That Which Does Not Feed You

Tries to Eat You

Do you have a relationship with junk mail? Does it feed you to keep a pile of junk mail or does it eat you?

Do you have projects that are unfinished? When you walk past them you have to feed them a moment of your time, care, attention. It eats you.

When you are a student, does the subject you study feed you? Not yet - you have to feed it and feed it and feed it. Then maybe it will feed you. Or maybe you will pay on the student loans for 30 years, and it will eat you and never feed you a damn thing.

What about children? They eat your time, love, care, calm, patience, attention, prime-of-life years, money, car, books, furniture. What do they feed you? They're inconsiderate, ungrateful, whiney, snot-nosed, germ-carrying wild animals. And then they smile, and say "thank you, daddy" when you make their third peanut butter sandwich of the day. They say "I love you" for the first time. They bring home report cards, and validate your belief in their superior intelligence. They make pictures out of glitter and glue, or wax paper and leaves, to decorate the dining room.

Every relationship you have with every thing or idea or person can be dissected with the "five minute self-help" model. Then you can look at the need fulfillment and say "does this feed me or eat me? Am I feeding it as an investment or is it just eating my time/money/emotions/shelf-space?"

I've done this and found myself much less willing to keep crap around. Here are a few types of crap I've identified: Precision Garbage, Perfectly Good, Sacred Relics. There are probably a million different kinds. In Buddhism, there are three "primary afflictions" that create suffering. One of them is "attachement," or "clinging." Buddhism would categorize and containerize all the kinds of crap I've identified as simply "attachement" and suggest you get over it. I think it's helpful to dissect the different kinds of crap to try to understand why each of them appeals to our clinging.

In a college Archeology class I learned about "Provisional Discard." That's what you call stashing a jug with a busted handle behind the hut. Archeologists find crap piled up behind huts and next to fences. People think "someday, maybe," that it will come in handy for some damn thing or another. So they shove it someplace out of the way. Someday, maybe, they'll need a jug so badly, even one with a broken handle will do. Provisional Discard is throwing away, but not all the way away.

I went to a yard sale once and saw that the Old Guy had kept approximately every single radiator cap he had ever bought. They each looked well used. Perhaps he figured maybe, someday, he or someone else would blow a cap so badly that a used cap would work better. The part that fails, the tension of the pressure relief spring, is invisible. The rest of the cap looks just fine. Perfectly Good, in fact. It has a function, but only in some imaginary "maybe, someday" future. In the meantime, it's just sitting around taking up space.

Precision Garbage is another thing altogether. It's crap and you know it's crap but you get stuck on it and have to put it someplace, or use it for something, or just set is aside until later. Like the sticker from an apple, stuck to a lunchroom table. Or the half-inch long sheetmetal screws in the kitchen junkdrawer left over from something you had to assemble. Again, you say "someday, maybe I'll need this." Or maybe, like the sticker, you just get stuck on the bit of precision, and try to find the one last "util" left, and stick it someplace where somebody will see it later. Or perhaps it's a bit of packaging, so precise that you can't bear to throw it out. Like a shoe box. Or a bit of styrofoam. Does it have a purpose, or are you just taken with the exactness of the shape?

Art is Precision Garbage. It exists as a pile of entropy reduction, a few square feet of precision paint, or an arrangement of objects. Does it feed you to look at it? Will it feed you over and over? Sometimes we make things and can't bear to let go of them. "But I made this, look at it!" It has no actual function.

Sacred Relics also have no function, but unlike art they are not necessarily aesthetically pleasing. Used baby shoes and locks of hair are sacred relics reminding you of a person that no longer exists. The baby has grown, and is now a child or older. But you want to keep feeding the memory of the surface of the person, a surface that has changed but you still cling to the memory of what it was.

This is all just stuff, with which you have a one-sided need fulfillment relationship. The stuff does not need to be owned. Baby shoes and sheetmetal screws will continue to exist in the landfill for thousands of years.

Relationships with ideas and people sometimes fit into these categories. Does it feed you to talk once a year to a former roommate or coworker? Do you say "maybe, someday," we'll get together for dinner? Is there a need that it fulfills, or are you just filling a slot on your address book?

Ideas about yourself and who you are fall into these categories. Have you fossilized an image of yourself from some period of time? Or can you bravely look at yourself in the mirror and say "Who the hell are you?"