Stuff

as a touring musician. That noise means its van call, your morning deadline to meet all your bandmates in the hotel parking lot, and you are frantically packing, running mental checklists, toothbrush, who bearings, water bottle, sleep mask thing, and you're zipping your suitcase hoping that the seems hold as you lean on it, smashing your entire life like a Panini, trying to fit all the possessions you'll need for the next span of weeks or months into a two inch wheely

carry on and a Duffel bag okay, and yet living out of only a couple of bags. I almost always packed something that never gets used, address that doesn't make it on stage, a book I don't end up cracking, which begs the question, if I don't really need all this stuff in this carry on, then what the heck is all the stuff at home for the drill that I can't find? The power cord floor, the velcrow curlers, the box full of power chords, none of them fitting

the drill. Living light for a while can make an apartment feel like a walk in junk drawer of heart to part with bits and pieces. I'm Dessa. This is deeply human. Presuming you're not a hardcore ascetic tuning in on a d I Y crystal radio, you probably have some stuff you don't really need, maybe even more than you want. So why are humans so driven to a choir collect and even horde? Why do you own so much?

And when does your stuff start to own you? The Royal Charter was a ship which sank off the coasts of Wales actually on this route to Liverpool from the gold fields of Australia. Sank in eighteen fifty nine and I think loss about six lives. What made this tragic According to reports, many of the people who drowned they were the miners who were carrying the gold on them and money belts. They drowned because they wouldn't let go

of all the gold that they were carrying. And that goal, by the way, is washing up on the shores of North Wales as we speak. Prospectives are going out to try and retrieve it. That is Bruce Hood, professor of developmental psychology at the University of Bristol in England, Bruce wrote a book called Possessed, which explores why humans strive to own so much stuff. But before we can examine the motives buried in our golumy little hearts, we've got

to get some terms straight. Possession versus ownership. Bruce, possession is the physical control of an item, usually a material thing, whereas ownership is a convention of social contract, whereby people are recognized to have control over something in perpetuity even when they're not there. So it's like, this is my spoon when it's in my best possession, This is my spoon when it's in the drawer and I'm asleep. Ownership,

that's it. As a general rule, the rest of the animal world doesn't own item in the same way we do. Possible exceptions might be the California sea otter, known to store one stone in a special little pouch, a handy tool for whatever they've got, a crack open a mollusk shell, and some birds like rooks or Jay's are known to play with bottle caps, marbles, and other shiny treasures and

bury their personal cash for safe keeping. But usually even if animals possess an object, a stick used for termite hunting say, they just discard it when they're done with it. When humans are young, they don't really get the idea of ownership either. They think if you can't control something,

you can't own them. So yeah, so if they think you're a sleeper in a comor you're tied up, you can't own something, because they have used this issue of control as a basis for establishing possession and for the basis of later ownership. We enter the world with no stuff, only a little plastic hospital bracelet announcing the names. Somebody just bestowed upon us our first bit of intellectual property, I suppose. But so somebody sets it up with a blanket,

a passive fire, a stuffed bunny. You learn the word mine, and you wear it out, and the great acquisition has begun. Before long, we're outgrowing shoes, sleeping on our very own big kid bed, maybe cruising around and a sweet rides on training wheels. Even in modern homes of pretty modest means, there's usually a bunch of stuff. Then you're full grown and it's time to move out, find a gig, maybe partner up with somebody and get a place of your own.

