We all have too much stuff in our lives, right? Material attachments. Clutter.
There’s a whole corner of the internet dedicated to selling you a fantasy of living a truly minimalist life, without all kinds of shit on your walls or in your cupboards and drawers.
In my teens and twenties I became obsessed with a kind of Westernised Buddhism, and I tried to detach myself from needing physical things like these. Actually, now that I think about it, to moderate success, because I didn’t become someone motivated by the desire to constantly own more things.
But as I’ve got older I’ve realised that, whilst ‘material detachment’ still has its merits, it’s a big mistake to dismiss the objects we hold on to as clutter. The stuff around us, particularly in our homes, becomes part of who we are in a way that’s hard to articulate.
Unfortunately, for some people, tragedy brings this importance into laser-sharp focus.
If you’ve been on social media recently it’s been hard to miss TikToks of Palestinians finding their neighbours reduced to ash. (Although for many the loss of home and possessions is diminished by the loss of loved ones.)
On a less brutal (but still pretty brutal) scale, for YouTube junkies such as myself, the Los Angeles fires have shown us in real time what it’s like for creators we’ve been following for years to lose everything.
Van (brother of Casey) Neistat made this great video about how the fire nearly claimed his home and his work studio:
In it he alludes to two other YouTubers who did lose their homes in the fires. Colin and Samir host perhaps the most popular YouTube channel in the ‘interviewing other YouTubers about YouTube’ niche. They often talk about how it took them more than a decade on the platform trying to find their way, and their road to success was a long struggle.
Anyway. Here is their video which has just dropped:
It’s a very well-made video, but it is just absolutely fucking heartbreaking.
Imagine your parents escaped the India / Pakistan partition, and moved to LA in a mobile home, gradually working to the point where they own a nice house in the Palisades. Imagine their lives had been defined by being displaced, and finally they found a place where their children, and their relatives, could all live together as a big extended family. Imagine every single one of their homes, and everything in it, is just disintegrated in a matter of hours.
Imagine you yourself have focused your whole career about being able to live in a stable, permanent community. Imagine you bought a house here a year ago, and spent the whole year painstakingly fitting it out. Imagine your wife is pregnant with your first baby, who is due any day now. Imagine you only moved in a couple of months ago.
Both Samir and Colin are very insightful about what it’s like to lose everything, but still have the people around you be safe.
Colin talks about how it’s not just the home or the stuff: the memories that the stuff reminds you of are now also gone. For Samir particularly, there might be an object that reminds you of that thing you did in the park next to the house where you grew up… and every single one of those things has been destroyed.
The key lesson of this tragedy – the moral – as far as I’m concerned, is that sometimes there is no lesson, no moral. There was nothing that they, or their neighbours, should have done to avoid this. They could have not bought a house there, but everywhere is vulnerable to something. This was just a natural force that humans couldn’t control.
But it can highlight things that were true before.
People—family, community, friends—are what really matter. But still, ‘stuff’ is underrated.