The Stuff of Our Lives: The Seneca Collapse of Relocating
The experience of relocating is curiously similar to an archaeological excavation of the ruins of a disappeared empire. Above, you can see two jars filled with old coins recovered from the nook and crannies of my house after emptying it of everything. Mostly these are old Italian “lira” coins, others are foreign coins and, in the smaller jar, you can see an Italian “gettone” used for making calls at public phones up to a few decades ago. This stuff has no monetary value, it is just a marker of passing time.
You know that the “Seneca Effect” has to do with overshoot and collapse. From the time when the Roman philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca noted that “growth is slow, but ruin is rapid,” I keep finding new examples of application of the idea. One that I recently experienced had to do with relocating: moving away from the home where my family had been living since 1965. From then on, this 340 square meters (ca. 3600 ft2) house had been gradually filling up with all sorts of stuff. Emptying it in a couple of months of work was quite an experience. “Sobering” is the correct word, I’d say.
I don’t know if you are all good followers of Feng Shui, striving for good vibes and not too much stuff in your home. I didn’t consider myself as an adept of that philosophy, but I didn’t see myself as a serial accumulator of useless stuff, either. Well, I had to reconsider my position. I was a serial accumulator. Really, the amount of stuff that came out of my place was so large to be bewildering. And so much of it we had to throw away — bewildering, too. We are still a little bewildered, but the most intense part of the saga seems to be over, so maybe I can report about my experience in this post.
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