We had two front seats in the volks fucking and then wait to put all of our worldly goods in the back. It was the most exciting time in my life. I would say that's Candy Hyatt for counting her experience of this particular life stage to go out and make a home for thine self. Part She'd grown up in New York, but headed out west with her guide Jack to start a life together. And they set off with only a car load of essentials, but she brought a

handful of precious items with her too. And I played violin all the way through high school and then just for enjoyment, and I had an antique box with diaries in it. They landed in Colorado, bought some land on Sugar Loaf Mountain, and Jack started to build a house using all sorts of salvage materials. We had the bumper car pavilion floor from ilitch Is, which was an amusement park in Denver, and we had radiators from Shannon's, which

was a biker bar in Boulder. They were those old metal banded up with a one of a kind home full of red stuff and unusual features stories built right into the walls. They had a little girl and the boy went into family mode, the years unspooling as years do, but then everything went off script. In nine we went on a vacation. We were watching the news and we saw I think it was CNN, they said a fire

is raging out of control in Boulder, Colorado. I said, wow, that looks like our road, and I'm known to catastrophize. So Jack said, no, that's not our road. That's further west than us. Everything's fine, don't worry, but not too much. Later the phone rang. One of my best friends who lived in town in Boulder called me and said, is Jack there, which is never a good question. You know you're going to hear some bad news and maybe pass out,

so they want they want somebody there with you. I said yes, and she said there's a fire in your neighborhood. Everything is not fine. And I had a picture in my mind of a corner of the house being gone, or maybe the curtains having caught em fire. But then she said it's gone, it's all gone. Oh gosh, the house exploded before the flames even got there because it was so hot. Wow. I have a few tears in

my eyes. Um. When we came back, we stood at the foundation and looked down into the hole that was left the house Jack built, my hand gone, the antique violin, all her diaries gone, and everything had fallen down into the foundation, and you could still see the words on the pages, even though everything was all burned, and some of that was my journals. Oh my god, I'm so sorry. It was quite a lot. Candy and Jack had less

than when they started. And I would also say that the fire was kind of the beginning of our splitting up to their marriage didn't survive the fire. Candy says that was partly because Jack's connection to the place was incinerated along with all their stuff. The emotional link was broken when the material anchors gave way, and he wanted to leave, to go someplace new. Candy wanted to stay, to start again where they were in normal life, you know,

without the extremes of like fires and floods. Think it can be kind of tempting to imagine there's the world of stuff and then there's the world of our personal relationships, right, But it sounds like those two worlds aren't completely as strictly separate. No, they're not, particularly when some of that stuff is a house that you've put your heart and soul into and your stuff is part of the picture that you have, and the picture has your relationships in it,

and it has your stuff in it. But when all of that stuff has gone and the picture has changed that dramatically, it changes your personal relationship as well. I think years and years ago, I found a half used yellow legal pad at my mom's house. On the top page, neat straight line had been drawn down the middle, and there was a short list of stuff on either side,

elemental stuff like car or house. I don't remember all the items exactly because they're obscured by the big wave of feelings that hit me when I realized what I was looking at. I was looking at my parents divorce. I'd know only hadn't hired a lawyer to expense it, but I'd never considered the mechanics of a d i y version of marital dissolution, like two people sitting at a table with a pen and a pad, dividing all their worldly possessions on either side of a sketched line.

It was such a sad and humble piece of paper, but also deeply moving to me because it was their alternative to court dates and legal battles that would have divided the assorted possessions of twenty years together. For a while, that sheet of paper itself was really precious to me. We keep things for all sorts of reasons. One of the most powerful emotional reasons is sentimental value, where people will really value something which is of no worth to

anyone else, but objects form part of our identities. That's Bruce again, our developmental psychologist, who, for what it's worth, has a soft spot for horror movie posters and golden eraw Hollywood stuff and a sidebar. If his voice rings familiar to you die hard, deeply human fans out there, it's because he made an appearance on the Spooked episode in season one, or maybe you just went to high school with him or something. He says that our ability to own things and to catch feelings for him is

historically linked to the way we grow our food. So, you know, when we transition from hunter gatherers into sort of settling down and farming and raising cattle and things like that, and then going off to fight wars, we had to have a system of rules, which meant that when we came back from the wars, we had our property. Is it the case that throughout history we've had really different understandings of what kinds of things are eligible for ownership. Yeah,

