The Borg – masters of assimilationHave you ever thought about how much time you spend purchasing and assimilating things you acquired into your life? It goes about something like this (and I’m not even talking cars or houses here): You need to buy / replace an item. This could be anything from a book, a shirt, a kitchen utensil etc. In some cases you might do research prior to starting the hunt, so you might browse the web, read up on it in Consumer Reports, etc. Then you get in the car, drive to one or even multiple store(s), browse the selection, figure out what you want, buy it, haul it home. Then you unpack it, you might need to read the manual/instructions, dispose of the packaging materials and find a new permanent place for it at home. Basically I’m talking about anything from the initial identification of a need to assimilating an item into your life.
On any given weekend, I may just buy 2 or so items that fit this bill, but I’m spending about 2 hrs doing so from leaving the house to coming back. Let’s say I spend another 20 mins or so unpacking and assimilating the items, so in total we’re looking at 1:10 hrs on average per item. That’s a LOT of time!
Now, follow me on this one: How many items do you own? Let’s break it down to an average of items per room, to make it easier. I’m not sure, but let’s say the average room contains 50-100 distinct items. In a 3 bedroom house with living room, family room, kitchen, garage, 2 baths, that makes 450-900 items, which equals approx. 525-1050 hrs (22-44 days!). So if you had to replace every article you own, you’d have to spend 1 month, 24 hrs a day selecting, buying and assimilating products!
I don’t know about you, but that’s quite a number. Don’t like my assumptions? Feel free to tweak the numbers and run through this exercise again and I bet you’ll still end up with quite an impressive amount of time.
Considering the sum of all the things we surround ourselves with is like a living organism which needs to replace all of its cells every so often, we are spending a lot of time maintaining and replacing our collective possessions on a permanent basis.
I guess, I wish I was Borg…
Everyone seeks to improve their life on a constant basis. Examples: We buy a bigger car, we move to a bigger house, we get more memory for our laptop, we get a faster printer, we accept a job with more pay and a shorter commute, and we go for the big screen TV (a completely random example). All these things add up to a significant improvement of our quality of life over time. But do you realize that this is pretty much a one-way street? Will you be okay with a smaller TV, less RAM, a longer commute, or less pay in future? Hell no! Once you’ve made the change and gotten used to it, you won’t want to go back to “how it used to be”. This makes all these improvements irreversible. You’ve set the bar higher, now get used to jumping higher too. Not that this is a terrible thing, as long as you realize that there is no going back, or at least not a painless way. This is the one-way street of progress…
I’ve finally figured out where all my energy goes on the weekends: creating order from the chaos of the week. Come to think of it, this reminds me of what I recall from the theory about entropy. Any system’s natural tendency is chaos, i.e. disorder. The only way to create order in a system, is to expend energy, which increases the order in a system. Without energy applied, an equilibrium with higher entropy (read “chaos”) results.
A few years ago, I found myself going to various stores to find out where a specific item, say a DVD, cost the least. I was driving around from the first to the second store, from the second to the third store and then back to the first store to buy it there after all. And all this to save $3. Or I’d go to one store that I knew had the item I needed (e.g. after shave), but I wouldn’t buy it there. Instead I would drive to a second store for this item only to buy it there $2 cheaper. Been there, done that?