Rusted silver keys to locks unknown.
Endless black wires and cords to equipment that no longer exist. Several black, gray, and beige jean jackets folded haphazardly in a large brown box.
Impossible stacks of unopened letters, some trite credit offers, others with peremptory statements like “Immediate Response Needed” and “URGENT.”
All of these are items my brother left, making me the unexpected inheritor of many useless objects. And I was finally able to organize them. This past week, I finally finished a task that was a year in the making: cleaning out my brother’s closet.
Fear and fatigue had kept me from accomplishing this task sooner. It was much easier to keep the closet doors shut and ignore what things I would see, and feel, upon opening them.
While I had created a space of my own in this basement apartment, this particular closet I left untouched…until this past week. Yes, there is a sense of resolution, but the questions surrounding his fate, and mine, will always reverberate against the walls.
It was last year—the week following my brother’s death—that I started the process of cleaning out the basement.
I was definitely overcome by the seeming impossibility of the task: sifting through items that were a reflection of my brother’s quarter-century existence, determining what would survive (the furniture; the movie and video game sets my younger brother coveted; the fiction books that intrigued me) and what would face the black death of a thrash heap (the useless, nearly interminable wiring; the empty DVD box cases; the notebooks scrawled with mathematical equations from now-useless college courses).
Those were the easy decisions. But what to make of the boxes and boxes of brand-name clothing (a logo-galore of Guess©, Armani Exchange©, Old Navy©, Levi’s©, Rocawear©)? What to make of the now-outdated technology he once prized—bulky digital cameras, digital planners, digital everything? What to make of the billiards sticks and the one…two…three…four different air ventilators? What to make of the off-white dirty sheets with the irremovable stench of bed-ridden sweat? What to make of the metal cane with the soft Hyaplon grip? The PortaBook© Notebook stand? The DiscoveryKids© Animated Marine Lamp? The McKesson© powdered latex gloves?
That one person could accumulate and hoard so much stuff was breath-taking. I’m not ashamed to admit that I felt overwhelmed, and a bit despondent. Actually, it was downright depressing. The objects that filled the various closets, drawers, shelves, and various nooks and crannies were all things that entered and exited through his life in some way or another.
Some were clearly transient—like the DVDs he played once, only to stash away in some corner I would later have to inspect, prying their utility with my own eyes. Others were clearly indispensable parts of his sickly life: the Samsung© flat-screen HD TV, the Asus© desktop, the Pfizer© meds. There was also the beige leather recliner where I always found him sitting on—nay, resting on, at a 60 degree angle, since his deformed spine could no longer support his body weight when sitting up. It was his relaxed posture, and it is how I most remember him: slouched on his recliner, staring at a flat-screen TV.
There is no way my brother could have collected so many things without money—and quite a lot of it. When my brother was still in middle school, in the late ‘90s, my parents sued Lutheran Medical Hospital for an excruciating misdiagnosis (they said meningitis) that prevented him from receiving the proper treatment for his later-diagnosed histiocytosis.
Years later, when he turned 18, he finally had access to what was rightfully his due: a quarter million dollars. One can imagine what it must be like to be teenager with an immediate access to so much cash. A quantity most people on this planet will never possess, most definitely not at once.
And for a kid from a working-class immigrant family, this was nothing less than hitting the lotto. With the money came a sense of power, a sense of being able to achieve the American dream that we see repeatedly in the media. At last, success through wealth.
As a teenager, this money was the conduit to a dream world he long harbored, after years of let-downs and humiliations.
By the age of 18 he had overcome the brutality of chemotherapy, forced home-schooling, and years of standing at the sidelines while his peers played basketball, ran a mile, participated in Phys Ed. Although I was too consumed with my own issues at the time to see it, I later developed a clear picture of what he used his money for: wooing a girlfriend with presents, buying a hardly-used car, buying an almost-limitless number of video games (one of his favorite hobbies).
Perhaps his wisest investment was helping with the down-payment of the house in which my family currently lives in. Back then, I was a passenger in a car my brother and parents were driving. Their vision of the American dream. A little house with an iron fence and a backyard. In some liminal urbanscape between the inner-city and the suburbs. A house that was blocks from the subway, a 45-minute ride from downtown Manhattan.
