I don’t know how
it happened, but somehow we ended up with five computers at home,
along with the attendant plethora of mice, keyboards, monitors and
printers. They were given to us, or we got them on sale, or we
bought them outright. About half the stuff we didn’t use,
ever. One of the hard drives ate disks. Another fried itself trying
to download songs.
Although I work on a computer every
day, no one else in the family has much to do with the beasts. I
have to drag my wife, Marypat, kicking and screaming, to answer her
emails. But we had all this electronic gadgetry, which at some
recent point was cutting-edge, expensive technology.
Funny thing is that last year we also had a big pile of electronics
to get rid of. I know this because at the same time last fall, on a
day with similar cold, drizzly weather, we drove it to the county
fairgrounds for the annual E-Waste Recycling Event. There was a
long line of cars unloading onto carts piled high with plastic
component-filled junk. Cheerful volunteers schleped televisions and
laptops from idling cars.
I remember looking at some of
our computer equipment last year and coming up with reasons for
keeping it: The kids might use the laptop. We could get the
neighborhood geek over to reboot the frazzled PC. You never know
when you’ll need a backup keyboard. Of course, none of that
happened. A year later, there it sat. This time we were ruthless.
No excuses. Out they went, four out of five computers, several
monitors, printers, three or four keyboards. It filled the better
part of the back of our car.
Marypat and I drove over
together through the cold rain. There were even more cars this
year, snaking out the parking lot and onto the street, with a line
of flashing blinkers stretching down the block. The line crept
steadily along. In 15 minutes we were close to the unloading zone.
“I hope they don’t reach their limit,”
Marypat fretted.
The year before, the event collected 118
tons of electronics. This year looked like it would break that
record. Some of it seemed brand new, still in the original boxes.
Computers that cost $2,000-$3,000 a few years earlier, fax
machines, copiers, televisions, stuff someone once felt they
couldn’t do without.
We were waved ahead.
“Yes!” Marypat said, like she’d just won a race.
Volunteers opened our car doors, hauled off the goods to the
appropriate carts, already mounded high. They heaved them around
like so much trash. I remember how carefully I had unwrapped and
set up the same hard drive one of the workers tossed on a pile.
Sorting was over in 15 seconds.
We drove towards the
exit. Marypat turned to me, big grin on her face, hand raised for a
high-five. “This feels good,” she gushed. That’s
exactly how it felt, like something to celebrate, something
cleansing and purging. I’m guessing that it felt just as good
for everyone else in line.
I remember precisely the same
surge of emotion when we got rid of our second car. Life suddenly
felt less burdened and encumbered. Sure, there have been some
inconvenient moments juggling errands and carpooling in the years
since, but relief outweighs inconvenience hands down.
On
the way home, I thought about the argument people trot out against
simplifying. “Do you want to go back to the Stone Age?”
they ask, as if the only choice were between bloated consumerism
and cave-dwelling. It isn’t that simple, or silly, but what
is it that made up our euphoria?
Stuff, from computers to
vehicles, keeps creeping into my life. I don’t think of
myself as a consumer. I don’t like to shop. Yet there it is,
filling up my existence. I enjoy some of the comforts and tools
that technology offers. But the truth is that we become enslaved.
We labor to be able to afford it. We fritter our days away
maintaining it. It clutters our lives and homes and minds.
That’s why it’s such a blessed relief to take a
whopping load of things I once valued and get it out of my life.
Simplification? I guess so. But what it really feels like is
liberation.
Alan Kesselheim is a contributor to
Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News in Paonia,
Colorado (hcn.org). He is a writer in Bozeman,
Montana.
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