Read the full transcript of Elizabeth Dulemba’s talk titled “Is Your Stuff Stopping You?” at TEDxUniversityofEdinburgh 2016 conference.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
ELIZABETH DULEMBA: Wow. So I have an important question for you today. Is your stuff stopping you? If it is, I’m hoping that we can change your priorities a little bit. So comedian Steven Wright said, “I have the world’s largest collection of seashells. I keep it scattered on the beaches around the world. Perhaps you’ve seen it?” The idea that something could just be in the world and that that could be enough was radical to me. It changed my life, the idea that you didn’t have to own something for it to have value to you.
So in November of 2014, my husband and I decided to sell almost everything we own and move to another continent. No. I do not blame Stephen Wright for this. I actually had some good reasons.
Finding My Old Goals
So, I came across this note that I wrote to myself when I was about twenty-five years old. And it was goals that I wanted to accomplish by the time I was thirty. What was amazing to me when I found this note was how it hadn’t changed a bit. I wanted to be getting a master’s of fine arts. I wanted to be teaching. I wanted to be published. I wanted to be volunteering. And the big ticket item was I wanted to be living overseas and maybe even speaking another language fluently.
But by the time I was thirty…oops. By the time I was thirty, only one item on that list could be checked off. And that was volunteering, which I was very proud of. I had volunteered for an adult literacy program. But look at all the other stuff on that list that has not been checked off, but yet I had some work to do.
The American Dream
So my husband and I, in 2014, we’re living the American dream. We had the big house, the cars, a garage full of toys, and a house full of so much furniture. I counted it out. There were no less than fifty different places where I could sit my precious rear end. Needless to say, I was not a minimalist. Let me say that again. I am not a minimalist.
So how does somebody like me wrap their head around something like what I’m doing? Well, this all looks really pretty from the outside. Right? But we were also experiencing a ten-year long recession, and it hurt a lot of people. It hurt us. It limited our opportunities in life. It limited our chances towards adventures that we wanted to have.
So Instead, we had taken to this new hobby of watching HGTV’s House Hunters International. Do you guys know this program? This is a TV show where people pick up their lives and they move overseas and they are looking for an apartment or a flat and you get to be a voyeur and go along with them, and it’s really fun. So every night my husband and I would say, “Okay, where do you want to go tonight? Do you want to go to London? Do you want to go to Paris? Do you want to go to Spain?” And then we’d sit there on the couch watching the program going, “Why isn’t this us? Why isn’t this our life? It doesn’t look that hard.” And I’d look around at all the stuff that was surrounding us. You know, everything that was in that house, that American dream, that wasn’t on my list.
Making the Move
So finally, the recession breaks up. Thank goodness. Life gets a little bit easier, and things start looking up for us. And one day, my husband, who is very familiar with my list, looks at me and he says, “What if you got your master’s degree overseas?” I think he’s kidding. Right? Yeah. Of course, he is. No. I look at him. He’s not laughing. I said, “Really?” He said, “You know, if not now, when?” And truly, if the recession had taught us anything, it was that you don’t always get to choose when opportunity is at your door and when it’s not.
So I said, “Okay.” And I got online, and I start looking at universities trying to figure out which one’s going to be the best fit. And the University of Edinburgh kept popping to the top. This is Edinburgh. And I have to admit, Scotland was not on my radar. But they had an MFA in illustration, which I am a children’s book author and illustrator, which that was high priority. The faculty is very picture book centric. Again, very important to me. And I could stick around for a PhD, which I hope to do.
So I was like, you know what? This looks like the best fit. And I applied to one school, the University of Edinburgh, and I got accepted. Woo hoo. Then I realized I had a big problem. I had all this stuff. Now, my husband and I are not independently wealthy people, and we were not being sponsored by a company. So there was no picking up our old life and moving it across the ocean to this new life. That was not feasible. If we were going to make this fly, we were going to have to sell almost everything. And again, I told you, what? I am not a minimalist. So how does somebody like me wrap her head around this idea?
I had some wake up calls. The first one is a few years ago, I had health scare. I spent two years walking with a stick called a cane in in the States. I was in a lot of pain. I gained a lot of weight. My hair turned gray. And it was looking like my days of walking the sidewalks of Paris or anywhere else in Europe for that matter were behind me instead of ahead of me.
My life was actually winding down pretty quickly, and it was really scary.
