot of stuff, you need to up and get rid of the stuff you don’t want. (Re-homing stuff is one of the big things I help my Home Harmonizers clients with — I help sort stuff that’s worth keeping out from trash and recyclables, I deliver donations — and it’s really satisfying work.) But learning to get rid of stuff is just one piece of the puzzle.

The other crucial piece of that puzzle is learning not to acquire stuff.

We live in a culture that places an extraordinary value on owning and acquiring stuff. We’re bombarded with ads telling us that material possessions are worth having. We’re told they make our lives easier, make us look cooler, make our homes more inviting, make us more popular or successful or satisfied. It’s pretty clear that the people and companies that sell stuff have a vested interest in making us believe that we need to own and acquire a lot of things to be happy.

But I believe that buying stuff impoverishes us. Both because stuff costs money, and because money is an insidiously one-dimensional way to interact with the world. When we think about our interactions with people and places in terms of dollar value, we miss all the other values that exist in the world. When I did the Luxury Month experiment, one of the things I loved most about it was that it changed how I saw stuff. I could walk through a mall with friends and admire everything honestly, because I knew none of it was going to come home with me. I could look at websites online and come away with some great ideas for how to repurpose stuff I already owned, because I wasn’t going to spend money buying something premade online.

I’m a professional organizer. I’ve seen far too many of my peers, including best-selling author Marie Kondo, indulge in shopping sprees that land them with tons of new stuff all at once. What do you think keeps all of us professional organizers working? The fact that so many people have never learned how to stop buying stuff — and eventually, when you buy a lot of stuff, it overwhelms you. The single best thing my clients can do for their homes and themselves is take a break from buying stuff. So this year, that’s what I’m going to do too.

Here’s my goal for 2016: 

I am not going to buy any physical stuff other than food.

A couple of exceptions, because good rules tend to come with those:

• I will buy toilet paper, unless I come up with a reasonable alternative. (This didn’t come up during luxury month.)
• I may buy shampoo and toothpaste if I run out by the end of the year, or the ingredients to make substitutes
• I will buy physical things that my car and my bicycle need to work (gas, oil, tires, windshield wipers)
• If unavoidable business expenses come up that involve buying physical stuff (like shipping materials), I will seek secondhand materials before buying anything new.

What do you expect the biggest challenge will be for me this year? Do you think I’ll need to make any more exceptions to my rule? Will you join me in a week, a month, or the full year of buying nothing? I’ll keep you posted on how it goes, and share some of my best experiences NOT-buying stuff as the year goes on.

Here’s to a Year Without Buying Stuff!

Time: The Endless Alternative

This thing all things devours; birds, beasts, trees, flowers, gnaws iron, bites steel, grinds hard stone to meal…

The answer to Gollum’s riddle, of course, is Time.

There is no way (that I know of) to escape the passage of time. But we can think of all the moments that we move through as one thing, we can name that thing “time”, and we can decide what to do in it and with it. We can track it, measure it, use it to evaluate our effectiveness. We can be on time, out of time, in time, timeless. Time is an immensely powerful concept. It’s also notoriously hard to get a solid grip on, and hard to spend wisely.

I worked in sales one summer during college. Like every salesperson on my team, I tracked my hours carefully, because that (combined with our sales dollars) determined how much we were paid. Of the 168 hours in a week, I noticed that the fewer hours I spent trying to sell knives, the happier I was.

I didn’t last long as a salesperson, but I did learn a few valuable lessons that summer. The first was that spending my time on some things — selling knives is a good example — left me feeling drained, and that getting back to a balanced emotional state after even an hour or two of work took a good long time. I also figured out that spending time on a different set of things (going for walks, organizing my space, reading, making art) left me feeling energized, and those activities were what I would turn to after a few hours of draining work.

Fast-forward to the present day. For years now, I’ve been moving away from work that leaves me feeling drained. I own a small non-profit that lets me spend some of my time organizing other people’s spaces. I end work feeling revitalized, because organizing is one of those things that feeds me, and my clients get to spend less of their valuable time on work they find draining.

Returning again and again to one simple go-to question, like “How does this make me feel?” or “What can I learn from this experience?” can be a powerful tool to ensure that the way you spend your time is working for you. Over time, you’ll begin to understand which things you do are working for you personally, which are working for you professionally, and which are working for your loved ones. And you’ll start to see more deeply into what you value, and key in on the things that are worth spending time on.

Whatever question you choose as your go-to, make sure you use it often, and with complete honesty. Don’t be afraid to change how you spend time when you need to; for example, I keep a very strange sleep schedule because that lets me spend more time with my partner. And don’t be afraid to hang onto patterns that work for you, even if it feels as silly as my habit of staying up all night organizing my bead collection when I’m anxious; the point is, go with what works for you.

What activities leave you feeling recharged? What obligations do you find most draining? What is one thing you haven’t found time for in a few years that you really miss doing? Can you find one hour a week to set aside, and do it?