And so it was: with my brother’s help, using the endowment he received from medical malpractice, we were able to “escape” a working-class immigrant neighborhood in Brooklyn and become homeowners in a mixed-income neighborhood in far-out section of Queens. In hindsight, there are some things that I think we all failed to see. We were so caught up in the allure of this experience—this sense of accomplishment, this sense of moving forward—that we failed to anticipate the impermanence of our materially-based happiness. After the paint had dried, the furniture moved in, the marble counters installed, we found to our chagrin that the house required more fixing than we anticipated: leaking pipes, an old boiler, an impossibly difficult basement. That year, my brother’s car was hijacked twice for its prized parts. And the neighborhood we were living in had experienced extensive white flight and depressing property values, creating a still-ongoing tension between the remaining, settled whites (mostly Italian, many living in the more decorated houses in the southern portion of the neighborhood) and the recent arrivals (immigrant families hailing from countries like Guyana, India, Puerto Rico, and Peru). In this leap “forward” we also moved so far away from our respective schools, workplaces, and old friends that we were spending countless hours simply commuting.
My brother’s condition also worsened over time. The pain from his deformed spine was finally forcing him to quit school, and he finally agreed to a spinal fusion surgery—a surgery I later learned has inconclusive signs of success, with many patients experiencing complications , needing re-operation, falling into permanent disability.1, 2, 3 None of us knew this. We just held hope. The surgery was done in 2007, but it was followed by ruthless procession of additional surgeries, hospitalizations, and treatments.
I was absent for much of this: I was studying away in Rhode Island, where I could conveniently ignore the problems that festered at home. I was too absorbed by own unhappiness to really take on anyone else’s.
While I tried to overcome my psychic pain by consuming myself in my studies, part-time jobs and volunteer gigs, hoping to overcome the pain of isolation through activism, my brother consumed himself in the realms of fantasy: video games, movies, TV shows.
While I tried to run head-first into my reality, trying (if vainly) to change it, my brother tried to avoid it at all costs through digital displays of worlds where indigestible problems were nonexistent.
Worlds that satirized family problems (think of animated shows like The Simpsons and Family Guy), focused on ones that could be turned comedic (movies with plots about chasing “the girl” or dealing with some pesky sibling), or were too unrealistic to touch one to the core (think zombies, warriors, gods, heroes and aliens in our newest supply of sci-fi movies and video games). After learning about the countless efforts my brother made to improve his health, to survive in a world that seemed isolated, cruel, and unjust,
I can’t blame him for using his available resources—his money—to purchase endless distractions and escape routes. But his life in these last years offers an invaluable lesson about the role of material goods in our lives. Even at their best, they only brought him a brief sort of happiness, a brief escape from the present, a turning away from social realities. Although it is oft-noted cliché, something we often nod our heads to before we proceed to worry about our financial problems, relationships, and work, the material objects in our lives do not confer happiness.
From a Buddhist perspective, it is our mind’s interaction with the world that can make us happy, or make us suffer—but the objects in and of themselves do nothing.
When my brother died the objects remained. Hard and lifeless, they were nevertheless reminders of a life long lived.
And they only possessed a reality through others’ perceptions. Sick of the materialism of an affluent society such as ours, one that operates on a deliberate oppression and displacement of the world’s poor, I was more than eager to give it all away, either through donations or ecologically-friendly removal.
My younger brother coveted the Xbox 360, Playstation 3, and large stacks of DVDs. My mother insisted on going through the objects I tossed into thrash bags to reclaim their supposed worthiness and relevance, only later to realize that there were too many things to reclaim.
It would have been pointless to keep so many things that would hardly ever be used again. A few days after that, when I was finishing up what seemed to be an interminable project of cleaning out the basement, that my mother finally conceded—with a sigh of impenetrable grief—that my brother had wasted so much of his money on material vanities. It’s like he was trying to fill the emptiness in his heart, my mother said in her soft Spanish. Her chilling words have never left me, for they signified the coldest truth I have ever heard. The resigned despair in her voice was almost unbearable—much worse than the months of wailing that preceded and followed his death. At week’s end, several large garbage bags littered the sidewalk in front of our house.
