Stuff
Found a lot of scribbled notes from 2009 and 2014 – even mentioned the movie club guys as being the ones to work on it with — who knew?!
I actually tried to impose some order in 2014 by numbering items just as they came to me, and it looked like this:
1. What is Stuff?* Stuff defined – useful versus other? Useful: tools, cooking utensils, medical equipment, and many others. Not useful: Everything else?
2. The burning house question and others – what do you take? What’s on your nightstand?
3. Statistics – how much you spent on what? Clothes, TVs, computers, cameras, cars. This can go on for a long time.
4. Toys— are toys stuff? Not toys like a Ferrari but think of some of the classic toys – yo-yos, jacks, a red rubber ball –
5. Mementos— Photographs, traditionally – but now we have videos, movies, and the ubiquitous smartphone, which is everyone’s camera but doesn’t have anything you could hang on the wall yet –
6. Stuff tests – are the things we can’t live without really stuff? Probably yes if it’s a kidney dialysis machine, but the complete collection of Barbie dolls or Star Wars Warriors still in their unopened boxes? We have to talk...
7. The art of stuff— can stuff be art?
I’ll spare you the rest of the list for now – it goes up to 26 – and leave you with my latest thought about Stuff—
How many of us at one time or another in our lives (and maybe still) had that room or place where we put our Stuff that we didn’t know what to do with and where to put it. For me, it was the garage where I could store a lot of plastic bins—a lot—filled with Stuff. What, if any, are the psychological implications?
I’m hoping Dave can create a Stuff bin for these miscellaneous observations to go into— thereby creating more digital stuff :-)