The pandemic has had so many influences on the way that we live our lives and I’m sure these ramifications will emerge over time and reveal themselves in all manner of intricate and complex ways that we have yet to imagine. However, it means that things we used to take for granted in the past, like planning for the future, seem less possible given how out of control these past years have been. We have collectively shifted into a mode of living that intends to future-proof our lives rather than anticipate it. But this has run-on consequences with our relationship with material goods and money in general.
During all those months of isolation, we became increasingly remote from each other, and hobbies, goods, services, and micro-obsession crafts became substitutes for real people: portable distraction. We could avoid unpacking how we truly felt. We’re still decompressing now. I have something to reassure you though – this is exactly what the people of the 1920s did when they emerged from their own pandemic. They exited the post-war austerity and the pandemic lockdown and bloomed, transitioning to flaunting and demonstrating their material wealth in a new public way. It was the shorthand for power and the substitute for complex personality. Yes, it brought disillusionment and disenfranchisement, but it’s reassuring to know that other people experienced a similar shift.
There is a key difference, however. While the flapper generation was concerned with displaying their accumulated goods, with covid we went the other direction. It brought the compulsion to own and possess in a period of uncertainty but also the shame of promoting personal wealth in an era increasingly critical of its inequalities. In the silence and muted atmosphere of covid and global stasis, the impact of Black Lives Matter could not have been more profound or stark. We turned inward in shame just as our public eye expanded into the social consciousness. Twisting between the world before and the world after. The world had been running away from the problems it created, tilted on the unequal axis of white supremacy that underpinned the capitalist, political, health and social inequalities. When covid brought many of these systems to a halt, it was easier to identify the patterns. This prompted a desire for more intentional decision-making with material possessions which had become the emblem of an unequal distribution of wealth and waste.
Waves of people donated bags and bags of waste to charity or cleared out their houses in the first wave. By that summer we did the same again but in an emotional and political sense. We had more elections with the sense of taking out the trash and welcoming in something slightly less obviously toxic. So why did we still have so much clutter? And things we couldn’t magically fix overnight?
I think we’ve circled back to rapid hoarding cycles as an immune response from that first wave. When our material possessions are so tied up with our identity and so part of our attempts to construct and reconstruct our identities with changing times, they begin to take us over. They also remind us of times in our lives when we wore them. The choices we made. Sometimes, the fastest and easiest option is to get rid of everything that reminds you of that time. Out of sight out of mind, right? It might make you feel good, but that person from the past doesn’t need to disappear for you to exist. They did their best. They did what they thought was right and what they were capable of doing. They didn’t have the information that you have now. That’s a privilege. Be kind to that person.
That said, the opposite can also happen when we idealise the past. Maybe a pre-covid past, or a longer-term historical memory that records a previous way of life. I see that in my parents. In the way, they made their money and moved to London but could never quite look their wealth in the eye. They never learned to make themselves comfortable by it. It became a thing, an obstacle, a threat that it could disappear, rather than a vehicle for improving their lives and the people around them. I grew up with everything I needed and asked for. It was a matter of wearing my parents down rather than finding resources. For that, I will always be grateful. But I also noted my parents’ idiosyncrasies. The differences in ways that they allowed themselves to spend money. Fancy blockbuster holidays – yes, a few whims here and there and we have a month in the US. Buying tiles for the crumbling bathroom? Not so much.
I never really learnt the small ways that money could make life easier. Innocuous things, like a portable charger to make your phone last longer. A new belt to fit when you’re between jeans sizes. The double standard of never buying a coffee out but having three Nespresso machines in the house. In a very unimportant way, I lived between extremes. It didn’t occur to me to spend ten pounds on a proper screen protector. They seemed like things that I didn’t need. As though openly maintaining a material good with the protector made us lesser, subclass. An action that somehow gave us away, shattered the illusion or implied you needed to protect it because there wasn’t an alternative.
In the same way, as we emerge from covid transitions, our parents can’t trust their future either. They can only remember how they were, their old habits. They have always hoarded things. In my room when I was away at university, in my sister’s room, in the guest room, in the attic. I spent the lockdown summer renovating the loft. My mum went to the cheap handymen who did our windows after I kicked a football through it and then enlisted me as free labour to paint. By doing this, she developed a new space to breathe - except no, she didn’t. Within three weeks, this brand-new space suddenly shed light on all the things we bought and never use, my childhood toys that we never threw away and all the ‘just in cases’ that we couldn’t abandon. Right in the corner - my pile of books. I can see the path marked out for me. In fact, I made it.
All our money is in stocks. All above us in the cloud. We don’t need to hold it or keep it, but we can broadly say that we have it. Material goods have ceased to be permanent or personal and even when we can’t see them, we still hoard them.
I read Bleak House by Charles Dickens for class last year. One of the characters was a hoarder above a law firm and collected all the wills and mergers and acquisitions. This decision extended the book by about 800 pages as the other characters tried in vain to fill the gaps that he had upstairs all along. In the end, the hoarder died. By spontaneous combustion. He literally blew up because he couldn’t let things go. Dickens informs us that as a result of his withholding, justice couldn’t be done for the other characters, so it was necessary. Except, of course, he was right all along – he possessed the papers of seemingly worthless value that ended up being hugely valuable. Dickens intimates that this is his tragedy, his accident.
I still wonder whether I was meant to be more disgusted by him or not. I pitied him. I saw something of humanity in him. I think we were meant to be horrified but honestly, I think he was scared. He feared the future just as he was terrified of his past. The history of poverty and the threat of it do rather the same thing. We see also how mental health factors contribute to a hoarder as well. The anxiety, trauma, family history and compulsion that it’s convenient to believe dies with him.
Many people consider extreme hoarding to be a psychological disorder, known otherwise as the Collyer Brothers Syndrome. I see a lot of that in the patterns of behaviour emerging post covid, in the 1920s, and again in my parents. You can see humanity constantly reaching for something – a whole, unified identity that can be kept perfect as it is and therefore be controlled. We also see the worry. The shame and the glory of his accumulations of things that were never his.
It’s taken a couple of pandemics, a few hundred years, and a heaping of generational trauma, but we still can’t decide whether we’re meant to be proud or ashamed of our things. We know only that our things define us whatever we do.
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