For me, this was all a new form of social awakening. I had become “socially conscious” and “politicized” before.
During my last year of high school, I had been agitated by my work with an organization of queer youth of color, and I became excited about the prospect of future activism. Midway through college, I was agitated again—except this time I was filled with anger. I was filled with animosity against the rich, white kids I was surrounded by in school, against decadent late-night indulgences and convenient ignorance of university staff, against the rhetoric of leftist radicalism that never left the walls of the ivory tower.
During this time, I was also diagnosed with multiple sclerosis—what I felt to be a final insult after years of feeling isolated and excluded from dominant society. All throughout these experiences, I felt like an activist, even when I least wanted to be. It had become an integral part of my identity. It was all about how I saw the world around me.
But my brother’s death brought about a new kind of awakening, one that was tinged with a gray sadness and a sense of death-is-imminent urgency. That my health started to deteriorate as my brother was dying was more than just a wake-up call—it was an emergency drill, a realization that I needed to see what my brother finally saw. Yes, there is sadness all around us.
But there is also greatness all around us. Our lives can be ephemeral and tragic, but also long and immensely gratifying. These may seem like platitudes, but I think there is something quite profound in these polarities.
One lesson that I’ve learned the hard way: if we continue to zoom through life with our minds locked onto the future, or dwelling grudgingly on the past, we’ll fail to see the beauty of things in the present. It all relies on our perceptions.
Trying to reconcile my leftist political background with my new-found appreciation of Buddhist philosophy, I’ve come to realize that it is all a matter of perceptions. Our mind interacting with the world. We react based on what we see—or at least, what we think we see. North American conservatives may see a destruction of traditional ways of living that they see as superior as spelling doom.
Liberals may see a diverse multiculturalism and the expansion of voting rights as signs of progress. An affluent person, blindly bound to his wealth, will likely see an increased percentage in taxes as unjust. And so it goes on and on.
Our perceptions of our social reality shape how we respond to the world, to one another, how we treat the beggar on the street, the European tourist asking for directions, the activist shouting against war. It is always a worthwhile question to ask ourselves why we hold the beliefs we do, whether we see the world as hopeless or full of possibilities.
Cleaning out my brother’s closet—over a full year later—made me think deeply about what I was really seeing. The anti-capitalist in me saw a hoard of brand-name clothing, digital hardware, and corporate logos that made me feel both angry and empty. It was the same unsettling feeling I’ve experienced many times before, a feeling of fighting a war that cannot be won.
Of being hurled down by the gods after reaching the mountaintop. As my pain medication kicked in, however, a subdued, neglected child surfaced. He saw these same objects with fascination—as if each told a fairy tale of dreams and desires. Tales of unresolved wishes.
I realized just how discerning my mother was in seeing through my brother’s youthful “vanities.” As I thumbed through my brother’s old but hardly-used jean jackets (which I assume he bought when he was a teenager and quite loaded), I started to wonder what he imagined when he purchased them.
Although we grew up in the same household, the same working-class and poor neighborhood (Sunset Park, Brooklyn), my brother and I grew up with different tastes.
I went through different phases in my adolescence and young adulthood (from penniless Goth to preppy gay to I-don’t-give-a-flying-fuck to whatever-I-feel-like), each phase reflective of how I understood the world and where I stood in it.
My brother, on the other hand, went to schools near our neighborhood and dressed in ways that were popular in the late 90s and early 2000s: a hip hop/urban fashion that consisted (for the male-identified) of heavy jean jackets, baseballs caps, bandanas, and gold chains. The image of “P. Diddy” Combs and his Sean John clothing line comes to mind as I picture the sort of images my brother was likely emulating, and which stands out in the two dozen jackets (!!!) he had purchased, along with countless shirts and baggy jeans.
Of course, one can easily attribute this spending spree to youthful naivety, peer pressure, or the like. But it seems equally, if not more, reasonable to trace the sources further upstream: to the incessant barrage of commercials, music videos, magazine ads, etc. that he and his peers watched, glazed over, and responded to. It was a coercion of marketing impacting a community: either buy the commodities that are given cultural valence in your world, or react by rejecting.
