Did you hear about the Belgian photographer who decided to photograph every item in her home? Yep, turns out Barbara Iweins has 12,795 items in her home. And that includes everything... every little single piece of Playmobile to every single fork and every single tweezer or blister pack of pills or screw or nail.
That seems like an awful lot of stuff. And yet... when I look at that number, I think... "Heck, I probably have at least that many nails and screws... just in nails and screws!" I'm a bit concerned that we would blow that number out of the water!
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| Some of the many items that Barbara Iweins catalogued in her home |
What Barbara also learned was... only 1% of those objects are actually important (128 objects). The rest of it... she could get rid of easily. Now that number... I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around. I mean, yes, I could easily get rid of every screw and nail and thing-a-ma-jig as they are not sentimental in the last. And not really "important"... until I need one. Which I often do.
When I first read the 1% statement... I read it is they only "need" 1% of the things. But that's not the case... it's only that 1% of the things are "important". And many of those things are sentimental to Barbara and her children, like a Dahlia preserved in a jar of formalin.
And so I think... if we had to pack and move and could only keep the things that were "important" to us... what would we pack? Knowing that we could always get more nails and screws somewhere else. I think we could come in under, or at the 128 item limit. Maybe.
North American Reality
But then... I had a bit of a wake-up call... You see... this was a Belgian woman living in a typical European home. She was appalled at the 12,795 things that she owned... and that took her 4 years to photograph.
Guess what... the average American home contains around 300,000 things. Yep... that is almost 25 TIMES as much as our Belgian friend. The average American home has the contents of 25 Belgian homes in it.
On the bright side, that means I should be able to keep 300 items of importance to me but... that's not the point of this...
300,000 things. How is that even possible? Although... with my stash of screws and nails and thing-a-ma-bobs... I do see how we might.. maybe... come close to that. For sure if we counted every single puzzle piece as a separate item! And let's not even get into paperclips. We have the space in our large North American homes so it's easy to buy in bulk and stock up on paperclips and staples and sticky notes and nails and screws.
I had this vague idea that... "oooh... maybe I should photograph everything that we own!"... Yeah. No. I mean, Barbara is a photographer and everything she took a photo of was very nicely staged, which must have taken a fair bit of time. I wouldn't do that but... it's a very different thing to photograph 300,000 objects. Nope. Not doing it. And besides... that's the average American home... what if we have more!?
So you will NOT be reading a blog a year or two (or 10) hence when I produce 300,000 photographs of our possessions. Not doing it. It would be too scary.
Could we get by with less things? Undoubtedly. We have gone through decluttering purges every once in a while and it is always (a) amazing how much we can let go of and (b) amazing how much stuff we still have! Sometimes ignorance is, really, bliss.
More Reading
Barbara Iweins site - Where you can see her Katalog of items
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