so that's absolutely true. So that was the origin of a lot of the misunderstandings with the invasion of North America because the indigenous people didn't have a concept of anyone owning the land. That seemed ridiculous. And that's why they sold something like Manhattan for forty two hours or whatever it was, because they didn't have a kind of understanding how that could ever be a binding agreement. And now in that same Manhattan, we've expanded our concept of

ownership to encompass almost mythical realms. You can own other people's debt or soybeans that haven't been planted yet. You can shot for shoes twenty four hours a day without putting on any to leave your own house. You can order custom bubbleheads or a bag of Ladybugs delivered to your door front of twenty bucks. Our world is a veritable bonanza of sale stuff and ownership. I worked with one lady, very complex lady, for about ten ten years

after she had the miscarriage. She was acquiring and awarding baby clothes and baby toys in response to that loss. That is Joe Cook. She's the director of Hoarding Disorders UK and she works with people whose stuff threatens to overwhelm the rest of their lives. She got into the business of organizing and decluttering because of her own experience with her dad. After my father died, it took me four months to clear the family home out. He was Polish.

He grew up during the war. He remembers his parents sacrificing their food to give to him. He hated any kind of food waste, but he also hated throwing anything away. There are people that have emotional attachments to things where they find it difficult to let go of an empty Chris packet a newspaper from thirty years ago. Acquiring and keeping stuff can be a self soothing maneuver, a response to loss or uncertainty or scarcity, the emotional installation, as

I call it. I think we can all relate to how we responded to the pandemic. I mean, who didn't go out and buy more petrol, Who didn't go out buy more Loo rolls or extra tins of soup? In terms of responding to anxious times. But by the time a prospective client calls Joe. Their lives have usually reached a crisis point. People might not be able to sleep in their bed, cook on their oven, or be able to use a bath, or it might well be that

the hoarding has attracted vermin. It can be hard to ask for help because hoarding has been so stigmatized in pop culture, but that's changing. The World Health Organization now treats hoarding behaviors as part of a medical condition. But letting go of stuff can be hard for a lot of us. The declutterer Maria Condo is like an international superstar.

Joe notes that a history of scarcity might make someone afraid to toss out even extraneous items, and grief might make throwing away a loved one's bathrobe feel like a denigration of their memory. People are now recognizing that actually, body isn't about people that are lazy and dirty. It's getting people to recognize and to understand and look at. We call it the meaning and the mess, the meaning

in the mess. Well, let's turn back to Candy, who we left standing over a particularly meaningful mess, looking into the ashes of her home with Jack. Their split was hard and messy at first, but over time, temper is cool and Candy moved into a house outside of Boulder, Colorado, near enough to Jack's new place, but on the days the kids spent with her, they could see him flashing a mirror from his porch to say hello. And after a walk one day, Candy and a friend stood talking

in her new home when something caught their eye. We were standing oh by a window, and we looked up and she said, oh, my god, is that smoke. My landline was ringing and it was a reverse nine one one call saying you need to evacuate, And I said, I think we need to go over to Jack's and get stuff out of his house. Another fire was headed their way, and both Candy and Jack's new houses were in its path. Jack, at that time was headed out of town on vacation with his new wife, but Candy

caught him on the phone. Do you want me to go over and get anything? Jack just kind of rolled his eyes into there she goes again, catastrophizing it was it was a pattern in our relationship. Everything is not fine. And then about twenty minutes later he called back and he said, well, maybe there's a few things you could get. Candy and her friend raced over, and it was already so hot that they were afraid the paint on the

car would melt. Jack's house sitters had already fled. They left the door open, so Candy and her friend just ran in started putting stuff in boxes, two computers, Jack's briefcase, which was essentially his office, the art hanging in the kid's rooms. By the time we left, I could see flames. We then, probably three hours um, someone called me and said that they had heard the propane tank at his house explode. It burned to the ground. He lost everything.

Oh my god. Not everyone would drive into the smoking heart of a wildfire, risking life and limb to save a few boxes of stuff for her ex husband, even after being dismissed as overreactive after the hard divorce. But Candy understood what was really at stake, and she knew exactly what losing a home and all the things inside it could do to somebody's whole life. I think it was us against the fire. In my mind, it was like, God, damn it, this is not going to happen a second time.

