The Las Vegas Rules II: Stuff Science

In lifestyle design, your relationship with your material possessions -- "stuff" -- is perhaps the central issue. Digital stuff is stuff too, since it has to physically live somewhere. Stuff is the locus where theories meet reality. It is not particularly hard to think about money, careers and investments in reasonably clear-eyed ways.  If it weren't for stuff, execution on those fronts would also be easy. Stuff is different. Even thinking about it is hard. We don't even have a good word for it.  If you've been living on your own for at least a couple of years, getting a clear sense of all the stuff in your life takes an intense, draining and intellectually demanding exercise like a GTD Sweep (the first stage in getting on the GTD wagon; just spending a weekend making sense of all your stuff). By comparison, developing situation awareness of your finances is as simple as logging into your major accounts. Stuff diseases, such as extreme hoarding, seem to me to be much worse than financial diseases like being over-leveraged. In lifestyle design discussions, I find that people vastly oversimplify the stuff side.  They pick unexamined philosophies about stuff, like "minimalism" or "go local," without ever looking at how the stuff in their life actually works. This is like deciding to save $1000 a month without actually looking at your income, debt and expenses. Worse, they try to pitch their unexamined "stuff religion" to others. So a few months back, I decided I needed to understand stuff and start experimenting with doing things to it, before getting all caught up in pretty lifestyle theories. Understanding stuff is Stuff Science. Stuff is an Illegible Machine Stuff Science is harder than finance or career planning, and there are far fewer ideas you can borrow from others because the stuff in your life is a unique configuration of stuff, even if the components are commodities.  Creating a smoothly functioning configuration of stuff in your life is Stuff Engineering. It involves applying Stuff Science, guided by a keen sense of Stuff Aesthetics. Stuff is multi-dimensional. Your stuff embodies your cultural defaults and unconscious and conscious decisions about a lot of things. Utility, convenience, ideology, personality, marital compromises, class affiliations, beliefs about how things can and should be done, rituals, dietary preferences -- everything is embodied in your stuff. Often a single significant element of your stuff, like your main kitchen knife, will embody all those things. Can you visualize the lifestyles of people who might own the following types of primary kitchen knives?

1. A special-ordered hand-crafted Japanese knife
2. An expensive 8" Wustof knife from an upscale store like Williams-Sonoma
3. An unusual knife (in the West), but still from Williams-Sonoma, like a santoku
4. A cheap knife from a department store
5. A "never needs sharpening" ceramic knife only available from TV infomercials
6. A dull steak knife re-purposed as a kitchen knife
7. A Bowie knife
8. A Swiss Army knife

Your stuff comprises what I called externalized mental models in Tempo. This means that despite the connotations of a haphazard jumble, your stuff is actually a complex system of interacting parts that embodies a lot of your thinking. We don't clearly understand the complex interactions in our stuff for the same reason we don't understand the other complicated machines we deal with, like airplanes, computers or cars: they are complicated. But at least with those machines you recognize that there is a complex machine behind the scenes. You may only deal with what product designers call the user experience (UX), but you know there's more going on, and experts behind the scenes who know how things work. When it comes to stuff unfortunately, though there is a complex machine behind the UX, there are no experts. If you want more control, you will need to become that expert. If you choose not to become an expert, your stuff will stagger through life like a zombie, as an unexamined set of externalized mental models, gathering entropy and crud, until it becomes so poorly adapted to your actual life that it seizes up. At that point, you step back stunned, pondering the revelation that your life is a mess. Even if you do try hard to become an expert, your stuff will remain a somewhat illegible machine, because it was  not designed top-down. It was designed as a series of hacks and modifications to an inherited lifestyle, which itself has been evolving for many generations. Understanding it completely would be like understanding the lifestyles of all your ancestors. The Stuff-Shock Doctrine Naomi Klein made up the term "shock doctrine" to describe a macro-economic phenomenon she calls "disaster capitalism." It's about how various powerful parties take advantage of big disasters (shocks) like Hurricane Katrina to further their nefarious agendas. In lifestyle design fortunately, there are fewer interested parties -- typically only you and your immediate family -- and fewer nefarious interests. So shocks can be a good thing. In fact they are necessary. Lifestyles are just too complex to understand and re-engineer without them. There is really no gentle, gradual evolutionary