The Thing About Things - How Clutter Saves Lives

Clutter Saves Lives

"Love? Love fades away. But Things? Things are forever" - Tom Haverford, Parks and Recreation

Look around yourself - you will find yourself among an ocean of things. You can probably change your life completely, but you can never get rid of half of the things which you don't even like or which you don't even realize that they exist. The only possible way is probably absconding from this life and starting a second life anonymously like a serial killer. You don't own the things, they own you.

So what if a third of your life is gone in sleep, you can spend the remaining precious time on dusting and maintenance of things. Why else do we have weekends then, if not for cleaning, de-cluttering and then shopping to bring new things home. That's what samsara is all about - your life stuck in chores and sustaining the life itself. The whole point of life is just maintenance, that's what humans are - glorified maintenance workers.

It's like someone invented this wretched evil game where you go up these made up social-levels by the amount of things you own and everyone got so addicted to this game that now we spend all our waking hours on it. But you can't blame the inventors either - poor souls were just distressed with all the suicidal-murderous thoughts of their own minds and the ugly difficult things they had to confront everyday like "How do I want my life to be?". So they just went ahead to save the humanity from asking pretentious questions like "What's life?", by getting us all into the largest multi-player game ever.

Every day or weekend or fortnight, depending on how deep you are into the game, you emerge from the chaotic scene of maintenance with all the cleaning equipment in your hands like a hero walking out of the area which he/she just bombed - except that unlike the hero, you don't get the girl/guy or the riches. In fact, this scene ensures that you never get the girl/guy or the riches - you don't have time for silly stuff like that.

Look around again - how many of these things are there  - just to be there? To stand still and look pretty? Imagine things having life and decorative things pondering over their purpose - how depressed would they be? The philosopher among them would rightfully declare that there's no purpose to their life, though the artist would declare that they are all art who move humans to tears(My flower vase always moves me to tears - true story).

I know what you are saying - not everything has a purpose, some things hold a lot of memories. Yeah, right, tell me when you last looked at all these sentimental stuff? The thing about sentimental stuff is  - the more you hold on to them, the more precious and sacred they become than they actually are. Sentimental stuff are basically like bitcoin - their projected value is a lot more than their actual value - which is zero. You don't even hold that moment in your life so close to your heart to which this senti-thing is associated.

Things keep us busy in the matrix they create - they keep us safe from ourselves. Imagine not owning any of these things - what will we do now with the freed up time, energy and resources? Who will save me from not thinking those dreadful thoughts - that one slightly embarrassing thing which happened in fourth grade which is still my brain's favorite bedtime movie, decisions I am avoiding to take, problems I don't want to confront or even acknowledge, regrets that gnaw into my soul, memories, nostalgia and existential crisis?

Things are basically the adult version of teddy bears, except that Mommy won't clean it up.
Stay safe(read blinded) with your things.

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