The Marketer Who Went Off Consumption

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Question: But why do you need packers when you are giving everything away?

Answer: I’m moving to Washington DC for a year and I’m giving away almost everything I own to three five strangers.

Giving away my stuff, I have learned, is more, not less, work than moving it from one city to another or putting it in storage.

Moving, so far, has been a simple two step process –

- At the old house, I pack everything I need for two weeks into a bag or two to carry with myself and indiscriminately stuff everything else I own into boxes and load them into a truck.
- At the new house, I unload the boxes from the truck and transfer all my stuff straight into cupboards so that I don’t have to look at it again.

So far, I have never really had to worry about the stuff that’s in the boxes. I have never had to ask myself if I really needed it at all.

In every city I have stayed in, I have bought more stuff than I have discarded. As a result, every time I have moved, there is even more stuff in the boxes and even less incentive to sort through it.

I stumbled upon this trippy treatise by Lithuanian thinker Andrius Kulikauskas — An Economy for Giving Everything Away — via Chris Messina’s blog.

The first part of Kulikauskas’s treatise — before he starts talking about open-source software — is truly mind-bending, especially in context of my own experience of giving (almost) everything away.

I accept the idea that I should give everything away. The challenge is to put this into practice. This is a design problem for personal life and social economy.

Accepting that I should give everything away, I realize that it’s not clear what this exactly means. What is mine to give away? At any moment, I have some cash on my person and in my accounts. I may own a car, laptop computer, desktop computer, software, bicycle, books, hiking equipment, chairs, clothes and shoes, eyeglasses, phone cards, kitchen utensils, paper and pen, toothbrush. I have a credit line that I can draw against at a particular rate of interest. I have family, friends, and even strangers on whom I can call for help. I am employable by virtue of my connections, work experience, education, enthusiasm and helpfulness. I have citizenship and civil rights. I have my time, my health, my organs, and my life expectancy. Moreover, I have gifts of creativity, invention, thoughtfulness, playfulness, friendship, concern, love. I have a mind for cultivating and applying these gifts. I have truths of life, and a moral sense. Finally, I have a capacity for good will, a free will by which I may defer to others.

I had announced a little over two weeks back that I’m giving away everything I own to one lucky reader of my blog –

In the first week of August, I’ll walk out of my house with two bags or three. I’ll give away everything else I have to one lucky person, for free.

When I say everything, I do mean everything — all my furniture, all my soft furnishing, all the electronic goods in the house, all the utensils and appliances in my kitchen, all the clothes, books, and DVDs I’m not carrying with me, and miscellaneous other household items.

The first week was slow and only two people asked for my belongings. Perhaps, people were suspicious of the seriousness of my offer. Perhaps, people were waiting for someone else to ask first. In either case, it was probably a symptom of the premium our culture puts on being self-reliant, on being able to not ask for help.

Blue from Washington DC wished she was in Mumbai, so that she could pretend that my stuff would allow her to have a grown-up living space and help her feel like an adult.