approach. Each time you want to make a significant change to your lifestyle, you have to deliver a shock. I call this the "stuff shock doctrine." Without stuff shocks, mainstream lifestyles create an anchoring bias for those who want to try alternative lifestyles. Since these mainstream lifestyles are local optima, small perturbations are useless. You'll be dragged back to that optimum. To break out of the local optimum, you need a shock. The stuff-shock doctrine motivates the basic method for getting past the immense complexity of thinking about your stuff. Just do something dramatic like deciding to live out of a suitcase or moving to Bali for a while. You don't have to fully understand how the stuff in your life works for this method to be at least temporarily effective. You just need to successfully compress your stuff down to a suitcase. The reason this is at least temporarily effective  is that it knocks you out of a rut and gives you a fresh start. When you arrive at your new city with a suitcase, you may not have everything you need. The illegible machine in your suitcase may not work. But at least you get an opportunity to evolve a small illegible machine, one consciously considered addition at a time, until it works. You may never understand how your old life used to work, but who cares, so long as your new one does. Let sleeping ghosts lie. But stuff shocks are only temporarily effective unless you do more, because community life is built around shared lifestyles. To the extent that you want to belong to the community around you but don't want to share their lifestyle, you'll be faced with a contamination problem. If you are already a minority in some aspect of your life  you've experienced this on a small scale.  I am a vegetarian for instance, which means in groups where I am the only one, I often have to be the bottleneck constraint and apologize for making everybody adapt a little to my needs. Imagine such issues affecting your whole life and you'll get a sense of the immense pressure involved in a truly novel lifestyle design that is different from neighboring lifestyles in many respects. Default lifestyles can start to sneak back into a stuff-shock created alternative lifestyle. Meshing your alternative lifestyle with traditional lifestyles all around you is a lot of hard work. Many people either cave under the pressure or simply exit the mainstream altogether, choosing to live in exile communities alongside others with similar alternative lifestyles. One way to understand the magnetic pull of traditional lifestyles is to note that the value of a locally-optimal lifestyle increases with the number of people practicing it, an unusual instance of Metcalfe's Law, better known as the fax machine effect or network effect. So even if your lifestyle is in effect a better fax machine, it will be less valuable if it cannot talk to traditional fax machines. If you like, you can even think of communities as basically networks of lifestyle nodes. They are more than that, but for the purposes of this discussion, those additional features don't really matter. In lifestyle design, you have to choose a point on a spectrum between isolation and interdependence with respect to people whose lifestyles don't synchronize well with yours, and whose lifestyle ideologies you may not agree with. Another network analogy may help: in electrical grids, new generators can only join the grid if they are synchronized, in terms of the alternating current they are pumping into the grid.  This synchronization is one of the elements of a larger design practice called impedance matching. You cannot efficiently deliver power into a network that then delivers it to a load somewhere else if you don't do impedance matching. Impedance mismatch can be a severe problem for lifestyle design. The more you lean towards isolation, the harder you'll have to work to maintain connectivity while minimizing contamination. Due to Metcalfe's Law and impedance matching this is a practical problem. The isolation/interdependence dichotomy is also a moral problem. But I won't talk about that today, I'll simply assume that you've chosen a fair degree of interdependence. For a variety of reasons, I believe that is the smart and right choice. Smart Stuff I have personally experienced many stuff shocks. I have moved 17 times across 7 cities in two countries in my adult life, not counting periods when my wife and I were in a two-body-problem situation and effectively maintaining two households. Early on, I used to be pretty dumb about stuff shocks. I hate moving, and each time I moved, I'd swear that I'd never collect so much crap again. But each time, as I unpacked my life and settled into a new place, stuff would creep back in.  