Issue #3: Optimizing, collecting, and Filipinos having too much stuff
Airing my Filipino laundry. Enjoy the ramble
This issue was inspired by a Deep Dive conversation between Ali Abdaal - a YouTuber that I’m a huge fan of - and John O’Nolan - Founder/CEO of Ghost and long-time digital nomad.
Here’s the part that resonated with me. I have also written out John’s quote below:
There was something else that was eating away at me, which was that once you sell all your possessions and have nothing but a backpack, a lot of existential questions creep in, because you don't realize how much of your life you spend thinking about what you want to acquire next. Whether that's camera gear, a car, a new sofa, you spend a disproportionate amount of time - at least I did - researching and thinking about what you want to acquire in your life next. And when you only have a backpack and you can't put anything in it, there's this existential void - everyone goes through it when they start traveling or doing the nomad thing - of: "Okay, so, I can't buy anything. What do I spend all day thinking about?" And it all gets very "What's the meaning of life and what are we all doing here?"
For context, about a month ago I moved all of my possessions into a storage unit in Brooklyn and am now renting a vacation home in the Florida Keys. So you could say that I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit. I think it would be accurate to call myself a perpetual optimizer: I’m often looking for the best deal, the highest value, or the most worthwhile upgrade to make.
But it’s been great to have the concept of upgrading the items in my living space completely removed from my life. And it’s not like I’ve really been missing my “optimized” apartment. I’m living here, and I’m not thinking about getting better speakers, or upgrading the TV, or replacing this item or that fixture in the house. The speakers sound good enough, the TV looks good enough, the chairs are comfortable enough, and my mind isn’t cluttered with the thoughts of trying to upgrade them.
It has also been nice to have the limitation of a single suitcase for my personal items. I only have so much space to work with, so if I decide to buy something, that decision doesn’t come lightly. This helps remove a lot of the “just-in-case” purchasing that I can easily fall victim to. I’ve had friends recommend to me the 20/20 Rule: Anything you’re thinking about keeping - just in case you need it in the future - in all likelihood you can replace it for less than $20 in less than 20 minutes from your current location. That’s been a great model to follow on this trip.
However, even though a lot of the optimization thoughts have been removed from my life, I still find myself collecting. I don’t have a permanent address, but I still have a handful of vinyls and poetry books on their way to my Mom’s place in California.
There is a surprising lack of research on the phenomenon of collecting, but according to Wikipedia:
Psychologists have often taken a Freudian perspective when describing why people collect. They highlight the controlling and impulsive dark side to collecting, the need for people to have "an object of desire." This desire, and hence the innate propensity to collect, begins at birth. The infant first desires the emotional and physical comfort of the nourishing breast, then the familiar baby blanket the child clings to for comfort and security. Stuffed animals, favorite toys are taken to bed and provide the emotional security needed to fall asleep. A sense of ownership and control is facilitated through possession of these items for the vulnerable child. Freud himself took a more extreme position on the origins of collecting. Not surprisingly, he postulated that all collecting stems from unresolved toilet training conflict.
I’m not so sure that my desire to collect comes from unresolved toilet training conflict, but when I think back on my culture, I’ve found that Filipinos tend to exhibit casual hoarding and collecting behaviors. Growing up, it was common to open up a drawer in any Filipino kitchen to find a panoply of saved take-out utensils from restaurants. The top door shelf in the fridge - usually reserved for storing butter - was instead perpetually filled with old soy sauce and ketchup packets. If you needed a napkin in the car, you could find a stack of them in the center console saved from 5 different fast food trips. And a 2-car garage could easily be reduced to a 1-car garage filled instead with storage bins and balikbayan boxes.
I feel like a lot of this behavior stems from the upbringing of the generation of Filipinos before me. My mother and many of my relatives grew up in the Philippines in abject poverty. When I was a kid, I was taught to make sure to finish all of the food on my plate, because there were kids in the Philippines who went to bed hungry. There was a feeling growing up that - while things were good now - we needed to be prepared for anything that came up.
Filipinos are also obsessed with ancestry and history. My home was filled with photo albums of my family and my relatives, and souvenirs from past trips. Whenever we had any Filipino parties with friends over, inevitably the photo albums would come out and my Titas and my Mom would be reminiscing about the good old days in the barrio. There is a strong Filipino tendency to not only preserve memories, but also tie them strongly to objects, which can make it difficult for Filipinos to justify throwing something away.
I’m not saying that I’m safe from this behavior either. I collected Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh cards as a kid, had multiple guitars in high school, and still have notes and items from my middle and high school days tucked away back home. And I still find myself having the urge to save spare ketchup packets in the fridge.
So this has been quite the scattered set of thoughts, but maybe this nomad lifestyle can show me a better path forward on all fronts. On one front, this has shown me that I don’t need to keep optimizing my possessions, and that I live perfectly fine and ably without having the best of the best on hand. In this new day and age, everything I need is easily acquirable, so I don’t need to keep a stock of things on hand “just-in-case.” And lastly, I want to re-evaluate my relationship with collectorship, and think about my motivations behind collecting certain objects. Do I need to collect things when I see that I live perfectly fine without any of those things? Lots to think about, but maybe this can help you think about your relationship with these behaviors as well. Thanks for reading.