Heather Aardema explains why we buy too much (easy online shopping, advertising, sentimental guilt) and how to stop. She advocates for buying less but better, embracing JOMO (joy of missing out), and letting go of inherited items that don't serve you.
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Have you ever taken a moment to walk around your home with the intention to notice how much you have? We have a lot of stuff. The average American home has over 300,000 items. A lot. And most of that stuff will never be used. We store it indefinitely in our garages, our storage units, our attics, our basements. We have a lot of stuff. So why do we have so much? Well, there are a number of reasons for this, and I think the biggest reason is because it's just so easy to buy. It's so easy to hit that buy now button. We do that, and a few hours later, whatever it is or was that we wanted shows up at our doorstep. It's very human to buy things. And I'll tell you a funny story. I was teaching a class on zoom in my office, my home office, all about living with less. And all of a sudden, my dog started to go crazy. She was barking and barking. And the reason why she was barking so much was because Amazon was delivering a package on my doorstep at the exact time I was talking about living with less. I want you to know I am not anti buying things. I'm not anti consumerism. What has really helped me, though, is this idea of buying more intentionally. And I came across this idea in the book essentialism by Greg McCowan. And in that book, he talks about the concept of buying less but better. And I think this is so powerful and so meaningful, and it's really impacted how I show up and what I choose to buy. So fast. Fashion, fast furniture, fast food, anything with the word fast in front of it is probably not really good for ourselves or for our planet. So I love the idea again, of buying less but better. So it's really easy to buy things, right? We've got this buy now culture. Why else do we have so much? I read a book called Subtract by Lydie Klotz. And in this book, Lighty talks about this human instinct for more, this natural desire for addition, and that we are more inclined to add things before we subtract things. So, for example, when I first learned how to cook, if I were making a stew or some kind of soup, I thought the answer was always, what else can I add to this pot to make it better? But if you add too much to the pot, then it doesn't taste good. It just kind of tastes like. Like mush. What else? Well, forever I wanted to add a shelf to a wall. And then I thought the answer was to add two shelves, that if we had two shelves, then it would Be perfect and I would be happy. Well, thank goodness we paused and we didn't do anything. And it hit me a few weeks later. Wow, I really love this wall without anything on it. When it doesn't have anything on it, it's a beautiful place for my eyes to rest. We have this natural human instinct for more and it doesn't always serve us. There are more reasons why we have so much. There is a business strategy and within this business strategy there are two concepts and one is called planned obsolescence and the other is called perceived obsolescence. With planned obsolescence, the idea is that if you buy something new, you're going to need to buy other new things for that. So if you get a new phone, well all of a sudden your old charger is not going to work and you guessed it, you're going to need a new charger or the phone is going to be a different size, so you're going to need a different phone case. With perceived obsolescence, the goal is that you look at your phone and you realize, wow, there's a brand new phone out there and you go and buy the brand new phone even though there's nothing wrong with the one that you had before. So planned obsolescence, perceived obsolescence, those are business strategies and big reasons why we have so much stuff today. I also worked in advertising for 20 years when I was working in corporate America. This is before I entered the wellness and well being space, before I started doing what I do today. And when I worked in advertising, sometimes I would be tasked to come up with ads that fell within the FUD department. That sounds so funny, right? The FUD department and FUZZ stood for fear, uncertainty and doubt. Yeah, I had to create ads. So TV commercials or print ads that made you as a consumer feel fear, uncertainty and doubt. How icky, right? That's kind of icky. We will also feel guilty letting go of items that have been passed down to us. And so we'll store those items even if we don't like them very much. I have a client who needed to go through all of her parents things when they passed and there were a few items that she really liked. Those things weren't clutter, but there was this collection of teacups, this collection that her mom had created, had loved, had a mass. And this collection of teacups was so meaningful to her mom. And so my client had these teacups, hundreds of teacups on her table and didn't know what to do with them. She didn't love the teacups. Now, if she had loved them, it would have been easy. They would have felt light. She would have kept them and used them. She didn't love them, though. This was her mother's collection. And so what helped her move through this was the thought that her mother had loved the teacups completely, wholly, and that there was no more work for her to do. And so when she allowed herself to embrace this new thought, that there was no more work to be done, that her mom had done the job completely, that the teacups could now be available to somebody else who could love them completely, she was able to let go of them freely, and the teacups moved on. So those are reasons for why we have so much stuff. And often we will feel like our dreams are being buried under all our stuff. And so if you don't want to feel weighed down by the excess, if you don't want to feel like you're being buried underneath your stuff, I want you to play with this idea of Jomo. Jomo stands for joy of missing out. And when we embrace this idea or this concept, you got it. Life can get so much lighter. So how does it work? Well, let's say you're at the store and you're just about to buy something else, and you realize, I don't really want this. And so you ask yourself, what's the joy of not buying this item? And the joy is that you're not bringing it into the house. It's not going to take up more space. The joy is also that you're going to have more money in your bank account because you're not buying something that you don't need. And that can make it easier to decide to purchase things more intentionally. How else can this play out? Well, let's say you're going through items that have been passed on to you. And these items feel heavy. You don't want them, they're clutter. The joy of letting them go is knowing that somebody else can now use them. The joy is that you now have more space in your home for whatever it is that you want. So play with this idea of Jomo and see how it can lighten your life. One of my favorite minimalists, Joshua Becker, says that we buy things with hours of our lives, hours of our lives. And I think he was inspired by Henry David Thoreau, who said, the price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it. So look around, ask yourself, do you have more than you want? Do you have excess? And if you do know that there are a lot of different reasons for this, that nothing has gone wrong, and ask yourself if you'll give yourself permission to begin to lighten things up. Don't let your dreams stay buried underneath the clutter. You've got this.
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