I want my stuff

Lately I’ve read a bunch of articles about people living in small spaces. There’s some kind of program in New York City to make very small apartments available to people and I’ve read about people living in 300-square-foot apartments and things like that. These people have structured their lives and arranged their space so they can live in glorified broom closets. They tout the benefits of living lighter with less clutter.

And I want nothing to do with it. I did my time in my first apartment, which was small (although it did have a dining room and space on the back porch, so maybe it wasn’t as tiny as I remember) and I am not going back. I don’t need a starter mansion but it’s not too much to ask to have a second floor and a little extra display space for knickknacks and whatnot.

I’d like a little more room than our rowhome, of course. A backyard would be great. My dream is to have a library where I would have floor-to-ceiling shelves to store all our books and records and mementoes. Or maybe an extra room that we don’t even name because we already have rooms that fulfill every function we need. Oh, and a second bathroom would be delightful.

I once read about a couple in New York that lived in some absurdly tiny space. It was not much more than a bed and toilet. They had no space for clothes so they kept extra clothes at the office and changed there and just dry cleaned everything. They didn’t eat there but just ate every meal out and were always out.

I’ll pass. I guess I’m getting old but I’m more of a homebody. I don’t need to piss away my money at bars and restaurants all the time. I like to eat out, too, but it would be insanely expensive and I it makes no sense to me to use cheaper rent to subsidize the cost. Staying out all the time would exhaust me. At a certain point, I just want to go home and hang out. I need some comfortable home base where I can put my feet up. A decent home is security and there are few things that are more psychologically important for me than my security.

Possessions are not the most important things in the world but I just like having my stuff around me. I like having access to the things I own. That’s why I can tend to over-pack on vacation: I like knowing that if I want to wear a certain shirt or read a certain book, they’re with me. That’s why I am opposed to cloud computing. I’ll back up my own files but I would like to have them on some kind of hard drive that I can access without relying on some third party that could very well go out of business.

Possessions are fleeting but I’ve acquired a lot over the years and a lot of it has sentimental value. If I stay on the sane side of the hoarding divider, is it asking too much to have a nice place with enough space where I have these possessions in easy reach?