The old saying, “The things we own end up owning us,” has a more solid ring of truth than we  subjects of consumer culture are willing to admit.

Every five years or so, I move.  And it’s torture. I’m suddenly reminded of how, despite my best efforts, I’m a slave to all those ephemeral impulses that advertising loves to fill us with till we’re fit to burst. I’m surrounded by boxes upon boxes of things I don’t even think I need. It’s going to cost me hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars to transport these things, and I ‘m not even sure anymore how half of them came into my possession. Scottish woolen skirts and kettle balls and European board games and Norwegian dictionaries and swim paddles and dutch ovens and bread machines and Laughing Buddha bookends — they all are scattered around my apartment or tossed in a box and I don’t know why.

I suppose at one point I liked the idea of all those things. I liked the idea of wearing Scottish woolen skirts, even though they make me look like a fuzzy hippopotamus. Certainly the swim gloves filled my head with visions of toned upper arms and sun-browned skin, even though I don’t have access to a pool in my dumpy New England town. I wanted to learn Norwegian at one point; hence the dictionary. But that never quite panned out (it could, however … someday). I always thought it would be fun and quirky to develop a passion for European board games; it seemed like the type of hobby a cosmopolitan misanthrope would take up on rainy days. Too bad those games are so dreadfully boring and time consuming.

Each and every one of those items made me feel my life was a series of doors hanging slightly ajar, each one promising  excitement and psychic renewal at any moment. The idea that I could use any one of them at any time convinced me that they were useful. I never used them, though. I just led the same life I always led, with a few deviations here and there. But nothing so dramatic as to make me start playing Carcassonne every Friday night while wearing a plaid skirt hand-sewn in Edinburgh.

It’s strange how we can fall in love with the idea of an item’s luminous utility.

It’s strange how we can fall in love with the idea of an item’s luminous utility.  It’s only when we are forced to unburden ourselves do we see the folly of our mindless consumerism. Each day  brought me much sorrow as I was forced to lug box after box of junk (Yes, I said it. All those things were indeed junk.) to Savers and the Salvation Army.

But once I dropped those boxes off and headed home again, I found I had forgotten what items exactly I had donated. Yet I’m still surrounded by piles of junk that threaten to suffocate rather than liberate me.

I fancy myself a frugal person. I shop at thrift stores. I take up hobbies (like soap making) intending to save hundreds of dollars by making everything myself. I discovered, however, that frugality sometimes gives us an excuse to shop compulsively at a lower price point. I fear I spent more money being frugal than just … well … being.

“The movement of commodities on the market, the birth of their value, in a word, the real framework of every rational calculation is not merely subject to strict laws but also presupposes the strict ordering of all the happens,” the Hungarian Marxist philosopher Georg Lukács writes in History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics.

The atomization of the individual is, then, only the reflex in consciousness of the fact that the ‘natural laws’ of capitalist production have been extended to cover every manifestation of life in society; that — for the first time in history — the whole of society is subjected, or tends to be subjected, to a unified economic process, and that the fate of every member of society is determined by unified laws.

Certainly I feel as though the commodities I’ve purchased have ordered every aspect of my life. I must be out of my apartment on Saturday, but there is still so much to give or throw away. The burden of my belongings has never felt so heavy. But the powers that be say that this is the only way to save the United States. We must spend ourselves into the grave to keep the engines of commerce humming along and (supposedly) spreading wealth hither and yon. Only now do I see how mentally ill I’ve become as result of this onerous ideology. It’s work, this buying and caring for things. And it’s work that makes me wish I was unemployed.

Ylajali would love to hear from you. Drop her a line at hansengenbub [at] gmail.com

And join Generation Bubble on Facebook: group name “Generation Bubble.”