Somewhere along the way -- perhaps it was the 5th or 6th move -- I got more sophisticated in thinking about my stuff, and started managing the isolation/interdependence tradeoff more carefully. I stopped moaning about the fact that my life, which used to fit into the trunk of my car a few moves back, now takes a 10x10x10 storage unit and a truck. I no longer subscribe to this sort of naive minimalism. I have given up the idea that you can make up purely abstract beliefs that tell you how to deal with stuff. Instead, I believe you have to think about individual lifestyle elements down to things like knives and shoes. You have to put more thinking into every act of ownership. This thinking doesn't just add value inside your head. It adds value outside your head, to the stuff itself. Your stuff gets smarter. More information -- the output of thinking -- gets embodied by it. Your bits-to-atoms ratio increases. Some people like to think of this as conscious living, but that's unnecessarily mystical for me. I prefer to think of it as smart stuff. If you learn to peel vegetables with a knife and eliminate a separate peeler, your knife got smarter. It isn't the quantity of stuff in your life that matters. What matters is how smart the stuff is and whether it is smart in service of your needs. A four-bedroom-house packed with smart stuff that you govern wisely is much better than a minimalist backpack that enslaves your mind because you cannot let go unexamined assumptions about stuff. Your behaviors become trapped within archetypes and doctrines derived from stuff. Instead of being a guy who lives out of a backpack, you become a caricature, a backpacker. When you don't govern your stuff, your stuff governs you. There are two variants of this, bad and worse. When your stuff is merely dumb, your life merely gets dumb and random. When your stuff is actually smart in the service of the goals of others, your life gets worse than random. It gets toxic, and predatory forces squeeze all value out of it (I wrote about this in The Gollum Effect). The bad news is that thinking hard to turn dumb or other-smart stuff into smart-for-you stuff takes time and multiple stuff-shocks. It is an iterative process. With each shock,  your stuff  gets smarter. This led me to a sort of broad goal for Stuff Science. Stuff Science is the study of stuff compression. Compression as in file compression. Shoving more information into fewer bits. It is an empirical and local science. The only way to study it is to subject your life to periodic stuff shocks and thinking about the results each time to design the next one. When you understand this in a naive way, you end up believing in the religion of minimalism: doing without, cutting away stuff simply because it is illegible, and preaching about the evils of stuff. You end up idolizing backpack-nomadism for its own sake. You end up not taking on challenges that might help you grow simply because they might involve more stuff.  You drop out and avoid challenges and pretend that the relief that actually comes from shying away from challenges is coming from the mere act of giving up stuff. Your life ends up full of little hypocrisies, like swearing by a "small and local" philosophy, but carrying around an iPad that takes the might of the entire global industrial system that you complain about, to build. When you understand this in a sophisticated way though, you can start to consciously make your stuff smarter. You may possess more or less stuff through life as the challenges you take on change, but you aren't navigating by some unexamined drive to merely eliminate stuff. Cognitive Nomadism If you've been following my previous writing, you'll notice that I've snuck in an idea that seemingly contradicts my own earlier idea: that externalizing intelligence makes institutions smarter and people dumber. If your stuff is getting smarter, are you getting dumber? Not if your stuff is getting smarter because of shocks you are engineering, as Stuff Science experiments.  Stuff-shocks keep you in charge, and don't allow stuff to grow by unexamined accretion for too long. We cannot think about every ownership decision, but periodic shocks force us to periodically inject a large dose of intelligence into our patterns of ownership. There are many ways to deliver stuff-shocks to your lifestyle, but the easiest way is to simply uproot yourself geographically and move to a different place. This is one reason nomadism is strongly associated with lifestyle design (and also the reasoning behind my claim, in The Return of the Barbarian that pastoral nomads are individually smarter, but collectively dumber, than settled peoples). What keeps nomads smart is that having to constantly pack up and move keeps them sensitive to the meaning and purpose of all the stuff in their lives, and forces them to keep making decisions about what to keep and what to leave behind. It is easy to let stuff pile up in the attic. Out of sight out of mind.  Stuff that was smart when you bought it can become dumb if your lifestyle changes and you either don't notice or are in denial about it.  