The difference between wanting and needing; What is Stuff?

THE STORY OF STUFF

“In this system, if you don’t buy a lot of stuff you don’t have value”

Such solid info – most consumers don’t break out of the mode of consumerism, which is why the ipad will likely do great.  But we all have it… and some of it you can’t escape it.  Some people make their closest bonds with physical objects… be it the women in “I married the Eiffel Tower” who bond *and love* (called “objectum sexual”)  physical objects because they cannot connect with humans, to others who dote on their glowing apple products, and sleekly designed marketed machines.

In 2005, I got back from a 8 month camping trip by my lonesome (and two dogs), and came to a storage unit that was 20x10feet and was full of a 3 bedroom home.

It was stunning to realize that I didn’t need *any* of it.  None.  I have some suits for work, some clothes for play, a couple pairs of shoes.  I have my vinyl records, I have too many books.  I have digital photos and digital music.  If my house was on fire or earthquakin’,  I could grab my wife, my pup, and a back up HD and be fine.  Honestly, the HD isn’t that important as I have clouded almost 40 GB of photos from my entire life, and I have the music backed up all over the place.  Ownership is moot.

Everything is transitory, and I started getting fed up with having worthless crap that has no identifying characteristics of *ME* on them… records will outlast me.  So will tshirts.  I mean… all this plastic and fiber and metal will last eons past us, and our memory will likely peter out to no more than a name within two generations.

Shedding my addiction to stuff, and reveling in my momentary glee when I *DO* identify with a product (I really, really love my 5×1 USB hub tape dispenser & my bicycle) without a twinge of hypocrisy… understanding that we will have a fluid dynamic between items throughout most our life…. was cathartic.

I am still human, and I still buy records sometime, etc.  Mostly, we save our money for experiences like travel and food.  I think a lot of our generation is understanding this?

I don’t buy “stuff” anymore.  I used to buy random crap… sort of therapy shopping.  Now I am just trying to float, and don’t get down on myself when I endorse a material item that really doesn’t matter… I remind myself that our connection with material items do sometimes have merit:

Phones, for example – I don’t really care about mine, or if I checked in on foursquare, but it is changing communication, altering connections, and mobile is becoming vastly more important than it used to be.  The networks on the Serengeti are stronger than in Manhattan or Chicago.  I was speaking with the head of Google travel, Ted Souder, and he mentioned he was on safari and his AT&T had 5 bars about 10 feet from a lion in the middle of Africa, and he couldn’t make a call in LA) – it’s just a testament to how vital the infrastructure is to emerging nations, and helping connect underground movements with modern social mobile tech, etc.

So mobile social phone tech is actually a little more complex than typical “stuff”, you know?  Anyhoo… that’s a ramble.

The film/doc Objectified highlights Apple in an interesting way, talking about the nature of form in design… and if an alien landed on our planet, in the old days that alien would have been able to draw logical conclusions about what the design was in relation to the function of the product.

A chair would visually make you aware it was for sitting.  A fork would be for eating food.

But now… form design has almost zero correlation to function, and we are stuck in this old model of design thinking.  The only company that is really challenging modern design is Apple…. and they showed some BEAUTIFUL examples of epic design.  The idea of the indicator light – it should be there when indicating something.  When it isn’t indicating, it should be designed to not be there.  It’s unbelievably simple, which makes for the most elegant design.  The film kept coming back to the fact that the best design is something you barely perceive as having been designed.  It is something you can’t recognize as “design” because it’s obvious, and “well why shouldn’t it be like that”.

Now form doesn’t mean anything to the function, and design is integrating the fact that you can make it however you want, and it still can do anything, aka smartphone.

If you picked one up never having known of a smart phone, you wouldn’t have a clue what the hell it is, or what it’s capable of.

One of the designers mentioned this…. we are finally at the point where we hold an entire universe in our hand in a well designed, demur, simple package….. yet *RIGHT NOW* you are sitting on an uncomfortable chair, at an ergonomically ancient and dysfunctional desk using writing utensils that don’t actually fit the form of your hand.

It’s completely unacceptable.

back to my thoughts:

So I think the future will be a forward thinking design and approach to “stuff” that helps delineate “what we use and need” versus “what we want to own and have”.

I think digitization of endless media- from Film to TV, to music and books- will lessen the consumer’s zombie like devotion to ownership, and epic walls of collections like CD’s and DVD’s will go by the wayside.  Hell I just sold my DVD’s last year because they are available streaming, or I can have them within a day if I really want it, and now I can just purchase it to my hard drive…….   they aren’t worth shit.

Amazing that the vinyl record’s lifespan is longer than that of the CD/DVD era.  Funny.

In the future, it will hopefully be that “future house” from MGM Tom and JErry cartoons where there’s is a logical button for everything, and it’s clean lines and zero clutter of worthless I HEART LUCY box sets, etc because it will be available instantly on you minority report like tv screen that disappears into the floating well, etc.

Not all stuff is bad.  But most of it is unnecessary.

Now the new challenge is not physical stuff, so much as devotion to our favorite apps, and the longing slack neck gawking of our lifeless eyes searching for connection with a screen that doesn’t stare back…. yet.  We look like zombies as we amble about fixed to the screen….. and it reminds me the Onion isn’t always satire, and sometimes it’s funny because it’s true.