Items on display at a garage sale provide myriad conversation contexts for buyers and sellers alike. Amy and I host or participate in a garage sale (or a tag sale as they're known back east) every few years, but it wasn't until this past weekend that I was struck by the way these events – and the stuff being bought and sold at them – offer rich opportunities for telling and hearing the stories of our lives.
Among the stories we heard from buyers who stopped by our garage sale were
- a Russian woman who searches garage sales for winter coats she sends back to family and friends back home (she bought an old coat of Amy's)
- a recently retired man who seeks out toys and games to entertain the children of his ungrateful children (i.e., his grandchildren) when they come visit
- a nanny who visits garage sales with the children she watches in order to have some contact with adults (Amy gave the kids who accompanied her a few stuffed animals)
- an Apache man who had made a pact with his now deceased mother not to attend her funeral so that her image – and spirit – would always be alive with her son (I'm not sure if he bought anything)
But the garage sale didn't just evoke stories from buyers, the sellers also had their stories to tell, e.g.,
- a stuffed bear elicited a story about how it was given to our young son over 5 years ago by a paramedic during his ride in an ambulance (his parents had perceived the bear with significantly more sentimentality than he does at this point)
- a lined flannel shirt I used to wear when we lived in colder climates evoked a few stories about how harsh those winters could be (and often were)
- children's books prompted exchanges of stories by both sellers and buyers for whom the books had been meaningful in someone's childhood (the prospective buyers projecting an anticipated layer of meaning for their children)
And the stories were not only exchanged between buyers and sellers. I overheard several of the buyers – also known as neighbors – exchanging stories that were prompted by items on display among themselves, and as a multi-family garage sale, several of the sellers also shared stories about their own and each others' stuff: places we've lived, travels we've taken, hobbies we've engaged in … and disengaged from.
I've been reading, thinking and writing about various manifestations of object-centered sociality for several years now. In a recent post on a thematic variation I call place-centered sociality, I highlighted a distinction between two dimensions of the idea of object-centered sociality: socializing about objects – e.g., talking about places and things through which we share some kind of connection – and socializing with objects – e.g., having a deep relationship with the place or thing itself. In the context of the garage sale, I heard stories representing both forms of object-centered sociality: stories in which the object for sale provided a pretext for a story in which the object was somewhat peripheral, and others in which the object was the centerpiece of the story.
A garage sale also reflects the wisdom expressed in The Cluetrain Manifesto: markets are conversations:
For
thousands of years, we knew exactly what markets were: conversations
between people who sought out others who shared the same interests.
Buyers had as much to say as sellers. They spoke directly to each other
without the filter of media, the artifice of positioning statements,
the arrogance of advertising, or the shading of public relations.These
were the kinds of conversations people have been having since they
started to talk. Social. Based on intersecting interests. Open to many
resolutions. Essentially unpredictable. Spoken from the center of the
self. "Markets were conversations" doesn’t mean "markets were noisy."
It means markets were places where people met to see and talk about
each other’s work.
The Cluetrain authors focus more on marketing – and its transformation via the empowerment of previously passive recipients of broadcast messages – than markets, per se, although they do talk about eBay.com as an example of a "virtual flea market". I've had very limited experience with eBay, but my impression is that most socializing there is more about the transactions rather than the stories surrounding the objects being bought and sold.
At several points throughout the two days, I was reminded of Dan McAdams' insightful book, The Stories We Live By, and his thesis that it is the stories we make up about ourselves that gives our lives meaning, unity and purpose. We start composing these stories in late adolescence – certainly by the time we are signing each others' high school senior yearbooks – and continue adding to and/or revising the narrative throughout much of our lives. Different life stages tend to provoke different editorial strategies, and the various characters we include in the unfolding story personify our basic human needs for power and love, and the things we buy and sell constitute props in the story. McAdams notes that "the good life story is one of the most important gifts we can ever offer each other" … and these gifts were being exchanged freely by all parties throughout the garage sale. I was tempted to title this post "The Stories We Sell By" or "Sales-Centered Sociality" … but focusing on stuff seemed more appropriate.
I imagine that this partly due to a priming effect: I recently listened to a KUOW Speakers Forum presentation by Annie Leonard, author of The Story of Stuff – a critique of our materials economy – and I think she would approve of garage sales … aside from the fact that garages house cars which promote driving which contributes to suburban sprawl and other modern practices that degrade the natural environment. On the plus side, garage sales reduce the extraction, production, distribution, consumption and disposal inherent in our acquisition of new stuff by enabling new people to reuse old stuff, overcoming perceived obsolescence by transferring old stuff to new people at a different stage of life for whom the stuff will be perceived as fresh and useful. But I think the main contribution is that the stories and conversations that arise around the the reselling of old stuff are much more likely to contribute to our happiness than the kinds of social benefits that typically surround transactions involving new stuff.
[In checking the The Story of Stuff blog just now, I see that Saturday, May 15, was Give Your Stuff Away Day. As I alluded to above, Amy ended up giving several items away during the two-day sale, and we will be giving the rest of the stuff away.]