Sterling Closes Viridian

I was never on Bruce Sterling’s Viridian design mailing list, although I did come across pieces from it from time to time. Back in November he posted the last Viridian note. I found it very thought-provoking – especially with regard to his critique of overly-thrifty consumption patterns.

Hairshirt-green is the simple-minded inverse of 20th-century consumerism. Like the New Age mystic echo of Judaeo-Christianity, hairshirt-green simply changes the polarity of the dominant culture, without truly challenging it in any effective way. It doesn’t do or say anything conceptually novel – nor is it practical, or a working path to a better life.

He talks about how his whole life patterns have changed in the last decade and offers some lessons learned regarding relationships with stuff.

Sustainable practices navigate successfully through time and space, while others crack up and vanish. So basically, the sustainable is about time – time and space. You need to re-think your relationship to material possessions in terms of things that occupy your time. The things that are physically closest to you. Time and space.

As I’ve chronicled now and then here before, I’ve been a multi-year mission to get rid of stuff, and we’ve purged a lot from this house, and yet there’s still more that could be done. Sterling writes:

many of these objects can damage you personally. The hours you waste stumbling over your piled debris, picking, washing, storing, re-storing, those are hours and spaces that you will never get back in a mortal lifetime. Basically, you have to curate these goods: heat them, cool them, protect them from humidity and vermin. Every moment you devote to them is lost to your children, your friends, your society, yourself.

Indeed, a guideline I’ve been trying to follow when trying to decide whether to keep something is: do I want to be paying a mortgage to store this thing? Another is: if I moved, would I want to pay to have this thing transported to the new place? If neither is the case, then why am I keeping that thing around? Sterling recommends that the things you use the most be the highest-quality you can afford. Things like a bed, shoes, and office chairs. And anything placed next to your skin for long periods of time. We are almost a 100% 100%-cotton clothing house simply because those are the things we’re most comfortable in. He urges a division of your stuff into: beautiful things, emotionally important things, useful tools, and everything else. The latter category he recommends taking a digital photo of and then getting rid of.

Store those digital pictures somewhere safe – along with all your other increasingly valuable, life-central digital data. Back them up both onsite and offsite.

Then remove them from your time and space. “Everything else” should not be in your immediate environment, sucking up your energy and reducing your opportunities. It should become a fond memory, or become reduced to data.

It may belong to you, but it does not belong with you. You weren’t born with it. You won’t be buried with it. It needs to be out of the space-time vicinity. You are not its archivist or quartermaster. Stop serving that unpaid role.

There’s lots more – definitely worth at least skimming the entire post. I think I will re-read it periodically, just as I re-read some of David Allen’s stuff, for inspiration when I feel like too much cruft is building up around me.

One small victory along these lines for me was a recent divesting of baby stuff that took place. TheLittleGuy has grown incredibly fast (even faster than most babies do) and thus for a few months we were having to ditch baby clothes every week or so. Fortunately, my buddy J had a baby boy about 7 months after TLG was born and so we just started sending everything in her direction. This past week I dropped off TLG’s bouncy seats and another big batch of clothes. One of the toys attached to one of the bouncy seats was the very first toy he ever showed an active interest in. I actually spent a little bit of time trying to decide whether to keep that particulary toy–not for him, for me. Ultimately, I decided not to, but it required an actual decision. Instead, I took a picture (as Sterling advises) and sent it on its way. Small victories, small victories! I am keeping some of my favorite pieces clothing of his, but I plan to cut them up and make a quilt out of them one of these days.

TLG's First Toy