I was lucky. As you can see, I’m standing before you. We figured it out. I changed my diet. I had some surgery, and I am now living a second chapter, a new lease on life.
My friend Liz Conrad was not so lucky. She was a beautiful children’s book author and illustrator, and was about to introduce a whole scads of children’s books to the world to share with our children beautiful books when she came down with cancer. It took her very young and way too fast. It made me realize two things. Good health is not a given. Good health is a gift. Life is a gift.
And that led to one more realization, which seems a little odd. Being aware of our finiteness, that we have a deadline is a gift. When we’re in our twenties, we think we have all the time in the world to achieve the dreams that we want to achieve, to do the things we want to do. We think we’re infinite, indestructible. And then you get a little older and something like that help happens to you. You have a health scare. You lose somebody close to you, and you realize that we have a deadline.
Every single one of us in here has a deadline. We don’t know when it is. But when something like that happens to you, there is nothing like that that will put a fire under you and inspire you to get into some action. Because right now, I’m not just living my second chapter. I’m living for all of the opportunities that my friend Liz missed out on as well.
Tom Hiddleston, who played Loki in the Marvel movies, said it really well. He said, “We all have two lives. The second one starts when we realize we only have one.”
Stuff vs Experience
It all comes down to stuff versus experience. Are you a stuff person, or are you an experienced person? Now there is nothing wrong with being a stuff person. I have no problem with that. I like visiting other people’s stuff. But I think there’s nothing more sad than being an experience based person stuck in a stuff based lifestyle.
And the weird thing is science has even proven stuff does not make us happy. Doctor Thomas Gilovich of Cornell University has been studying happiness for over twenty years. And he said it really comes down to this. We can surround ourselves with stuff, and we can even identify ourselves with the stuff that we keep around us and think it’s part of us, but it will always be separate from us. It is not truly a part of us, whereas our experiences are a part of us. We become the sum total of our experiences.
So if this is true, stuff cannot make us happy, why do we keep it? Well, lots of reasons, but today I’m going to talk to you about three.
The Illusion of Safety
The first one is that stuff makes us feel safe. Now, this goes back to the lizard ring, caveman days. It used to be that if you were the leader of your clan, you had to go out with a big spear and kill a wooly mammoth to bring back meat and furs and keep your clan safe for the winter. And the the cave that had the most stuff had the best chance of survival.
But we don’t live that way anymore. Nowadays, if you want a steak, you can pop in your car, go down to the corner market and buy a steak. No spears involved. And yet, that lizard brain part of our us still reigns.
The second reason I want to suggest is that stuff gives us the illusion of permanence. We like to think that if we have all this stuff around us, it’s not going anywhere. Right? So we’re not either. But we know this is an illusion. We know this isn’t true. Things can happen. Floods, fires, war. You can lose all of that stuff in the blink of an eye. Question is, is it going to be up to you or to somebody else?
The Marketing Machine
The third reason was is one that is so pervasive. I’m not sure you’re even aware of it. The third reason that we keep stuff is because the marketing machine tells us we should. They tell us that we should buy, buy, buy, buy, and not just what we need. There’s there’s this thing called, let’s move on. They the whole point is for them to make sure that you’re happy with the purchase when you make it. And we all know that glow. But shortly after that, they want you to be unhappy with your purchase. About a week, a few months, they show you something better, something newer, something shinier. Now you want that instead.
The reason they do it is because if you stay happy with your purchase, you’re not going to buy anything new. And if you don’t buy anything new, you’re not going to be giving making any money for anybody. And they have convinced us that our value to society is wrapped up in how much money we can pour back into it. I think we’re worth more than that. They give us choices, so many choices. And they convince us that these choices represent freedom, when really it’s just a ploy to make us buy more stuff.
But ask yourself, do you really care about what they want you to care about? Henry David Thoreau said, “The price of anything is the amount of life we exchange for it.” How much of your life have you exchanged for trying to figure out what they want you to care about instead of what you actually care about?
How to Get Rid of Stuff
So have I convinced you? Have I sold you on this idea? How do you get rid of stuff? If this is the lifestyle for you, if you want it and again, I’m not a minimalist. You don’t have to get rid of everything. Maybe you just streamline a little bit.
The first step is to become a conscious keeper. This means to become aware of everything that you have in your life, everything that surrounds you. Make sure nothing is sticking around that isn’t serving some purpose. You know, if there’s something that has bad karma, maybe it came from an old boyfriend, or there’s something buried deep in your closet so deeply you don’t even know you have it, get rid of it. These are the things to clean out.
