![]() (Accumulating love can be part of the same impulse: people who collect objects, like stamps or dolls, are creating a collection to worship as a whole.) This worshipful love of possessions is the kind of thing that makes people wash their cars obsessively, make sure that their antique rifle is in absolutely perfect condition, and insist on everybody in the house admiring their chosen delight at least once. A study from 2011 gave us a particular insight into what happens with the second sort of love for possessions, particularly in men. We possess a wide variety of attitudes towards our stuff: Some people will just enjoy accumulating goods, while others will worship the objects they have. One of our first relationships is often with this object. ![]() He details experiments in which children refused point-blank to take a perfect copy of the loved thing instead of the thing itself. ![]() Christian Jarrett, writing for the British Psychological Society on "stuff" and how we relate to it, explains that this is often viewed as a "transitional object" because it helps us become slowly independent of our mothers. We find this object incredibly hard to release and many of us hold onto it into adulthood. In fact, when we're very small, many of us develop an incredibly strong attachment to one particular object.įor some of us, it's a bear or a stuffed toy, for Linus from Peanuts, it was, famously, a blanket. When it comes to the here and now - a world where possession accumulation is viewed as a natural part of life, and ascetics who go without extra clothes, sofas and ornamental candleholders are viewed with suspicion (or are selling you something) - the origins of our object-attachment often start quite early. As clothing technologies shifted and became cheaper, people of different classes also became more able to own clothing for different occasions, and to buy new clothes as the old ones went "out of fashion." This is partially why the concept of changing fashions developed. But the purchase of non-essentials is generally a signal of wealth- a sign that you have enough money to buy a brass coat peg in the shape of an owl, or an ornamental typewriter, or thousands of books, and therefore don't have to confine your spending purely to food and board. The key to that is often the purchase of stuff, particularly stuff that sends a specific class signal (which changes from society to society). ![]() Throughout history, the middle class has tended to be aspirational: it has wanted to look good and separate itself from the lower rungs. The creation of a middle class was a particularly vital element in the development of shopping for "fun." As various mechanisms in the history of capitalism made people richer - from the shift to agriculture to the Industrial Revolution - the number of people with money to spend on non-essentials expanded. "Disposable income" has only really been a thing for a couple of centuries, at least for everyday people (of course, kings, queens and nobles have always been able to flash the cash). Why do we buy things we don't necessarily need? The origins of that question actually lie in history, and more specifically the history of capitalism. Yes, you should still clean out all the 10-year-old shoes from under your piano and take them to Goodwill, but here's some insight into why you got them and what drove you to keep them so long. But we can derive acute comfort and psychological solace in many types of human possession, a range of emotion which goes from conscious joy and pleasure to melancholy memories and expressions of identity. If you haven't heard of Marie Kondo's famous method (get rid of any items that no longer "brings you joy"), you've been living under a rock. The biggest new trend regarding possessions is, of course, to get rid of 'em. But the pack rats among us aren't actually all that unusual many of us have an intriguing relationship with possessions, which can be explained by diving into some research on capitalism, psychology, and theories of self. But pack rats still have our own issues.īecause while it's not a pathology, the urge to hold on to possessions that aren't useful - or to keep buying new cute toothbrushes, or to somehow accumulate 14 dove-shaped candles - can be a bit confusing. Are you a pack rat? People who just can't throw things away (or keep accumulating new stuff despite concerns about space or storage) are psychologically distinct from hoarders - those folks who collect stuff to the point where it causes chaos in their lives, but are still unable to part with it for deeply problematic psychological reasons ( in Suffocating The Soul,one of the key books on hoarding, the psychologist Renee Winters says the activity is motivated by a "soul's wounding" that happened to hoarders at some point in their lives).
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