(7/8) The sneaker hangover.

There was this documentary on Netflix a few years back…I think it was called ‘The Minimalists’ and it’s about these two (semi-_real-life guys who, very dramatically, ended up giving away all of their possessions because they felt like owning all of those possessions weren’t really all they were cracked up to be.

So they spend the better part of the movie explaining why ‘stuff’ isn’t really all the great for us and they give all kinds of tips on how to get rid of it and live a more ‘stuff-free’ life. These guys also have this very wholesome podcast full of all kinds of platitudes like ‘the things you own end up owning you’ and ‘Use things and love people, because the opposite never works’ and I’ve probably listened to at least 50 episodes and it’s interesting. And one of the guys is a writer, so he talks a lot about his books. And sometimes they have guests on the pod and it can be really interesting from time to time…

And I’ll be damned if that message didn’t hit me right in the gut.

I think it’s good advice. But I don’t know. I can only handle so much of it. I think it’s nice to think that life would be way simpler with just…you know…50 possessions or whatever. But the reality of most of our current civilization is that it requires quite a few possessions to simply ‘get by’. Does that mean everyone should own 100+ pairs of shoes? Probably not. But one of the things nobody tells you about being an adult is that in order to get just about anything accomplished, you often need a specific set of tools. So…I dunno…something like making a pizza - things are just a tad bit easier with a pizza slicer (instead of a butter knife or whatever The Minimalists use to cut a pizza). And…having a ladder can be very useful if you need to clean the gutters on your house. And…no lie…as I started typing this line - my kid says ‘[this thing] on our new [entertainment center] isn’t working’. I got up, went to the garage, and grabbed some crazy glue I’ve been holding onto for the past few years. Instead of it turning into a 45-minute debacle of strapping in my kids and driving to the store to find the right glue - I’ve managed to 'plan ahead’ by owning certain possessions like this tiny tube of crazy glue I’ve had for several years:

I probably wouldn’t have had that glue on hand had I been a minimalist. So I can’t really advocate for full-on minimalism. I haven’t really tried it, either, though, so take that with a grain of salt. I suppose the closest I’ve been to it has been traveling for 3+ months at a time with whatever I can fit in my backpack. And I can tell you that that’s no walk in the park. But I have known for years that collecting and owning an endless amount of fill-in-the-blanks rarely ever really ends. And after a while, it just ends up weighing me down. There are times when I think ‘wouldn’t it be nice if I could just pay someone to sell all of this stuff for me' but I’ve never had the wherewithal to actually do it. I don’t think I’d have the peace of mind to deal with the ramifications later on down the line.

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(and this isn’t even half of it).

I don’t know why, exactly, I’m talking about all of this stuff. Other than the fact that it enters my mind from time to time. Especially when I feel overwhelmed with all of the stuff I’ve accumulated over the years. CDs. Baseball cards. Clothes. Whatever. And ‘overwhelmed’ is clearly how I feel about sneakers lately…

I don’t know why nobody else talks about it. I don’t know why there aren’t more voices in the space that talk about how overwhelming it is to keep track of all of this stuff. Like the Mayors and the Fat Joe’s and the Jumpmanbostics - incredible collections, but seeing those rooms FULL of shoes gives me a certain level of anxiety. I think about all of those shoes being unused. I think about them gathering dust and I think about them degrading to the point that they’ve outlived their usefulness. And I do it with my collection too. I’m looking at that pic above - I can pinpoint more than 20 pairs in that pic above that I haven’t worn in more than 2 years. 3 years. They’re just pretty wall decorations.

I think about greed and hoarding and I think about all of the people I’ve come across throughout the world with little more than a pair of flip-flops to their name. And I’m a hypocrite. Obviously, the biggest hypocrite. I remember I once gave a guy in Indonesia the shoes off my feet - a 10-year-old pair of Climacool 1’s that I got in college - and even though the guy was over-the-moon-happy, I still sometimes regret giving that pair away. Why? What the hell am I holding onto? Is it the memories that those shoes brought me? Because I damn sure wasn’t wearing those shoes more than once a year anyway…or is it something else?

So how does one move forward with this knowledge? And the never-ending stream of information being thrown at you. Where does one go? How does one extract the greatest amount of use they can with all of this stuff, yet still striking a balance between ‘reasonable’ and ‘savant’ and ‘joy’ and keeping things fun?