Self-Storage

UPDATE: No, Leo does not count as a possession to be disposed of prior to moving; he is quite welcome to come along on what he will no doubt view as a road trip from hell. I'm thinking bunny tranquilizer will be in order.

This post links to a brief NPR story on the proliferation of self-storage businesses.

Robert had a storage unit in Austin for some time after he moved from College Station into my old one-bedroom apartment. After we moved to our current larger apartment with excellent closets, we went through his stuff in the storage unit and the vast majority of it was thrown out. (We went through it more than once because I firmly believe that it is very difficult to cull the correct amount of junk at once. It's sort of like pulling weeds - you start with the big weeds, and when they are gone, you can focus on the smaller ones until they're all gone, or you simply run out of energy for it.)

At one point in this process, Robert was holding a telephone and said that even if he sometime needed another telephone, he wouldn't want this crappy old one; he would want to purchase a new, up-to-date phone. (And I was thinking that even if he decided to use this one, would he ever be able to find it in the mountain of "stuff that might, theoretically, one day be useful.")

The story made a good point that many people spend much more money on storage than the stuff itself is worth. In many cases, I would guess that the storage costs even exceed the replacement value of the items. After all, you can easily buy some junky furniture, appliances, etc., from Goodwill or the Salvation Army for almost nothing.

But this clearly does not apply only to apartment dwellers with a storage unit. I think many people who would agree that renting a storage unit is a waste of money quite blithely spend a huge amount of money to buy a bigger house than they need and then fill it with stuff. (Corollary of the ideal gas law: stuff expands to fit the available space.) Just because once you have bought the big house, your storage costs are fixed does not mean that the decision to buy such a large house wasn't stupid and that you are not throwing money away to store stuff that is of little genuine value. And even if your house isn't huge, you are basically turning rooms, garages, etc., into self-managed self-storage units that could be used in another way. You may have purchased a two-bedroom house that has de facto become a one-bedroom plus room storing mounds of crap.

Of course, there is a huge body of literature on the meanings invested in personal possessions and how these possessions inform self-identity through the extended self. There is relatively less work in the area of people's disposal or "divestment" of possessions.

Personally, I have almost always felt better after getting rid of stuff. Obviously, I do not make a habit of getting rid of things that I use or truly believe that I will need later or to which I am strongly emotionally attached, but it seems that people have difficulty making the decision to get rid of possessions that are much more mundane and insignificant. It's hard to know how various factors like laziness and risk-averse frugality (i.e. being unwilling to get rid of something that may be needed later because you don't want to risk having to spend money to replace it in the event; I just made that term up) intersect with psychological attachment in leading people to keep stuff forever.

I am not alone in this feeling of post-disposal contentment. A 2001 qualitative study in the journal Advances in Consumer Research notes:

"Following disposal, informants frequently reflected on their decisions, the outcomes both financially and psychologically, and the overall impact of severing their relationships with possessions. For most informants, this assessment elicited positive emotions, feelings of release from obligations to possessions that tied them down, and a newfound awareness of opportunities more suitable to their current situation (Pavia 1993). Informants described a sense of "regained control" over their environment and a sense of emotional closure to the past. Even Juanita, who had disposed of so many of her possessions, described her feelings of relief and renewal in this excerpt from her interview:

Relief! Definitely, that was it, relief! I knew it was going to be hard. But after you get rid of everything that hurts so bad to get rid of, you just feel better. I won't have to go through that again. I had dreaded it, but it's past me now. It wasn't really anything traumatic, but then again, it was. I've lived here 52 years and the kids were raised here too. So, it just hurts. But it's a new beginning."

(Roster, CA. 2001. Letting go: the process and meaning of dispossession in the lives of consumers, Advances in Consumer Research, Vol 28(1).)

Robert and I will likely be moving to another state at this time next year. (I am hoping that state will be North Carolina, but more on that later.) We will almost certainly be downgrading our apartment to something smaller and I have no interest in joining the self-storage trend, so systematic reduction of our stuff is imminent.