I disappear for two weeks and come back not with a song in my step, but with deep unsettling questions about the futility of my own existence. Is this the start of my mid-life crisis? How exciting! What do you wear to a mid-life crisis, anyway? I hope it involves tulle.

My determination to be the girl with the most cake toys has seen my collection flourish and grow. My lady cave is covered in awesome things as far as the eye can see – entire shelves dedicated to my favourite pop cultures; a mishmash of genres and universes and lifestyles. I have a lot of cool stuff.

Unfortunately, I am starting to question WHY I have so much cool stuff.

At the end of the day, it’s just .. junk. Brightly coloured pieces of plastic moulded to look like someone else’s money-making dream. Why do I have it? And what will happen to it when I’m dead? There isn’t going to be any sort of museum exhibit filled with artifacts from my pointless life; no one is going to look at my collection of things and think how awesome I must have been to have spent so much time and money amassing all these lovely things. In the end, it’s all just garbage. No matter how much we may dearly love our hobbies or curios or collections while we live, when everything goes dark it’s nothing more than a burden to those who loved you. You may keep an item or two as a memento – I recommend anything from my Optimus Prime collection – but you can’t keep my entire life together. None of my things will mean as much to anyone else as they did to me, and that’s pretty depressing. I keep thinking back to my dad’s record collection – he loved his records. He had thousands of them, and had been collecting them since his radio days. After he died, what happened to them? My mom let a close friend of his go through the collection and take what he wanted, and the rest were donated or thrown away. Everything he poured into his collection – all the time and money, the thrill of a rare find, the delight in an old favourite, the love of a good memory – gone. The collection wasn’t a comfort or joy to my mother, it was a burden. She stressed over what to do with the thousands of records – toss them in the garbage? Leave them on the curb? Donate them to some organization?  The neatly lined shelves that made my dad happy for decades were nothing more than a huge pain in the ass for my mother to deal with.

Will that happen to my things? When I draw my last breath at 114 (I’m nothing if not optimistic/terrified of death), will Ed be left with a house full of dusty plastic reminders of a movie we once saw or a video game I once loved? Will he look over all the faded memories of the ridiculous things that made me happy and curse the need to clean up after me one last time? Or will I have long since caved in to the nagging voice in the back of my head that wonders if I wouldn’t maybe be happier living a minimalist lifestyle that would fit in a duffle bag so that I may come and go as I please?

I love my things, but I am questioning why I have things. If all my cherished items are nothing more than a burden for others to deal with after I’m gone, is it better to not cherish anything at all?

Mid! Life! Crisis!

future landfill