There is a story that I read recently has gotten me to think about the role of media imagery and materialism in our world. Actually, it was an account given by a Buddhist activist and linguist, Helena Norberg-Hodge, who documented the changes she saw in Ladakh—a region in northwestern India that was isolated from Western influence up until the 1970s4. As the account goes, the Ladakhis lived, for hundreds of years, as Buddhist farmers. As Buddhist monk Jack Kornfiel relates: “They lived simply, with rainfall enough to grow their crops and time to tend to their temples and follow the sacred rhythm of their year.”5 In the early years of the cultural invasion, they told visiting Westerners about how rich their lives were, how their basic needs were always met. Over the course of twenty years, however, Norberg-Hodge noticed startling changes. The capital of Leh transformed from a rural community of 5,000 inhabitants to a congested, urban sprawl. And after years of exposure to television, music, and fashion from India and the U.S., Ladakhis started to complain about how poor they were. As Kornfield tells it, “many Ladakhis have left their villages to live in crowded, impoverished quarters in the city, seeking the happiness promised by the modern world. There are blessings in modernization, and we can understand the villagers’ desire for running water and electric lights. But we can also recognize the costs of materialism when desire becomes out of balance.”
Desire-out-of-balance was what I saw in those jackets my brother bought. At one end, what I saw was a dream unfulfilled: a desire to look strong, healthy, popular, powerful. Whether I wanted to indulge in them or not, the images of the Sean John ads flooded my mind, showcasing a world of affluence—and black affluence at that.
Who can blame a young man from wanting to indulge such a dream? At the other end, I saw something extremely perverse and unjust: clothing stitched and hemmed by Third World women at paltry wages and substandard working conditions, then marketed to working-class youth of color in the global North and sold at substantially higher prices.
My head hurts trying to keep track of the whirlpool of insanity our modern capitalist world has wrought: the commodification, the marketing, the buying of our media, our education, our government. We don’t see all this in our everyday lives; instead, what we see are people leaving their homes, driving their cars, entering their workplace. And in the course of any given day we pass by countless ads meant to sell us something—on the subway, at the bus station, on our favorite Internet sites.
Ads intended to sprout a desire for things we don’t need. Before we realize the extent of this sensory deluge, these commodities have entered our fantasies and desires exactly as corporate headmasters wanted. And so we continue to struggle—sacrificing our livelihood at times—for those items that will bring us the lifestyle we covet. A house. A car. A flatscreen TV. Those incredible jean jackets P Diddy wears.
We put our bodies through incredible stress to achieve these things, our minds latched onto the rewards. And when the rewards finally come, we feel ecstatic. One would say happy. Until the novelty wears away and we’re left wanting more.
Such was the cycle that I saw in that heap of things my brother had bought over the years. It was as if there was something clawing inside him, a craving that was augmented by darkness. Like an addiction. Like filling an emptiness (as my mother put it) that would never go away. And isn’t this precisely what capitalism thrives on? The incessant, insatiable desire for more? (More capital, more consumption, more land, more war, more, more, more…) A system designed on quick fixes, on short-lasting highs that we then need to keep feeding to prevent a convulsion of our crack-addicted bodies.
Yet, as much as instant gratification is an assumed part of our “American culture,” it is not the commodities themselves that trouble me (and, as it is, many of the commodities are things we absolutely need for our survival). For me, the more insidious aspects of our capitalist world have nothing to do with the things themselves. It is about how capitalism digs deep into our hearts and minds, shaping our mentality about the people around us, the houses and streets, the earth and the sky.
It is about how we come to think of everything—from a vacation trip to a seashore spot, to the food we eat and the clothes we wear—as quantifiable entities. As things with a price. From there we see a system that runs off dog-eat-dog competition and notions of ‘success’ predicated on wealth and power. We then feel as if we’ve failed when we don’t achieve the sort of ‘success’ that is flaunted at us in television shows and movies: a high-paying job, a nice house and car, a spouse and children.
