Collecting vs cluttering
April 24th, 2025
I have a delicate relationship with physical objects in the material world. I like the abundance of details aesthetically, but at the same time, having a lot of stuff fucks me up and makes my environment feel crammed and suffocating. I found out that I need to have as little visual noise in my daily life as possible to function well. I plan to have a bedroom with empty walls and a single mattress on the floor once I move out from my current place.
The tricky part is that I have a couple of hobbies that are centered around bringing new physical objects into my life. I decided a long time ago that I will not allow myself to build collections that have no function except for being visually appealing. The current "collector" hobbies I have — lolita fashion and dolls & miniatures — are fine in my framework: lolita clothes are just some of the clothes I wear in daily life, and the doll hobby is as an art medium, because I can craft miniature stuff and make dioramas. That's the reason I have dolls, but don't own a single anime figure: dolls can be positioned and photographed in dioramas and thus be functional; figures' function is to be put on a shelf.
Even though I like clothes and cute miniatures, I suffer every time I buy something new — I want to have less things, not more! I try to get rid of at least one old thing when I bring a new thing into my space. Every time I get a better alternative to something I already own, I immediately start searching for a new home for the older thing. I am in the constant process of buying and selling to crystallize the perfect selection of stuff.
I hope one day I'll be free of all the stuff that doesn't have a function in my life. I will definitely be getting rid of almost all of the books that I have — and I don't even have a lot of them, two small shelves, maybe. Honestly, every time I bought a book, I regretted it. Maybe I'm too neurotic, but I start feeling bad about owning anything when I don't use it at least sometimes. Since I won't be frequently re-reading all of my books, I don't want them in my life. And even if I wanted to re-read some book, I'd definitely choose to read it in digital format. There's nothing for me in reading physical media; in my opinion it's just pure inconvenience in comparison. I regretted getting a couple of volumes of some mangas I like; they have beautiful art, but since I won't be opening them often enough to consider them functional, they should be gone. I feel that way about all of the media, really. Games are also objects cluttering my life, so I never get digital copies these days — you can't get rid of them. I either pirate or buy a physical copy that I can sell or gift to someone if I want to. Recently there's been some news that Steam users have spent $19 billion on games they've never played even once. A collective pile of shame worth enough to buy a country.
Probably everyone has an old relative with a collection of never-in-use china — I really don't want to be that kind of person. I don't want to live a postponed life. I think you should never wait for a perfect moment to use your nice stuff. Why not wear your best clothes in daily life and make being overdressed your style trait! I also believe that keeping clothes that aren't the right size for you, in hopes that you'll be able to fit into them someday, is deeply harmful for your mental health. Use your best stuff day to day, don't hold on to things that serve no purpose. Things exist to serve people, not the other way around.