We are not going to lose everything a second time. Bruce Hood argues that our strong compulsion to own and keep things is a basic impulse potentially driven by evolutionary forces. Collecting property might be a way of signaling our status, that our stuff was essentially proof of our fitness. Chest pass to Bruce think that humans are inclined to competition because of well, we were competing to reproduce. And the more that you have, the more that you're signaling your

competence or your ability to provide for future generations. So there's a kind of real imperative to China accumulate as much as you can control. According to this theory, our possessions were one way to signal status, dominance power. But of course our attachment to stuff isn't driven only by ancient forces. It's also driven by ads on Instagram or the fancy window displays on Fifth Avenue. The TV commercials

were the hottest. A list actor looks into the middle distance with an expression of sensuous boredom to help selk alone, like it's marketing man, think about something like a celebrity endorsement. All right, that was something which was meant by John Watson is a psychologist academic footnote here. John Watson American active during the first half of the twentieth century known

for advertising campaigns that appeal to consumers. Deep psychological means if you realize that if you pair certain desirable things together, people make the association that owning one will achieve the other. And so he just figured, let's get all these celebrities, these heroes that people worship to smoke certain brands of cigarettes or use certain toothpastes, and then that's why people

would buy it in an attempt to emulate their heroes. Hi, I'm Dessa, host of the self referential hit program Deeply Human, and fans often ask Dessa, with your dulcet voice and poignant insights on human behavior, what sort of nonstick cookwear could you recommend? Is there anything that's easy to clean an oven safe? Well, let me tell you. When I'm not cooking up another episode of Deeply Human, you can find me at the stove using Dessa's Deep Dishes brand

cookery items. I'm too busy cleaning up of the podcast to words to worry about cleaning up pots and pants. Enough already, James Faub. When you've got your own brand of cookery items, holler. Big ad agencies launch huge campaigns trying to link consumer goods with status and prestige and then pushing in exactly the opposite direction. Is a blogger named Mr Money Mustache, a dude who has been called

the Frugal Guru by The New Yorker. What I realized at one point is that I hadn't just started a blog. I started sort of a fake ironic cult. Pete aideny a k a. Mr. Money Mustache is like a cross between a cartoon gold prospector and a counterculture warrior fighting conspicuous consumption. He got Internet famous by advocating a low spend lifestyle and a really aggressive saving strategy. But before Pete had any money or a mustache, he was a boy in a small town of Caledonia in Canada. It's

a working class community with a simple lifestyle. You don't really have much to compare yourself against. And I think that's a really healthy thing, because human nature is to compare ourselves with the richest people and then wonder why we can't have that. My dad was a frugal guy and he liked to keep things reasonable, So we were always like the last family to get the cool stuff, the last one to get a microwave, of and last one to get a nicer TV or VCR, all these

nighties things that other people had. But what I realized later they were fairly well off, like, you know, fairly middle income, probably higher than some of my friends. But we had a lot less stuff. And Pete made note it was important not to spend too much of what you earned. When he first got a tech job in the US, he thought he was making a killing. But my co workers are like, oh, yeah, it's just enough. You know, things are so expensive these days. But he

built his life to cause less. He biked the commute, for example, instead of leasing sleek new wheels. The reason I could do that is because I chose to buy a house that was, you know, within ten miles of work or less. And they were driving their mw is in from a super distant suburb because like, we looked the same and we had the same salary. But I was just able to save like more than half of it, and they were saving sometimes zero, going further and further

into debt over the years. Meanwhile, he was going in the other direction, saving and investing a considerable chunk of his take home pay, which was possible because he wasn't buying a ton of stuff, and within about seven or eight years that was enough to live off forever, just passively off of the you know, the dividends and income

