Sentimental Materialism

Je vois la vie en choses

Last night, I needed something basic but flashy — a little illusion of substance without too much risk. By chance and because it was cheap, we threw on American Hustle, a film of incredible elements that nonetheless comes out a little off.¹ Despite memorable performances from Christian Bale and Amy Adams, Jennifer Lawrence is the real star here. Late in the film, out to lunch with her mobster boyfriend, she finds herself pressured into leaving her husband and moving to Miami. She chokes up, and it’s clear she isn’t quite sure what to say. But then, her eyes restless and her lip trembling, she tells the truth: “I’m not very good with change. It’s hard for me.” Like these mid-life inflected things tend to do, coming out of nowhere, it hit me hard. It is so much easier, as her character illustrates so well, to drink and pretend and do the same thing tomorrow.

Last week, I teared up as I sold a chair I’d had for ten years. It wasn’t even comfortable and I’d never been able to sit in it for more than an hour, and in truth I was glad to finally be rid of it. At the same time, it was something I’d had with me in the house for a decade. And the house itself — I know this is going to hurt most of all, once we sign over the keys: we’ve lived here almost thirteen years. But we’re finally moving. I’m selling furniture and books and knickknacks. I’m donating whatever I’m too lazy to list and throwing out old clothes. Soon will come the hobbies: Am I ever going to paint again? Do I keep the guitar I bought with my first paycheck when I was sixteen, even though I haven’t played in years? After that, the indescribable attachments: an empty bottle of cologne I’ve had since I was eight; a piggy bank I haven’t used since my voice dropped; a beat-up silver teapot my husband and I bought when we first moved in together, and that actually makes tea taste metallic. Earlier this year, when he snuck a planter into a box of donations once the plant inside it had died, I felt what I can only call panic and snatched it back out and put it on a shelf in my office. I couldn’t let it go. It was something I’d lived with. It was something I’d had in my life when I was happy.

Obviously, you can’t live with everything. You can’t take it all with you. Throughout this process, I’ve been confronted with the extreme manifestation of this attachment to objects — a kind of funhouse mirror of my own neurosis. When I announced that we would sell, my mother decided it was time to “go through” her storage unit — a 9’ x 16’ closet packed about twelve feet to the ceiling, untouched for years. Here is the same problem in a much more desperate register: How could I even think of getting rid of those old hair clips? Someone will buy them. How could I just throw away a musty comforter that’s been in and out of storage units since 2015, even though she replaced it a long time ago? Under the hard deadline of a terminated lease, an entire truckload of her life is teetering on a cliff — a life she’s kept all these years because of the fantasy of starting over, of finding a larger apartment, of decorating again, of cooking. But also because, like me and my little empty bottle of Hermès, these are her memories. In my impatience and frustration, I am trying to throw away her past. Who wouldn’t cling to that?

The enlightened among us, in America, are supposed to make fun of our peers for their attachment to things — to stuff, as George Carlin spat. A former friend of mine (this isn’t why we broke up), in advance of Dune’s release in 2021, wanted to borrow my copy of the novel — a junky hardcover reprint from the eighties. I said no; it was special to me. When I was fifteen or sixteen and spending all my time making music or chatting with internet strangers, my mother came home with it one day — a find in the used annex at Barnes & Noble — and handed it over. It was a novel my dad had loved and she thought I’d like it too. I didn’t read at the time — nothing but assignments — but I sat down that night and started reading and couldn’t stop. I bought the rest of them and read them all. It’s the book, the physical copy, that brought me back to reading — which is to say it’s the book that changed my life. I’d never let anyone touch it, least of all someone who treated all objects like disposable junk, who misplaced and spilled on things every day. I didn’t say this but my friend seemed to intuit it, and grew angry with me: “It’s just a book. You’re too attached to things.” To make amends, I bought him a new copy of Dune. As far as I know, he never read it.

It’s just a book, it’s just stuff, it’s all just things — objects with which we burden ourselves and which require space, maintenance, cleaning. This is the supposed revelation behind the Kondo Method or millennial minimalism: the bare shelves and blond wood and eggshell walls of the Instagram-primed apartment. In Longing for Less,

Kyle Chayka Industries

examines the role the internet itself plays in this movement:

Minimalism entails blocks of solid color, organic textures, desaturated hues, and a lack of patterns. Minimalist imagery has only a few discrete subjects or focal points, often centered. The style seems adapted for the internet and social media, where every image must either compete with or match the vacuum of white website backgrounds. It looks good on the screens that contain so much of our visual experiences because the abundance of blank space makes otherwise subtle qualities stand out.

A living space (and ergo a workspace, since for most white collar workers these are one and the same) with recognizable patterns and identifiable décor, is in effect purged of mementos, of the strange objects only time can give us. Your space — the backdrop for your content and conversations — becomes as interchangeable, as neutral, as that of anyone else in your socioeconomic class.

When I was growing up, the zeitgeist said to fear and despise the office cubicle. Today, most people live in them.

