Plasticshit
"Should I buy this?". One of life's most interesting conundrums.
"Should I buy this?". One of life's most interesting conundrums. Basic economics would have us believe we're perfectly rational actors in possession of complete information, but in real life, of course, we're capricious ignoramuses. We don't know that much about the piece of plasticshit we're considering purchasing until we get it home, and we certainly don't know how our futures will transpire in the presence of said plasticshit. Even more so now we buy our plasticshit online - chosen, basically at random, amongst a multitude of other similar plasticshits of the same ilk.
It probably seems like a trivial question, and on an individual transactional level it mostly is, but when you finally have to box up and move all your plasticshit after 10 years, you get a true sense of the cumulative weight of all those micro-decisions. Faced with piles, boxes and bags of junk, you ask yourself "How the hell did I end up with all this crap?". The answer is pretty simple - you didn't take each buying decision seriously. You just opened Amazon, searched, clicked and forgot. You needed a magnetic-phone-ring thing, so you just bought it. One summer, the temperature was over 30 for two hours so you bought a giant paddling pool didn't you. You don't stop to seriously consider how long plasticshit will last, how much space it will take up or how or when you'll dispose of it. You just put it in your house somewhere, perhaps alongside the never-used Bohemia decanter someone long-forgotten gave you as a wedding present 20 years ago and which has now developed a thick patina of grease from every time you picked it up and thought "for fuck's sake, do I look like a Count" and put it back in the cupboard where it takes up so much space you're now planning a kitchen extension.
The process of moving is like the end of a ten-year football match where the score's been kept a secret, although you secretly know. The crap has beaten you fair and square. As you traipse soullessly from the basement to the top floor to put the fourth hairdryer in a box marked "PLASTIC SHIT", you may get to seriously contemplating how you might make better purchasing decisions in the future. After all, none of this stuff was free and it all adds up. Ten quid here, fifty quid there. There must be thousands in waste piled, boxed and bagged.
My buddy Ethan and I once tried to come up with a scientific method of quantifying how much you should pay for something by multiplying how many years it would last, how many hours a week you expect to use it and a sort of utility-power multiplier. For example, a new MacBook Pro that would last for five years and be used for work 8 hours a day might have a value score of over $20,000, even though it only costs a tenth of that. This method isn't great as it assigns high scores to 'slow' products - for example, a beard trimmer that takes two hours to complete the job rather than five minutes scores much higher, which is obviously ridiculous.
There's probably no real methodical way to make these decisions, but I'm starting to think that 'projected future moving' is probably the best, most realistic heuristic for buying judgements, even if you never intend to move.
I've been packing up for at least a couple of weeks now, so I feel qualified to formulate the following taxonomy of plasticshit. There are three categories of stuff you come across as you prepare to move:
Stuff you just need and would have to buy it again if you didn't take it with you. Think potato peelers. You don't love this stuff, or even like it. You just sort of need it, in a middle-class potato peelery kind of way. You feel nothing other than boredom as you box this stuff up. Much of it will be beige.
Stuff you couldn't give a shit about, that you can't remember buying, that you resent having to spend £1.50 on a box to take it with you. You swear under your breath as you heave it into the van and sometimes just kick it for no reason. This stuff makes you hate yourself just a little bit and possibly your spouse just a little bit more. Every item will need to be argued over. You will want to take it to the dump. You will not be allowed to. You will put it in the corner of a room, move it to another room, offer it to all the neighbours, offer it to strangers. You will eventually take it to the dump.
Stuff you actually like. Your piano. Paprika. Maybe a nice pen. Not much else to be honest. This stuff is either huge and requires specialist help to move, or takes up next to no space and smells nice. You smile as you pack this stuff up. You give it an extra turn of bubble wrap.
Everyone will have their own ratio - I'm probably like 50/40/10 if I had to guess. Sad, I know, but in some ways it gives me hope for the future. If only I could beat the materialist-consumerist treadmill I might simultaneously save money, live better and not have to repeat this saga again, ever.
So how do you avoid it? God knows I don't want to do this again. Here's my new simple method. It's Mari Kondo for plasticshit. Before you proceed to checkout, picture yourself in ten years, surrounded by boxes. You pick up a piece of plasticshit. Close your eyes and imagine yourself having to bubble wrap this item. Resentment is a no-buy.