I seem to have a lot of clutter these days. I’m sure we all do. Over the course of days, weeks, months, years and decades we seem to end up with more stuff than we really need.
Thankfully, in my physical life, moving multiple times has shed me of most of my unwanteds. This was certainly the case when I moved back home to Washington. I left everything I thought I wouldn’t need here there.
It’s very cathartic, this elimination of flotsam and jetsam in your life. The longer we live in a particular space, the more stuff we accumulate. It happens so slowly that we don’t even know it’s happening at the time. One moment we can fit everything quite nicely into a one bedroom apartment; the next we’re getting a three bedroom house even though we live alone, and finally, we end up with a storage unit because we just can’t seem to fit everything into our once spacious home.
My brain has this same problem. It was quite spacious at one time, but over the years it has filled up with an awful lot of stuff, some things I still want and need, others, well, suffice it to say that I have an awful lot of junk stored still, stuff I still like to think I’ll need someday but know deep down I never will.
This wasn’t really a problem until a year ago. If you recall, I went to that three-day brainwashing thing that was really actually quite helpful. Let’s just say that because of it, I was finally able to pull my head out of my commitment ass, find the girl I was born to love and marry her.
One of the things they teach you in this brain bender is that there is three types of knowledge: Stuff You Know, Stuff You Don’t Know and Stuff You Don’t Know You Don’t Know.
I have a lot of stuff. I know an awful lot of stuff and I know these days that I don’t know other stuff, some of which I choose not to know, and still other stuff that I just think I don’t know.
Still with me?
This is all the stuff stored in the storage unit that is thankfully still covered with hair. Like a real storage unit, it’s not stacked in there very neatly. I just add things over the years as I come into ownership of them and never bother to clean it all up. The words to the theme from Tom Slick lean up next to all the prepositions I had to memorize in 7th grade, which lie right next to my locker combination, the one from high school gym class.
As you can imagine, some of these things are just collecting dust. It’s not that I even remember them. But I know they are in there somewhere, filling up what I once spacious storage unit.
I thought it was unlimited in size until I found out there is a lot of Stuff I Don’t Know I Don’t Know. It turns out that most of our understanding of this world is Stuff We Don’t Know We Don’t Know. It’s the unexplored part of our lives, the part that can be found outside of who we think you are, which is clouded over by all the stuff we know and don’t know.
Something like 80% of our life is all this stuff we don’t know we don’t know. Why don’t we know it? Well, first we probably never knew you needed it. Second, there’s a ton of stuff already sitting in the storage unit – stuff we know and don’t know we want or need – so where in the hell are you going to put anything else?
Me? I’ve decided to have a storage unit sale. All that stuff in my head that I don’t really need? It’s for sale at fire sale prices.
I mean, do I really need to know the difference between a Boeing 737-400 and -500? Is it still important for me to know my mailing address in Florida (I know, which one?), or the jingle from a Washington Builder’s commercial I heard in 1964? I’m pretty sure that I don’t need the words to my high school alma mater anymore, and I think I can part with at least some of the names of girls who broke my heart when I was young, such as Michelle Ritchie, Jeany Hahn and Lori Burton.
Unfortunately, I think all of this stuff is a hard sell. I mean, who really wants this scrap? Even if it was Stuff You Don’t Know You Know, how would you know you need it?
Sometimes I wish we could bulk erase stuff. Remember back in the days of cassette tapes? I do. I remember using one of my dad’s mega magnets to erase my brother’s favorite music mix. One day he was rocking out to the Beatles and Three Dog Night, the next… the dreaded sound of static.
If I could, I would. But I can’t. Even if I could get rid of all this stuff in my mental storage unit, it would be of no use. Eventually I would start filling it up with other stuff, stuff I thought I needed at the moment, only to find I really didn’t.
Worse, I imagine happening upon someone else’s clearance sale. I would casually stop by, and before I knew it, I would have armloads of stuff someone else didn’t want and that I didn’t know I needed.
I’d come home, suddenly knowing all about which lure to use to catch which fish and in what stream. I’d know 20 ways to clear a drain pipe. I’d go on and on about the inner workings of the stock market and the dangers of day trading, and before you know it, I would be stuck with more useless stuff.
I guess I’ll just have to get used to having a brain that is overflowing with stuff and get better at packing all in. I know that an addition is totally out of the question, but still, oddly intriguing.
In the Emerald City, researching chip implants,
– Robb