So when you do get rid of it, how do you get rid of it? Well, there’s plenty of ways. You can sell it online. You can sell it at a secondhand shop. You can, have yard sale or what we did, which was an estate sale, which is basically a big fancy name for a yard sale. It means you’re selling everything instead of just what will fit in your yard.
But my very favorite way to get rid of it is to donate. Now, I told you about this recession. Our local library had one year during this recession where their budget for buying new books was big old goose eggs. Zero dollars. My husband and I are both writers and readers, and we had an enormous collection of books. So we piled up our car from bottom to top no less than three times and drove all of these books to our library. They were thrilled. There were so many books. They ended up disseminating them to our local libraries as well, all the libraries in our area. So instead of those books sitting in our shelves where only we could enjoy them and only one at a time, they were out in the public where lots of people could enjoy them. What a warm fuzzy feeling that is. I love it and I recommend it. I hope you do it too.
The Cost of Storage
And I can see it in your eyes. You’re saying, “Okay. I can do this. I can do this, but I gotta put some stuff in storage.” Right? I see it. You know this. I did it too. I had a pile. We we created this pile. It was going to be this stuff goes to storage. Okay. That’s fine. But every time I walked by that pile, I started realizing that this was going to cost me.
Sure, financially, all this stuff was going to go into a dark closet where nobody could use it. And we didn’t know our five year plan or ten year plan. We had no idea when we would be back for it or how. So it was going to cost a lot of money. And then there was the emotional cost. It was going to sit there like this anchor embedded in my old life, you know, tying me to this old way of living. It doesn’t feel very good. And then there was the experiential cost. I started looking at it going, is that table going to cost me a weekend in Amsterdam? Is that lamp going to cost me a dinner with my husband? And eventually, that entire pile went back into the house for the estate sale, where it could fund our new adventure.
Liberation
So it finally came time. We were out of there. We’re pulling out of the driveway in a car that has a big for sale sign on it, and I’m looking in the rearview mirror waiting for that gut check moment. You know, the moment where you’re like, “Oh my God. What have I done? What if I was wrong?” And I can tell you honestly, all I felt was relief. The weight had slid off of my back. I felt liberated.
So, this was what our life looked like for the next few months. First, we went to Holland University in Roanoke, Virginia where I teach in the master’s, children’s book writing and illustrating program. And we lived in faculty housing for about six weeks. This is basically using other people’s stuff, putting a little bit of our stuff in, or basically renting, which is really all of us are doing in this life if you really think about it. That one’s fine.
And then it was time to go to Europe. But there was this one hiccup. Faculty housing ended on August 2nd, and we couldn’t enter Scotland on my student visa until August 17th. We had several weeks in there with no place to go. We were homeless. I’ve never been homeless in my life. I panicked until my very smart husband said to me, “Well, what about your host family?” And sure enough, I was an exchange student in France when I was in college, and I had stayed very close with my family. And I called them up and explained the situation, and lo and behold, they had a little flat in Blois, France overlooking the Loire River that nobody was using. So guess where we went?
Even when we got to Scotland, we were looking for a flat, a place to stay. We got here right in the middle of Fringe. Bad time to go apartment hunting. At any rate, we ended up staying in a short term let right on the Royal Mile. Wouldn’t want to live there full time, but it was great for a week. All of these things happened as a direct result of we had become so mobile. We had so little stuff. We could turn on a dime. We could say, “What do you think about that? Let’s do it.”
Goals Accomplished
So let’s look at my list now. I’m happy to say I have checked off almost everything. I am a now a masters of fine arts student in illustration at the University of Edinburgh. I teach at Holland University in the summers, as I mentioned. I’m published. I have two dozen books, including my first novel, A Bird on Water Street, which has been doing quite well. I volunteered like crazy in the States, and I’m looking forward to doing it again here. And a big ticket item, I now live overseas in one of the most beautiful cities in the world, Edinburgh, Scotland.
Now, you might notice there’s one little item that’s missing on that list, speaking another language fluently. I think you know me well enough now to know that I’m working on it.
Your Stuff, Your Life
So if there’s anything that you take away from my talk, I hope it’s this. I want you to realize that the stuff that we keep in our lives affects how we live our lives. Think about what’s in your life. Is it holding you back? Is your stuff stopping you? And if it is, I hope I’ve inspired you to do something about it.
