Purchasing & purging our way to lasting joy, peace and security?
For decades we’ve been told that in order to be happy, we need to own certain stuff.
Once we’ve got that, to reach the next level of happiness we need a different set of stuff. And so it goes on.
We’ve fallen for the adverts and quite literally bought into what the brands tell us we need and should want. Even as Christians we fall prey to thinking ‘life would be a little better if only I owned that coffee machine/coat/designer watch’. We have much more than we need, but still our consumer culture tells us that we’re not quite as happy as we could be, and it advertises a variety of purchasable solutions to this problem. Maybe it was widespread ‘affluenza’, or maybe we just realised that we were never reaching the happiness that was promised by possessing material things, but the pendulum has begun to swing in the opposite direction, with the internet full of blogs, lists and tips for decluttering our way to a happier, more mindful life.
The tidy life
‘Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful’, William Morris once said. A contemporary extrapolation of this ethic can be found in Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying, which has sold over 5million copies, and its companion Spark Joy. The popularity of her writing and the decluttering techniques therein recently prompted TIME magazine to list her as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. The glowing promise of this style of decluttering is that, by bringing order to every nook and cranny of our lives, we can regain control and order in a world of digital chaos and distraction.
Less stuff to be happy?
Decluttering can seem entirely rational because it subverts our consumer culture’s false assertion that in order to be happy we need to have more stuff. But with its converse assertion that to have less stuff is to be happy, minimalism strays into similar territory – a preoccupation with material possessions.
It was this belief that drove Chris McCandless, a young American man in the mid-1990s whose story is told in the 2007 film Into The Wild, to leave home with only a rucksack full of stuff and go adventuring. Tragically, in his final days of life, alone in an abandoned bus, he concludes that ‘happiness is only real when shared’. He decluttered his life and discovered that it wasn’t the answer to accessing a truer, more authentic self that he’d hoped it would be.
When we buy things, and when we clear them out, the desire that lurks beneath each action is informed by our duty to subdue the earth (Genesis 1.28), but distorted by sin to make us believe that this will bring us true happiness. The reality is that our possessions, whether few or many, can only bring happiness when we recognise them as good gifts from a loving God who caringly fathers us throughout our lives. Perhaps this recognition is most possible and most vivid when we unclasp our hands and offer our possessions to be a blessing to those God has placed around us.
Lacking no good thing
The pursuit of purging our homes of excessive possessions can lead to a quiet despising of God’s provision, just as the accumulation of things can lead to bitterness and dissatisfaction when what we want eludes us. Neither attitude will easily be defined by thankfulness. Of course, at the heart of it all doesn’t lie a deep desire for a lack or abundance of stuff. At the heart of both rampant consumerism and busy decluttering are our inherent human longings to bring order to chaos, to feel loved and wanted, to find security. Better than a well-organised wardrobe or an empty inbox, it is love that offers us freedom, lifts our burdens, and replaces them with lasting peace and joy.
These are the things we’re actually yearning for when we purchase, or reorganise and declutter. Aren’t these possessions of ours markers of love? That we were loved, and are loved still, by the God who cares for us and who ensures we lack no good thing.
