My grandmother had a wardrobe full of clothes she never wore. Not old clothes, unwanted clothes, forgotten clothes. New ones. Beautiful ones. Things she had bought with genuine intention and then somehow never put on. We would visit and find them hanging there, tags still attached, waiting for an occasion that never came.
We used to laugh about it. Gently, affectionately, but laugh. What is she thinking? Why does she keep buying things she does not use? Does she not have enough already?
I am in my fifties now. I have a bookshelf that looks exactly like her wardrobe.
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"Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories." — Walter Benjamin |
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Let me be honest about my inventory.
The bookshelf first. Books bought with genuine ambition, read to the halfway point, set aside when something more urgent arrived, and never returned to. Each one represents a version of me I was going to become — the person who understood philosophy, or Ottoman history, or machine learning — and did not quite get around to becoming yet. The spines look impressive. The pages are largely undisturbed.
Then there is the guitar from high school that has followed me across countries and apartments for thirty years. Always present, always promising. I can still play a few chords. I was going to do more with that. I tell myself I still might. The guitar says nothing, which is kind of it.
I studied German in middle school, high school, and for two years at university. Years of it. I have never used it. I live in Romania. Have lived here for twelve years. My Romanian is what I would generously describe as functional and what my Romanian friends would describe as a work in progress that has been in progress for an unusually long time. The country has been patient with me in a way that is either generous or slightly damning depending on how you look at it.
And I tell my friends that one day, when AI handles everything else, I will finally finish my Python course. They laugh. I laugh. We all know what that means.
I see it everywhere around me too. Subscriptions kept because cancelling feels like admitting something. Apps downloaded with purpose and opened once. Gear bought for hobbies that arrived at full intensity and then quietly faded — equipment still in a drawer somewhere, perfectly maintained, waiting for the version of its owner that bought it to return and claim it.
My grandmother's wardrobe. Exactly.
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My daughter is six. She collects stickers. Not for any purpose — not to decorate anything, not to trade, not to complete an album in any organised way. Just to have them. She keeps them in a small box and goes through them periodically with the focused attention of a curator examining something precious. The stickers do not need to be used. Possessing them is enough.
I watch her and I think: this is the purest version of what I do with books. No pretense about reading them. No story about the person she is going to become once she has processed the sticker collection. Just the pleasure of having, of owning, of the collection existing in the world as a thing that belongs to her.
Children are honest about their collecting in a way adults are not. Adults build a narrative around it.
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A friend of mine collects old German magazines. Among them, Simplicissimus — a satirical German publication from the early twentieth century, sharp, political, unafraid. He has been sending me photographs from issues dating back to 1915, images and cartoons documenting the relationship between the Ottoman Empire and Germany a century ago. The dynamics, the alliances, the tensions, the way two very different civilisations negotiated power and proximity. What struck me every time a new photo arrived was how familiar it felt. A hundred years passed and the underlying patterns had not disappeared — they had just changed costume. His collection was not nostalgia. It was a lens. The old magazines were showing him, and through him me, what happens today by revealing what happened then.
This is the distinction worth making. Not all collecting is the same thing. Some collections are the physical form of genuine passion and curiosity — preserved things that would otherwise be lost, windows into moments that no longer exist. These collections mean something beyond the objects themselves. They are not about the aspirational self. They are about making sense of the world through what it left behind.
But much of what we accumulate in modern life is something different. It is the aspirational self made physical — the identity we are buying rather than building. The books that signal the kind of reader we intend to become. The courses that represent the skills we are going to have. The equipment for the life we are going to live once things settle down a bit.
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The anthropologists call this extended self theory — the idea that we incorporate objects into our sense of identity, that what we own becomes part of who we are or who we believe ourselves to be. The psychologists point to something adjacent: that acquiring things produces a brief dopamine release that fades quickly, while the anticipation of acquisition often produces more pleasure than the possession itself. The buying feels better than the having. Which is why the clothes stay in the wardrobe with their tags and the books stay on the shelf with their spines uncracked.
The modern economy has understood this precisely and built an entire infrastructure around it. The course platform that sells you the person you could become. The subscription that represents the life you are going to live. The app that will finally make you organised, productive, focused, fit, calm. The gap between the aspirational self and the actual self is the most reliably monetisable gap in human psychology. Every unfinished course, every unused subscription, every book half-read is evidence that someone understood this gap better than you did at the moment of purchase.
In the digital world the accumulation has become invisible and therefore unlimited. A physical wardrobe runs out of space. A Kindle library does not. A folder of saved articles has no weight. A collection of browser bookmarks costs nothing and takes up no room and can grow indefinitely, a perfect archive of everything you were going to read when you had time, which is to say an archive of everything you were going to become when life was different.
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I have stopped laughing at my grandmother's wardrobe. I understand it now in a way I could not at the time. She was not being irrational. She was doing what humans do — buying a version of herself she wanted to exist, keeping it safe in case she needed it, surrounded by the evidence of who she might still become.
The question worth sitting with is not how to stop collecting. It is what the collection is actually telling you. The books on your shelf are a map of your curiosity and your intentions — both honest things about who you are. The courses you bought and never finished are not failures. They are data about what you thought you wanted and what you actually pursued when given the choice.
The gap between what we collect and what we use is the gap between who we are and who we thought we were going to be. That gap is not something to close with productivity systems or decluttering advice. It is something to read honestly, the way my friend reads his old German magazines — carefully, with attention to what it tells you about the moment you are actually in.
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"I have more books than I could read in several lifetimes. But I know what I don't know, and that is the beginning of wisdom." — Umberto Eco |
My grandmother's wardrobe was full of beautiful clothes she never wore. I hope, wherever she is, she knows I finally understand.
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This week's insight The gap between what we collect and what we use is the gap between who we are and who we thought we were going to be. Your unread books are not failures. They are a map of your curiosity and intentions — honest things about who you are. The question is not how to close the gap with a productivity system. It is how to read it honestly. The collection is data. Use it. |
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