One morning in January, I woke up and it was like a spell had been broken the way I looked around my room and saw how dull everything was, not because it was lacking but because of how full it was of stuff.
Stuff I didn’t particularly love. Stuff with no serious meaning to it. Stuff I didn’t care about. Stuff that, if you had secretly tossed, I wouldn’t even realize went missing. Stuff I bought because it was trendy at the time, because my friend had it, because I had seen attractive influencers my age brag about it on Instagram, and it made me think that I could be her.
So, I did a bit of Marie Kondo-ing and produced a few large bags of clothes and trinkets and stuff for donation. Standing in front of all my stuff, it hit me that all of it used to be money, and all of that used to be time. I was standing in front of the metabolic waste of my existence, materialized. I was looking at the amount of my time, therefore my life, that had been turned into garbage. And the worst part is that I could’ve prevented it.
A movie scene that has stuck with me for years comes from Spirited Away, where Chihiro finds her parents turned into pigs. It’s comical to describe, but when you put yourself in her shoes, it’s terrifying: it’s every child’s nightmare to lose their parents to a force they can’t control. The panic she feels in that scene speaks to me deeply, the feeling of watching your loved ones do something that you know is wrong but being called “silly” when you try to stop them.
You’re not you when you’re hungry
Materialism isn’t inherently evil; it can be gorgeous through the frames of abundance or art. Miranda Priestly’s “stuff” monologue from The Devil Wears Prada, for example, shows how material creates jobs, fuels culture, and shapes history. Miyazaki’s plates of food are dramatically overblown and colorful and delicious, but Chihiro’s parents don’t think about what they consume, only about how much. When she confronts them, her father shrugs: “It’s okay. I have my credit card and some cash.”
This is the mindset that will make you waste your life away into bags of garbage: the idea that shopping is a material issue, and overconsumption is a budgeting problem, rather than a spiritual problem. It’s easy to be Spirited Away, whisked into another world operated by desires that come from ads and friends and fleeting trends. Your appetite for novelty and your fear of missing out sucks the joy out of you—the more you eat, the hungrier you are. The more you spend, the more vapid you feel. You lack spirit, not another fashion identity. You don’t need another aesthetic, you need stronger values.
The title Spirited Away in Japanese is Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi, and kamikakushi means “hidden by the gods,” a folk belief where people mysteriously vanish into another realm. This film is about magical abduction and losing your identity. Chihiro loses her name and becomes “Sen”: to be spirited away is like being stolen from yourself, forgetting who you are under the influence of forces like greed, fear, anger—and who’s to say that emotions aren’t magical? That desires aren’t demonic possessions of the mind (“demonic” meaning “godlike divisive superfactor” in Greek)? Who’s to say that feeling horny isn’t its own kind of spell? We literally use “mania” and “craze” to describe the way people desire something: Beatlemania, the craze with Labubus, matcha being ‘all the rage’.
Lust, for example, is the feeling of wanting something really badly. It doesn’t have to be a carnal desire but it’s about a possessive craving that ends in a feeling of collapse, an appetite that, once appeased, reveals its emptiness:
Lust is the deceiver. Lust wrenches our lives until nothing matters except the one we think we love, and under that deceptive spell we kill for them, give all for them, and then, when we have what we have wanted, we discover that it is all an illusion and nothing is there. Lust is a voyage to nowhere, to an empty land, but some men just love such voyages and never care about the destination. —Bernard Cornwell
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