I once bought a keyboard a long time ago but didn't touch it after a few piano lessons. I lugged it around for the next 4 moves, telling myself I'd take lessons again. But at some point I realized it wasn't going to happen. I gave it away. If I hadn't been moving so often, I'd probably still have it. That said, while nomadism is the easiest way to deliver stuff-shocks to your lifestyle, it isn't the only way. It takes discipline, but other techniques, ranging from intensive spring-cleaning to maintaining a "Goodwill Bag" (a bag of stuff to give away via Goodwill, a chain of stores in the US where you can get cheap used stuff) can deliver large and small shocks to your lifestyle. So to generalize the principle of using shocks to design your lifestyle progressively and iteratively, we can call it cognitive nomadism. There are two basic kinds of shocks. Expansion shocks put more stuff into your life. Compression shocks eliminate stuff. Both are good so long as your stuff gets smarter on average. Most lifestyle design relies on compression shocks rather than expansion shocks simply because it is easier to make your stuff get smarter if you are eliminating rather than adding. This is because additions are born dumb. If you add a home gym, it is dumb stuff until you settle into a routine of actually using it. Eliminations can also be dumb, but there will usually be immediate acute pain, and you will find out immediately. If you were to give up your cellphone due to a romantic notion of "living off the grid" you'll realize how much your life revolves around it in a day or two. So a good default assumption is that additions are dumb unless you experience immediate relief (no integration costs), and eliminations are smart unless you experience immediate pain. I recently answered a question about writing skills on Quora, and emphasized the role of rewriting and editing. Stuff-shocks are the rewrites of your life. And as with any editing processes, by default you should assume that cutting stuff is smarter than adding stuff. If you try expansion shocks, not only will it cost you more, there is a much higher chance that others will determine what stuff gets put into your life. When you buy a house for instance, you are inheriting an entire set of lifestyle assumptions from am architect paid by a developer. When you move from a house to the trunk of you car, there is simply much less space for others to put stuff into. Expansion shocks that make your stuff smarter on average are hard to engineer. So there is nothing intrinsically great or noble about living out of a suitcase or a car trunk, being nomadic or being minimalist. That's merely the simplest pattern you can use to deliver frequent cognitive-nomadic shocks to your system, with a high probability of things getting smarter. My Experiments Recently, I delivered the biggest compression shock of my life to my stuff. My wife and I put most of our stuff into a 10x10x10 storage unit and sublet a part of her parents' home in Las Vegas. We will be living here for at least 4-5 months. It isn't exactly living out of suitcases (though we only have a few suitcases worth of our own stuff) because the house is furnished and has almost everything we need. But it's a start. I am learning very fast what stuff I actually need, what stuff is just leftover crud from the past, and what stuff I am hanging on to for sentimental reasons. Living in someone else's furnished home is giving me a sense of how much my lifestyle has in common with others' at the micro-level -- things like spatulas and dishes. I am learning for instance, that I have an irrational attachment to certain kitchen equipment. I am realizing I can do most of my preferred cooking in anyone's kitchen, not just my own. Though this particular shock is reversible (and likely will be reversed to a large extent with the next move), both of us are starting to think the same radical thoughts: if we can put 90% of our things in storage and do without them for 6 months, how much do we really need any of it? We are starting to understand different things -- ranging from couches to books -- in broader terms. How much does it cost to acquire? To rent? How long would you have to store something for the marginal storage costs to exceed the costs of just selling it and re-buying it later? Is it seasonal-use (our winter stuff is in storage for instance)? But beyond these sorts of obvious computations is a sort of sensibility that is taking root in my mind, where nothing is ever allowed to become a taken-for-granted possession. It's all negotiable at the next stuff-shock. Actually, I experienced an even more severe temporary compression shock. As many of you know, I turned the move from DC to Vegas into a 3-week road trip, during which I was essentially living out of my car, others' spare couches and the odd hotel room. I will be doing several more weeks of that later this summer. Living out of a car is an excellent test-drive for those considering lifestyle design. Ever since I started thinking in terms of lifestyle design as an ongoing series of stuff shocks, things have started seeming both more comprehensible and more manageable (I don't have to figure it all out right now, I just have to figure out the lessons of one stuff shock at a time, making this a sort of lean/agile lifestyle design model). The idea of stuff shocks also gives you an easy way to estimate whether your lifestyle is in good shape. Just ask: what was the last stuff shock you subjected it to, and how strong was it? If your answer is "a spring cleaning 10 years ago," chances are your stuff is fairly dumb and/or toxic. I am not suggesting that everybody should become a real nomad. That's just not possible for (say) somebody with a house, an underwater mortgage and two kids in school. But I think anyone can be a cognitive nomad and deliver frequent stuff-shocks to their lifestyles to keep their stuff smart.