I’ve been thinking all week about conspicuous consumption. I guess that is a relative term, depending on your income and your living circumstances. I started thinking about this when I cleaned out my kitchen cupboards. I found I had three jars of soy sauce, two tins of Hershey’s Cocoa, four jars of nutritional yeast. Really? Who has four jars of nutritional yeast? I must’ve had 20 boxes of assorted herbal teas, Lipton orange pekoe tea, green tea, and decaffeinated tea. I don’t even drink tea! But every time I go to the grocery store, I am intrigued by the packaging (someone in the marketing department deserves a promotion) and I think that I should drink herbal tea, so I buy something that looks yummy and put it in the cupboard.
After sorting my cupboards, and throwing stuff out, giving stuff away, and deciding I’d give myself one more chance to actually consume food items I had purchased, I moved on to gadgets and appliances. I have a toaster, a sandwich maker (for grilled cheese, and pocket sandwiches), a waffle iron, a “bullet” and a stick blender. I have a Kitchen Aid, a Vitamix, an Instant Pot, a popcorn maker, several appliances for making coffee, grinding coffee beans, a food dehydrator, and even an air fryer. A month ago these seemed like normal things one would have in a kitchen. Now that I’m downsizing, most of that stuff just seems ridiculous.
I kept coming back to “What do I really need to be happy?” Even better, “What do I really need to survive?”
I know it sounds cliche’ but the first thing that came to mind was my health. As I grow older, I don’t take that for granted anymore. I try to eat better, and I try to get at least some exercise. Nothing else matters if I’m not well. The next thing that comes to mind is Cosmo. I probably could manage to stay alive without him, but what would be the point of life without my dog? He is the best thing that ever happened to me. He brings me joy on a daily basis, and I need him in my life. After that, there is of course, sustenance. I need to be fed, and I need a roof over my head. (I learned last year the importance of a roof over one’s head when mine blew off {my roof, not my head} and when I managed to get it back on, it leaked every time it rained. I got a new roof. Life is much better with a roof. But even that is probably not a necessity. I’m sure many people around the world manage to live without a roof.
So the truth is that we really don’t need much to actually survive. Food, water and protection from the elements. Everything else is pretty much just luxury items. So why do so many of us have so much? Maybe we think it’s a measure of our success. We have to have stuff to prove to ourselves and others that “we’ve made it.” There was a time when if I was cooking and couldn’t find the soy sauce, I’d tear the kitchen apart until I found the last drops in a bottle back in the corner of a cupboard. At some point I became wealthy enough to think “Hmm. Must be out. Better buy some more.” (Apparently I did that more than once!) That leads me to my next line of thinking. How many kitchen cupboards does a single man need to survive. I have so much storage space that stuff gets shoved into a back corner never to be seen again until I’m thinking about clearing out to move.
I’m not sure I’ve got answers for my questions. I continue to downsize, and every day I find something else that I can live without; something else I can dispense of and not even miss it. This is going to have to happen many, many times before I move into my van and get on the road.