Do things make us happy?

What's the difference between the objects that bring genuine joy, and the ones we seem to mindlessly accumulate?

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Image: Karl Blossfeldt, from Urformen der Kunst (1928)

There’s an abandoned house up the road, disintegrating year by year. The roof is caving in on one side, and thick vines and a towering rhododendron are reclaiming the back half.

Snowdrops pop up in the front yard at this time of year, along with a carefully planted ring of daffodils around a tree. It’s evidence that someone once cared for this place.

I stop to take a few pictures of the flowers and decide to get a closer look.

Outside the house, there are dozens of old rusted out cars, tractors, and RVs – some of which have been almost entirely consumed by blackberry vines. A child’s shovel is stuck upright in the ground.

I peer into the grimy windows. Inside, there are mountains of junk. It looks like someone filled the home with the contents of five garages, then shook it like a snowglobe. The front windows are covered, but just inside the glassed-in porch, you can see huge piles of newspapers stacked up and yellowing.

Our neighbors tell us that the couple who lived here died, and their children have no idea what to do with the property, so they’ve just let it go. I wouldn’t want to deal with all of this either.

It’s clear that someone who lived there had a problem with hoarding. While hoarding itself is a disastrous mental affliction, it stems from feelings and urges that I think many of us can relate to:

1. The comfort of things, and a belief that more things will improve our lives in some way.

2. The slow accumulation of more than we could possibly need.

3. The fear of giving up something that might be needed in the future.

Hoarders take this to an extreme, but I think most people struggle with the same root causes.

Why do we accumulate so much?

Being human in this world is difficult. We are anxious creatures, weighed down by the knowledge of our own mortality, and subject to complex and nuanced relationships with others that we must constantly navigate. It can be exhausting.

For many of us, acquiring more stuff provides some temporary relief, or at least distraction. It comes with a promise: “This new thing will make my life better.” Now I will be happier, because I have this useful, beautiful thing. It will make me attractive, and people will like me more. It will make me smarter. It will save me time.

Our minds are built to believe this, that acquiring more resources is innately good because it increases our chances of survival. Other humans have learned to exploit this, so we now inhabit a world of constant consumerist messages. We always want more, and there is always someone promising it.

And the thing is, those promises aren’t entirely false. The objects we acquire do often make us happier.

Do things make us happy?

The problem is, for 99% of them, that happiness doesn’t last. Primarily, this is due to the phenomenon of habituation. The novelty and promise of the new thing is exciting, but eventually wears off as we become used to it. It just gets added to the pile, and becomes part of the background of our lives.

But occasionally, there are objects that bring a kind of joy that lasts. Every time you see this thing in your home, you smile. Perhaps you admire its beauty, its design, or its history. Or perhaps it has sentimental value, a story attached that has burrowed deep, connecting you to it by some invisible thread.

For example:

• My antique quilts bring me consistent joy. There’s something about their complexity and imperfection, and the mark of human hands.

• My plants sitting in the windowsill make me happier, but because they’re alive and because I care for them regularly.

• The jeans I just finished sewing make me happy, because I picked out every last detail and spent a month working on them.

Old quilts definitely make Rusty happier.

These are rich objects. They have a story and meaning that goes beyond the temporary pleasure I had when I acquired them.

The challenge is to shift the balance, so that we’re inviting as many of those rich, joyful things into our lives as we can, and avoiding the trap of gathering more and more of the temporarily soothing things, the shallow objects that just seem to show up.

How to shift the balance

Creating things with your own hands is one way to do this.

It attaches a story to the object, a connection, and a feeling of pride. That seems to last beyond the normal period of habituation, when most objects we buy are forgotten.

It also places a natural limit on quantity. There’s only so much you can make, so you’re forced to make choices about how you spend your limited time, and what you really want to invest that time in.

And finally it lets you create something that is truly beautiful according to your own taste and whims. Creating with your hands means you are filtering everything through your personal experience, reflecting yourself back out into your environment.

All of these things combine to create a sense of richness around the things we make, no matter how flawed they are.

You may not have a problem with hoarding, but to be human is to have a desire for more. And in such an abundant society, it’s easy for that desire to take over, obliterating the meaning of what we own with sheer quantity. It’s easy to fill your life and home up with shallow objects.

Looking at that abandoned house, what resonates with me isn’t the pile of old cars, the mountains of plastic toys inside, or the accumulated newspapers.

It’s the carefully planted circle of daffodils, lovingly placed by someone one cold fall day to bloom for years and years to come, even as everything around it falls apart.

My desire for more is natural. Making things lets me re-channel that energy, to put it to use fulfilling another essential human impulse: the need to create something beautiful.

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