Make Good PlacesThis is the first part of a four-part series on how to live well in the age of overconsumption.
I have a complicated relationship with stuff. I went to college for sculpture, which is really just about making meaningful stuff. I work in residential interior design, doing procurement and project management, which means buying a lot of stuff for people all the time. And I’m a sustainable designer, so I’m constantly thinking about which stuff people should buy to lighten the load on the environment while knowing that the best thing for the planet is almost always buying no stuff at all.
What does all of this mean? It means that I spend an extraordinary amount of time thinking about, looking at, and trying to understand stuff—how it’s made, who made it, what’s in it, why we need it, what its value is, where it goes after it’s been used. Almost all day, every day. This is where my interest in the relationship between sustainability, stuff, and human well-being is rooted. If there’s anything I’ve learned in navigating our affinity for things, it’s that we people need stuff. We cannot survive without it, but we also cannot survive in our current “stuff” landscape.
Sandra Goldmark, a repair connoisseur, professor, and pioneer in addressing our stuff problem, argues that our love of stuff is a deeply human condition. In her book, Fixation: How To Have Stuff Without Breaking the Planet, Goldmark explores the role of things in our lives: “We bring these objects into our homes, and they shape our daily lives, the rhythm of our days. Your lamp lights your family dinner, your coffee maker marks your morning routine. The things around us create a story of who we are, and they impact our health and happiness and planet just as our food does.” Neuroscientists approximate that 90 percent of our thoughts are subconscious, which is to say that we move through the world and make decisions without pairing those movements and decisions with language and conscious effort. We don’t think, we just do. The objects around us play a central role in facilitating those subconscious actions day in and day out—more than most realize. They make us more aware of the passage of time and help us create grounding, coherent structures for our days.
Medical sociologist Aaron Antonovsky’s salutogenic model of health examines the origins of health (versus the predominant study of the origins of illness). A salutogenic approach to architecture reiterates the importance of our objects in fostering what Antonovsky coined as one’s sense of coherence. In salutogenesis, a strong sense of coherence makes us more resilient and increases our ability to endure stressful events in life, therefore making us healthier. The three major contributors to one’s sense of coherence are comprehensibility (a person’s ability to make sense of one’s life narrative and current circumstances), manageability (a person's ability to manage daily physical realities and activities), and meaningfulness (the foundation of one’s desire to live). Our homes—and all of our stuff— address all three facets of Antonovosky’s theory of well-being. Comprehensibility includes things like secure housing, the simplicity of use and form in our space, and easy wayfinding; manageability means having a home that is functional, safe, and encourages healthy habits; and meaningfulness manifests in our “stuff” by designing for pets, socialization, and our hobbies—the things that give our lives joy and meaning. Our stuff triggers actions, and each action we take positively or negatively contributes to our health.
Sarah Williams Goldhagen further emphasizes the role of our built environment in her text Welcome To Your World: How the Built Environment Shapes Our Lives. She uses neuroscientific principles to show that our thoughts and choices are inextricably linked to our surroundings. We view our environment as a “living ecology of affordances” in which people sort and move through the built environment according to what an object or space offers to us (i.e. its function). Similarly, our surroundings are littered with “primes” (non-conscious triggers or stimuli in the built environment) that influence one’s thoughts and inspire action. Through both the salutogenic and neuroarchitectural lenses, stuff matters; it defines our day and pushes us to take action.
There’s more to stuff than just the actions they offer us, though. Through the repeated use of objects to perform our daily actions, we develop a sense of identity, and our sense of self becomes dependent on the things we use.
Goldmark suggests that many of us don’t notice the objects that help us perform our daily functions—until something breaks. When confronted with a broken or malfunctioning object, we experience a “sense of frustration, a lack of control, a perception of the precariousness of our many human-thing entanglements.” A broken thing is frustrating because it can no longer perform its utilitarian function (a coffeemaker that cannot make you coffee makes for a frustrating morning indeed). However, a broken object also forces us to confront our dependence on the things around us and the ways in which our object-driven actions foster a sense of self. While we need stuff to survive, its presence in our lives guarantees more than survival; it allows us to create a sense of control and fosters a sense of confidence in who we are and what we value. Goldmark writes that “this interruption to the flow of our daily life may threaten something even deeper: our sense of who we are…when an item breaks and interrupts the flow of our day, it also interrupts our sense of who we are.”
If the stuff we collect and surround ourselves with accumulates into a sense of self, then it is essential for our health and well-being. We live in a world obsessed with stuff for all of the wrong reasons. We produce and consume stuff at an exorbitant rate because we love stuff—and we need stuff—but we’ve created a direct, causal relationship where there isn’t one. More stuff does not equal more happiness. In fact, more stuff definitely leads to poorer health and less happiness. While we do need stuff, the context, quantity, history, and quality all matter more than we realize. The effort we invest in caring for our stuff matters.
We can rethink what Goldmark calls our “stuff diet” in a way that is better for our individual and collective well-being, and a matter of life and death for our planet.