This aesthetic, of course, spills out of apartments and into commercial corridors. In his second book, Filterworld, Chayka recounts his fascination at finding what is essentially the same “authentic” coffee shop in every city he visits: “The twenty-first-century generic cafés were remarkable in the specificity of their matching details as well as the sense that each had emerged organically from its location… What I eventually concluded was that they were all authentically connected to the new network of digital geography, wired together in real time by social networks.” In an interview with Sarita Pillay Gonzalez, she tells him how she began to notice, all over Cape Town, the same “long wooden tables, wrought-iron finishings, those [Edison] lightbulbs that hang, hanging plants.” This aesthetic, Chayka says, “was propagating into different venues as well: beer halls, gastropubs, art galleries, Airbnbs.” Unmentioned here is another bonus for the business world: Not only does every space look alike and seamlessly “network” on a homogenous internet full of homogenous people; but the aesthetic’s popularity ensures that this décor can be manufactured en masse by laborers overseas and, until just recently, imported for a song.²

It’s hard to take seriously this criticism of being materialistic from people whose apartments and neighborhoods all look alike, mass manufactured for a kind of mass personality — nor from those who engage in the digital equivalent of this consumptive lifestyle. While social media has guided the offscreen world to reproduce the aesthetics of the internet, this still costs money; and even beige trinkets and particle board furniture remain out of reach for many who, to paraphrase Chayka, nonetheless seek to identify with the void:

I felt that I fit into these non-places. They reflected my tastes and aspirations, in a way, as someone who traveled a lot and took a cosmopolitan pride in working all over. But identifying with a literally empty symbol was a strange exercise.

Years ago, I wrote an essay about silence in art and silence on social media — how cultivating deletion as an aesthetic by constantly erasing oneself can be digital self harm. Usually, people hurt themselves to manage trauma or PTSD; it displaces stress and pain in the same way a poem or a visual composition, by altering the register of attention, can subvert our expectations. It’s a cliché at this point, but neurotically trying to create a perfect persona — a likable brand — entails hiding or deleting the complexity all of us bring to our lives. To be visually appealing on the internet, as Chayka implies, we must be minimal to be able to circulate — to inflate our value as currency. Driven to succeed by this logic, it’s a liability to bring your whole self, your whole life, along with you. Social media’s collapse of the past into the present — strangers treating something you did twenty years ago as equally representative of your personality, of your values, as something you posted earlier that morning — makes the past itself a danger to your livelihood. Economically, memories are toxic assets.³ It simply doesn’t make financial sense to cling to who you were, to what you cared about.

Social media, of course, is not the only factor here. In American life, we tend not to have ancestral homes. There aren’t country houses passed down and shared among siblings. There aren’t parcels of woods to return to every year. In our real estate, we prioritize the building of wealth by buying and selling every few years — mostly because, up until 2008, it was the only way the majority of Americans had any chance at class mobility. In our vacations, we prioritize novelty. Our families tend to be small and nuclear; and, post-Trump, they are more fractured than they’ve ever been. With no place to go and remember, and with fewer people around to reminisce, objects are where we tend to store our memories. However, after the Great Recession, that American system — the life in things — is much harder to maintain. Things require space, and as my mother’s life can illustrate, space is a luxury. In fact, as any realtor fluent in square footage can tell you, space is money. In this sense, the vogue for minimalism⁴ among millennial Americans seems like a trauma response to the mass theft of our wealth. We lack the adequate space to populate our lives with memories, with things we love, and so we throw them away. We delete them. We diminish ourselves to curtail harm without realizing the harm is in our diminishment. These are dehumanizing conditions, and it doesn’t surprise me when people adapt to them by dulling the vibrance of their humanity.

And that’s the root question, I suppose: How do you remain human under dehumanizing conditions? As a parallel example, the fantasy of computers that seem human has played out, in reality, in reverse; anyone who’s interviewed for a job in the last five years can tell you just how robotic technology has made us. It’s extremely difficult to cling to humanity under conditions like these, is what I mean. But my answer hasn’t changed. If you want to resist your diminishment, you have to know what or who is willing you to change, and why. You have to know why deleting photos of yourself brings a strange pleasure, or why it’s a sinister relief to divest yourself of a lifetime of objects. You have to know, as ever, why you think what you think, and why you want to remain human, despite the cost.

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Thank you for reading. Sorry it’s been so long. Thank you for sticking with me. You know how moving can be, but I’m grateful to have been able to write this, and hope to write again soon.

1. For what it’s worth, I think Bradley Cooper is the rancid ingredient — as he is in most of his projects. The only role he’s nailed is the waterbed guy in Licorice Pizza.

2. Trump’s tariffs are a global economic disaster in the making, and millions, ultimately, are going to starve. I also think it’s terrible that Americans import an endless supply of cheap and worthless crap that ends up right back in the ocean it crossed to get here, and that it’s high time this ecocidal activity stopped.

3. In this vein, it’s not unrelated to internet aesthetics that a nation’s history has become just as economically dubious as one’s personal past.

4. Since the announcements of the tariffs, I’ve wondered if the trend in décor will swing back to the nineties aesthetic of clutter — antique frames, midcentury lamps, bold paint, Catholic camp, shoddily reupholstered furniture. With new items at a premium, thrift stores and Craigslist might be the West Elm and IKEA of the remainder of this decade. Including the adjective “Bohemian” (instead of the “shabby chic” of the oughts) has made it easier for us to sell the more ornate or ostentatious items we’ve decided to get rid of, which makes me wonder if they might find their way into some other family’s shared memory — here’s the ottoman we got from that depressed gay couple selling their house, and so forth.