Life in the work-hard, play-hard generation

Before the end of every year, I always make it a point to get at least a day off from work to clean my room.   By cleaning, I don’t mean simply mopping the floors and dusting things off, I’m talking about literally taking out every object that is in the room save for the bed frame and my large cabinet, and then moving everything back one by one. My life has very few rituals, but this is one of those I have never missed for more than a decade now.

That fact that I’m a 30-something single guy still living with his mother makes the task manageable enough, but it still takes one entire day.

On the surface, the act entails simply reorganizing things.   On a more psychological level, it’s my personal way of taking a second look at whom I have become the past year and preparing for the new one. The objects we own describe us most effectively, and people bookmark lives in periods of time, so it’s practical to use these two as the contexts for self-awareness. 

I did this year’s cleaning yesterday, since I managed to get an earlier leave from Factorytown. By early afternoon, our living room was half-filled with piles of sorted-out things from my room.   The bulk of my stuff consists of books and various folders of printed material — drafts of my own work, works I printed off the Internet, etc. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised to see that I had more of those than everything else combined. I am, after all, a writer and walking cliché.

This year, I realized, I only bought 11 books, eight of which were purchased at full price, and the other three at a bargain. I was pleasantly surprised to realize that I have already read each and every book I bought this year. I guess I have finally become a more utilitarian book buyer, which I swore to become way back in 2005. 

I looked at the entire pile of books (I arranged them by genre) and realized that more than half of them I actually bought several years back, when I was still a voracious hoarder who frequented bargain bookstores.   I stopped when the largest bargain-book chain started focusing on the pre-owned magazine market, and put those on the top shelves.   Much as I wanted to, my knees are bad and I couldn’t spend extended periods stooping or squatting just to check out the merchandise below.

The majority of the bargain books remain unread, which is a shame, come to think of it, given the breadth of the collection I have assembled.   When I was younger, I always believed that literature was timeless, and that as one grew older one would have more time to read and less time to look. I still strongly believe this, and sort of regretted the fact that this year, I spent very little time reading.  

I think I must have spent too much time trying to be good at my day job, completely ignoring what I think made me good at it (and in pretty much everything I do) in the first place.   When one reads, one’s perspective grows — at the very least, it hones your capacity to wonder, to be bewildered, to be curious, to acknowledge that there is still much to learn and discover.   No matter how romanticized it sounds, it’s quite difficult to disassociate reading and being good at something, no matter what profession or field one belongs to. 

Many years from now I will look back at this year as the year that I almost bought a car.  In my pile of folders, I have collected brochures from various car

manufacturers who give away marketing materials in malls. Somebody at work bought a secondhand car (the rest already had one, or grew up having one), and all of a sudden the most popular subjects of conversation were cars and driving.

I have faintly smiled and pretended that it’s okay that I can never relate, but all this exposure triggered impulses that were quite hard to fight, and harder to admit: Envy and Vanity. I was envious that other people had things I didn’t, and I was vain about the fact that I might be able to afford having them as well, if I wanted to.   The car was a pronounced example, but of course the situation was the same for other, less significant things.

No wonder a lot of companies draw on these emotions to boost sales. Even in the news, we hear stories about what this and that celebrity bought.   A list of the things Aling Dionisia purchased in LA after Pacquiao’s victory is a Google search away.   Wherever we look, we see images of decadence, and since not everyone can afford such, one is sold the promise that you can have a piece of this lifestyle as a gift for working hard. 

I don’t blame the people around me for buying into this promise — it’s ultimately an individual choice — but I sort of regretted being a sponge for unguarded mass consumerism. 

The concept of rewarding oneself is generally healthy, but it’s quite complicated to draw the line when one is already using the concept as an excuse to be irresponsible. Yes, indeed, we’re in a democracy, and one can spend as much as one earns, but there’s something fundamentally wrong about being a stupid consumer. At the very least, one has to recognize that money is not easy to earn at all. 

With my things all bunched up in a pile, it was easy to see that for most of my purchases this year (and even almost-purchases that I gave serious thought to), I began to want because of envy rather than need. From an assortment of small electronic gadgets that will soon be irrelevant or outdated, to cutesy useless things like cellphone stands, memory pillows and a handy contraption to draw circles and patterns with, I have spent serious money on things that other people wanted.   I swear I’d have been a fashionista, too, if I were smaller — I simply can’t find clothes that fit me in bazaars, thank God.

I was pleased that I had pushed back purchasing a car to two years from now (for a very good reason — I’ll be better equipped, financially), and had, after a long battle of wills, decided against buying a DSLR camera. The latter was an almost-purchased object as well. I managed to collect as many brochures to compare specs, and reading these closely made me realize that it’s quite useless to buy this much technology only for a hobby.  

It took me half the time to bring back things to my room. I was done rear-ranging my space before the evening

news.   I placed the most useless things I’ve bought this year on a box on my table, as a sort of reminder of how gullible I have become to mass marketing.    On the topmost shelves, I picked what I think is a good sampling of 20 books from those I haven’t read from years ago. I would like to target reading at least five books every quarter next year. 

Although I’m really not inclined to make a list of New Year’s resolutions, since I daydream enough to make up for having to write one and I end up never following anything I’ve listed down, this year I decided to put up some sort of forward-looking reinforcement in my room.   On my wish list for holiday gifts at work, I asked for photo printouts of five paintings that I particularly liked.   One colleague was gracious enough to grant my wish.

I taped the photos on the wall beside my bed.   They’re five works of art that I like and thought of randomly, representing no particular message or inclination: a couple of murals from Diego Rivera and Picasso, a couple of Magritte paintings that fascinated me when I was still in school, and an Ang Kiukok work that I first saw on an art-auction brochure someone left in a bus. 

Other than being quite cool, I’m putting up these reproductions as a constant reminder that beauty is free.   Art and literature, I’ve always felt, represent the zenith of the human experience, and that zenith is what beauty is. These five crudely taped reproductions in my room are not, by all means, the most beautiful creations in the world — they’re not even my favorite works of art — but their being there tells me that I don’t need to own anything to truly understand and appreciate it. 

We live in a work-hard, play-hard generation.   I’m a total dinosaur for still subscribing to happiness that is intangible, but nevertheless I would like to believe that life, its various aspects and all the meaning that we associate with it, is more than the size of the wallet or the ego. The changing of years is a good time to remind oneself of personal philosophies, and I think this one hard-held belief is what I’d like next year to be about.