Happiness and the Pursuit of STUFF

by Sheryl Suko
Mrs. Gottrocks Fine Jewelry and Gifts

Fourteen months after my husband sent me to jewelers school on the other side of the country so I could change careers to something I loved, I was walking through my four-bedroom, three story "dream house" again. I realized that while I was away, I had been quite content living in a little one-room guesthouse, out of expensive home party baskets crammed full of underwear and school supplies. It had been a step back in time to my college and post college days, and now I was overwhelmed by how much useless STUFF I had accumulated since marrying, and how much of it was unused, stashed away in packed closets, or just plain silly. I turned to my husband and said, "Your first wife was a real pack rat. This STUFF has got to go!" Just FYI - I am his only wife.

So three huge yard sales later I began feel the oppression of that house and that foreign lifestyle I had somehow evolved into lifting like a fog. I was very proud of myself. I realized just how unhappy I had really been before I left, and how, like a lot of my friends at work, I had used STUFF to self-medicate that unhappiness away. Now I was happy to be home, happily renewing my deep appreciation and love for my husband, happy with my new career and all its promise -- and for the first time in a long time, heavily in debt. So my first goal was to get to work and start paying off the school debts, which I figured would take me about four years if I worked hard and stopped buying STUFF. However, I had no idea how superficial this "unstuffing" of my life had really been.

I started getting calls from doctors. Your pap smear is positive - hysterectomy. Your knee needs Orthoscopic surgery - oops, sorry, we can't fix it. Your "allergies" are really a deviated septum - Nasal Surgery. I underwent three surgeries within a three month period of coming home in July. But by Christmas I was back on my feet and ready to get busy with my new career. Then just before Christmas my husband began complaining of pain in his side - Appendectomy. Then his abdomen ballooned like he was pregnant - Third stage clotting disorder we didn't know he had, followed by 18 months of deadly infections, additional surgeries, and a long stay in the hospital with Pancreatitis.

One day in the middle of this chaos, I stared at a pile of bills like a deer in the headlights. While we had some disability insurance, my husband's salary dropped dramatically. My business loan evaporated as I struggled to keep us current with our bills, and worse, I couldn't' work and nurse my husband at the same time. So just for the heck of it, I sought the advice of a financial counselor. Then HE looked like a deer in the headlights, proclaiming we'd better get busy or we'd lose everything! His first instruction - sell that house. NOW. I was, of course, now so stunned I couldn't even SEE the headlights. It was a down housing market. We'd be lucky to sell in a YEAR, much less right away. But that very day a realtor contacted us about a couple looking for our model in our neighborhood. One very quick round of Realtor Roulette, and I had less than a month to find a new place to live, un-STUFF, pack and move. So many little blessings happened to us every step of the way through our troubles- but that's a different story. I found a condo, and prepared to move.

So what do you do when you are moving from 4 bedrooms, living and family room, and a STUFFed basement to a two bedroom condo with no storage? We couldn't afford a local storage unit, so if it didn't fit in the condo, it had to GO .I think if I had the time to think about it when I was scrambling to keep the balls in the air, I would have felt much more self-pity about losing my STUFF than I actually did. But because of my life in California, I had already made my peace somewhat with the "un-STUFFing" of my life. Of course, then I thought I would get to keep the STUFF I already had!! But when I realized I would have to get rid of most everything, I think I was too stunned to really ponder what that meant. I didn't put a gun to my head or fall to pieces, I thanked my lucky stars I still had my husband and set about doing what I had to do.

My wedding gifts and favorite things were given away to friends, all the family heirlooms went to members of my family with children, my various collections to people who had admired them, house wares and clothes I had no room for went to more yard sales, and most of my furniture was sold so we could buy a few small condo-sized pieces - it was a race to de-STUFF and pack what was left to make the deadline. Lord only knows what I would have done if I had not had those yard sales earlier when I came home from California!

So there we were, surrounded in our condo by boxes of STUFF we absolutely could not live without. Within six months I had given more than half of THAT STUFF away, until finally after a year or so we had room to breathe in our little condo. Initially we felt embarrassed to have had such bad fortune at our age - after all we weren't kids anymore. We felt we'd taken a giant step backwards, until we realized that most people "de-STUFF" when they retire anyway, so we chose to view it as just "de-STUFFing" a tad early. But eventually, I started to take notice of my old work buddies - the "Joneses" I used to buy STUFF to keep up with, and I could see that so many of them were trapped just like I had been in an endless cycle. They worked hard, hated their jobs, but kept upping their lifestyle - buying MORE STUFF - which trapped them in these jobs they hated. It just went round and round. Their lives were about misery and complaining, and feeling rotten all the time. We had nothing in common anymore, and I felt I was growing unpopular because I HAD dared to walk away from a good job to find happiness. I'm sure more than one of them thought I had gotten my comeuppance when disaster struck and I lost my STUFF. But then I had the gall to find even more happiness living a smaller - and more freeing - lifestyle. I lost most of those friends.

We're pretty happy now. We make decisions based on our happiness, not on how we are going to support our STUFF and the pursuit of MORE STUFF. We've attracted a whole new bunch of friends who like their jobs, like their spouses, don't drink or smoke or pop Ibuprofen like its a narcotic, or use over the counter cold medicine just to get some sleep. They too seem to understand that STUFF is not the prize - HAPPINESS is the prize of a life well spent. Which is not to say that having a lot of STUFF can't make you happy - it just has to have its proper perspective in your life.

My husband is well now, and that is my greatest blessing. I am more content with my living situation than I've ever been. I've come full circle back to the simpler, happier lifestyle I lived in my college and post college years - only with matching furniture, a mortgage and an adult sense of style. And I find I don't long endlessly for STUFF anymore. Sure, I buy STUFF. But I shop to buy what I need, not shop to FILL a need. I truly believe if more unhappy people stopped and examined their PURSUIT OF STUFF or what they do to keep the STUFF they already have, they might find there is a better road to personal happiness. For me, I now have a storage unit so I can "change the universe" as my husband calls rearranging things, without necessarily having to get rid of the old to buy the new. But I when I buy something, I am buying just that - some thing. Not my happiness.

Sheryl Suko
Manassas, Virginia
March, 2003