Outfitting

A bourgie habit.

As longtime readers know, I have chosen to prioritize the virtues of Focus and Beauty for this year. This one is about focus, and I’m seeing in myself the negative pattern of outfitting.

outfit v.tr. (also refl.) (-fitted, -fitting) provide with an outfit. esp. of clothes.

OK fine, but I’m talking about the synonyms which include, {furnish, equip, appoint, accoutre}, especially the final two which certainly connote particular appointments and accoutrements.

At some point by your mid-forties, you get a fairly well-rounded sense of your living accommodations. Your sofa is paid off or it isn’t. Your bed and its linen are satisfactory or not. When you are comfortable, where do you go from there? Well, my peasant chums, you tend to take after the geniuses who can afford all of the accoutrements. And for the overwhelming majority of us affluent peasants that means making purchases somewhere other than the local Army surplus outlet. We enter that grey areas between being drab and being a collector. That means we need to get outfitted.

Now hear me out. I’m not browbeating you. There are degrees of this, the simplest of which all red-blooded Americans indulge. I’m talking about Christmas, Back-To-School and Summer Vacation. These are each hallowed events for which we start doing the right kind of shopping, because not only is it for us, but there are social conventions to reinforce and fond memories to be made.

The Garage Test
At some point in your affluence, and certainly in mine, you recognize that you have more stuff in your garage than is absolutely necessary. My garage, for example, is stuffed to the rafters because both my wife and I are packrats, but we are packrats of a different species. She is a sentimental packrat. I am a paranoid packrat. I would estimate that a full 60% of the boxes in our garage are in the “Memories” category, from baby shoes to old favorite t-shirts and bedspread that are fated to become quilts. As for myself, surely you don’t expect me to get rid of all the extra USB cables and four kinds of hammers. No I am never going to sell those music CDs even though I have ripped them onto FLAC and stream them and never use the CD player. Of course I have three first aid kits… in there somewhere, I think.

It is the pain of moving and the humiliation of the garage sale that brings this burden into focus for most of us. For me it is the realization that I have been downloading software and subscribing to publications that ‘keep me on top of things’ for which I have absolutely no responsibility.

But I’m Prepared
I have two copies of the Oxford Concise Dictionary. The Eighth Edition from 1992 (second printing) and the Twelfth Edition from 2011. Today is the first time I used it for writing an essay, and I’m literally checking the other edition to see if I like the definition better. Yes, actually I do, because in the 90s they actually used the term ‘haberdasher’ for outfitter, and now in newer sans-serif edition, they talk about outdoor adventures.

As a suburban parent in SoCal, I have certainly outfitted my kids for scouts, band, cheer, football, track, volleyball and community theater. All rather extra expensive given three actual kids instead of the median 1.9. I thought it was super cool of me as a father to spoil them in the particular way I did back when Toys R Us still existed and digital cameras were all the rage. I literally took 300 odd pictures of them posing with the toys they wanted for Christmas.

Almost nothing speaks to the obsession of outfitting like the term ‘prosumer’. You’re not a professional photographer but you have a collection of Nikkormat lenses that would make Ansel Adams black and white self-portrait blush in embarrassment. You’re not a black belt in anything, but you have four combat knives. I confess, I have really gone down the EDC rabbit hole.

My God It’s Full of Shit
I realized on my iPhone, that I have 12 pages of apps. I don’t really know what is beyond the fourth page where all my financial apps are. I really need to do better. I can periodically do so. I have a desktop app that can remind me! Maybe I have to reorient my acquisitive and curious nature. Do I really intend to spend a lot of time doing this thing?

Here are some ‘productivity’ apps I’m deleting from my phone today:

• TacoBell

• Kalshi

• Zoom

• Wrike

• Plexamp

• Soundbrenner

• iTunesU

• Converse

• eBay

Hmm. I think I’ve found a pattern. The first thing is that I’m getting rid of mobile apps that would encourage me to spend money. I don’t sit on a subway train, so there’s no time when I’m out and about when I need to look through apps and shop. Especially not real estate. Goodbye Zillow. Also there are apps I keep for nostalgic reasons, like Plague Inc. Then there are apps I use because other people use them just for compatibility. LinkedIn, Linktree, Blinq. WhatsApp. I don’t need these. I need focus. I’m a stupid brainy person who is easily distracted by capability. I want to do this. I want to do that. I need focus. Goodbye Trello.

That’s not the half of it. I built a simple API app to XBox to discover that since its invention I have played 268 videogames. I have wasted 22 years of my life. The shame of it all.

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Fighting Eclexia

Fighting against being overly curious creates tension between the goals of focus and discovery. It’s rather like a cycle of life. Outfitting is bourgie collecting, and downstream of that is the dreaded garage sale. The wealthy collect upscale artifacts and downstream of that is the dreaded estate liquidation. Downstream of all of these is the memory hole and the city dump. Ultimately the crime is environmental, specifically the devalued environment we pass on to youth as our cast off treasures. Why should they respect what we ourselves have found disposable?

Douglas Adams famously wrote:

• Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.

• Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.

• Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

This is an incisive critique of our progressive society.