We live out our lives always in the future, our minds always several steps ahead. And we suffer from anguish, stress, disappointment, loneliness. And a vicious cycle begins: drowning ourselves in work, abusing drugs and alcohol, surrounding ourselves with acquaintances, entering into superficial relationships that ultimately disappoint us…
To be clear, none of this is a denunciation against work, making friends, or building relationships. In fact, these are the activities that have the potential to suffuse our lives with meaning—even contributing to a long-lasting happiness.
But there’s a significant difference between fostering genuine relationships (either with people or our work) and the run-amok bigger-is-better attitude where we try to force our lives to fit some pre-compartmentalized box we were sold on TV.
Although my trip along the dharmic road is in its infancy, I’ve already come to sense Buddhism’s deeper appreciation for self-destroying impulses. Dukkha, an ancient Pali word, is often translated as “suffering” and “stress.”
And the dukkha we experience in the chasing of dream-lives, like those we see on television, has a distinct classification in Buddhist tradition: the dukkha of conditioned states (samkhara-dukkha), a dissatisfaction based on things never measuring up to our expectations. I like to think that my brother, in his wisdom, latched onto to this concept in his final days.
Speaking like an old guru viewing children at play, he commented on the hilarious vanities of the rich he saw on television.
He also came to humbly accept his own old vanities. Certainly, the suffering he experienced from bleeding to death (dukkha of ordinary suffering) was unavoidable. But he understood, in hindsight, how much of his earlier suffering was based on expectations of a life he desired.
A desired life built on expectations mediated by his surroundings. A desired life that always made his actual one seem inferior, festering holes of loneliness and disappointment.
As I’ve noted earlier, perception is key. We saw an extreme case of capitalism-mediated perceptions in the case of Ladakh. And it goes to show that if we are able to see what is good in this world, see what is good in all of us, we can avoid feeling as if our lives are somehow deficient.
In short, we can avoid the suffering from our unhealthy desires. Likewise, although it is a moral imperative to take notice of the evils of our modern world—the destruction of the planet, endless wars, the violence against the poor—we should also take notice of our vast potential for good.
Our ability to laugh at our follies. Give a lending hand to victims of a climate disaster. Resist neoliberal alienation by coming together, sharing our resources, dispensing with the obsession of personal ownership. In emphasizing the importance of the mind in constructing our worldviews, Buddhist philosophy shows us that we can have agency in our lives. We can choose to become passive recipients to corporate conditioning, or we can choose to find those things that will bring us genuine happiness. We can find goodness in our lives in the moment. We can find goodness in simplicity.
Organizing my brother’s closet this past week, I came to realize that I had undergone an incredible change over the past year. It’s still unclear what the legacy of his life will be, but I already have a lot to be thankful for.
To say I have a new-found appreciation for life is an understatement. I breathe in a new air, see a new sky. Walk on a new earth, in a new body with new feet. Even my relationship to objects has changed. Rather than a means to an end, I try to experience them as they are. As objects.
So now, while I try to figure out what to do with those jackets, and the many other things that stayed behind, I think back to the time my brother and I spent together. To how we enjoyed each other’s company while watching a few of his movies. Or the worlds of video game fantasy he showed me on his flatscreen. Yes, we were using material things. But in those moments, it wasn’t the material objects in themselves that brought us joy. Nor were they being used as means of escape or forms of distraction.
This time, they were being used wisely, moderated by a mindfulness of life’s impermanence. A mindfulness that this moment won’t last forever. So it was best to enjoy it.
1) Deyo et al. 2004. “Spinal-Fusion Surgery—The Case for Restraint.” New England Journal of Medicine 350:722-726.
2) Smith, J.C. 2011. “Back Surgery: Too Many, Too Costly, Too Ineffective.” Dynamic Chiropractor Vol. 29, Iss. 8.
3) Nguyen et al. 2011. “Long-term outcomes of lumbar fusion among workers’ compensation subjects: a historical cohort study.” Spine 36(4): 320-31.
4) Unfortunately, given that this is an account by a “Westerner,” I have to leave discussion of the Euro-American imperial gaze for some other time.
5) From Jack Kornfield’s essay, “The Transformation of Desire into Abundance,” as found in In the Face of Fear: Buddhist Wisdom for Challenging Times (2009).
Decolonize Chris! 