from owning a few shares. Those of you familiar with the Fire movements are no doubt yelling at the radio by now, But for the uninitiated, Pete is one of many finance writers connected to a lifestyle trend sometimes referred to by the acronym fire financial independence retire Early devotees save up to sevent of their annual earnings and are generally very eager to talk with you about it. Individual

mileage berries. But our good rule of thumb is you can retire or in about ten years if you're willing to live humble and stay super disciplined. The savings at up and according to Mr money Mustache, that doesn't have to mean crazy sacrifices. Just think of it this way. Whatever you're spending is, does anybody in your country live on half of your level of spending? And I'm sure that answer is yes. And then is it possible that any of those people are happy, having like fulfilling, great

happy lives, maybe even more fulfilling than your life. Well, you know there's millions of people in every country, so you're damn right there is. The fire movement has definitely received some heat from being cheap, but Mr money Mustache explains it's really about clarifying your priorities. Does buying a new wide screen TV really make you happier than if you just played with your kids for all the hours

that you spent working to buy the TV. Mustachio Ism isn't about self denial, and the lifestyle isn't all that monastic. I like to use the term slightly less ridiculous because it's still ridiculous. Like Mustachians, we all live luxurious lives. We can do air travel, we live in climate control houses, we even have cars. But we're just being slightly less ridiculous than other people. It's not a life spent in recliners either were Early retirement is about it. It's not

about quitting work. It's about freeing you to do your best work. At the heart of the Mustache there is a message that is as much about ethics as it is about finance. My goal with Mr Ronie Mustache is to make it a marketing project, to make frugality be an aspirational thing. For rich people. That's positive on on the world, the earth, and the ecosystem, as well as your your wallet. There's a photo you might have seen it online that's supposed to be a complete inventory of

Gandhi's possessions at the time of his death. Spectacles, two pairs of sandals, a pocket watch, a prayer book, like a dozen or so items laid neatly on a piece of cloth. You could fit the entire estate into a kindergartener's backpack. People quibble over whether or not he owned a mattress or a desk in addition to the pictured items, whether his iconic spinning wheel was still in his possession

at exactly this time. But looking at this photo, the man's commitment to a simple, spare existence is like genuinely breathtaking. A pair of Gandhi's sandals sold at auction for just north of dollars, and the new owner, one presumes, wasn't gonna wear him. It was the thrill of owning a piece of history. Humans are an owning animal in part because we can be settled lives allow us to keep more than we can carry, and in part we acquire our cash of things to compete with one another, maybe

for mating rights other forms of social status. The ever present title pull of advertising pressures us to spend more, to own more, and then to upgrade to the new model. And in the hardest times of our lives, we might keep things because it's just too hard to let them go, even if they don't make us happy anymore, even if we have more than we can use, Even as the water rises around us, our fists want to hold tight

to the objects that might weigh us to the bottom. Okay, guys, I have got to get some rest before van call tomorrow. So for parting thought on stuff and our complicated relationship to it, let's go back to candy. Do you think about stuff and material possessions differently than other people? Do I do? I pack up some things, put them on a bed close to the front door, and alert a few of the neighbors, and the box says in case of fire, and all they have to do is run

in and grab a few things. But every year that box gets smaller because there are fewer things that I think are really that important. Every year I think I would just start over. I don't owned that there are things that I really am so attached to that I couldn't go on with life without them. Deeply Human is a BBC World Service in American public media co production with I Heart Media. It's written and hosted by Medssa.

Find me online at dssa on Instagram and Dessa Darling on Twitter, and you can find my cookwear on your next holiday whish list. Hey, every cooks wish desas Deeps. I'm worried about you. Shut up, James, I hate you. Those three words were forbidden in my house when I was a kid. There were just too serious, too mean. On the next Deeply Human, we're investigating hatred, that verbot and emotion, its role in culture wars, difficult family dynamics, and the cesspool of social media. And we'll get some

hopeful psychological insights too. Why do we hate? And how can we stop? And if you've been enjoying the podcast so far, take a moment to pin a little review we read each and everyone. Thanks for listening, and I'll meet you back here for the next round.