Just today I came across the meaning behind the term “white elephant”. You can read the Wikipedia article yourself, but apparently some South Asian king gifted rare albino elephants to those who displeased him. Traditionally, to own a white elephant was seen as a sign of great success and prosperity, and to be gifted a white elephant was a great honor. But white elephants were tremendously expensive to maintain and tended to result in the opposite of prosperity.
Pretty clever of that king, really. I’m no fan of political games like that, but to give something associated with prosperity that has the opposite effect is pretty ingenious. Yet we all live with white elephants.
Ever since I started this blog, I’ve been amazed at how I and others hold onto things we hate. We all have that something in our lives that we really want to chuck in the dumpster, but we simply can’t. Perhaps it’s worth something but the process to sell it is involved. Perhaps, like those white elephants long ago, we were given something that we simply don’t feel we can get rid of, fearing to disrespect or anger the giver. Perhaps the item has some deep semblance of usefulness that we are convinced will come in handy in the future. Or perhaps it is something we keep telling ourselves that we want to use, while we secretly do not.
I’m of the opinion that most possessions are white elephants. I’ve wanted to articulate this more in a separate post, but will have to settle for a watered-down version. There are very few things I use on a daily basis, and the handful of seasonal objects I use are fairly straightforward. Much of what I own (though certainly less than in the past), is something I feel obliged to hold onto for various reasons, but actually has nothing to do with my daily bread, or my dreams for the future, for that matter.
There are more obvious white elephants of course – those things that sit around and cost you money without ever being used. This is why I’m not a big fan of extra things with engines. Some people manage to live a life with multiple cars, off road vehicles, boats, and other motor sports, and it’s absolutely beyond me how you could enjoy maintaining so much. The expense is enormous, and as soon as you have those toys, you need even bigger toys to transport them! Registration, fees, maintenance. Some people certainly get use out of those, but as people get older you see them use these toys less and less. Some people live their whole lives going from one toy to the next.
But engines aren’t the only things that do this. Projects do this as well. Several months ago, I realized that I had been working on a Lego “ice base” project for over 10 years! Whenever I bought parts, it was always a subconscious action to try to find a few parts to add to the project. But when I recently thought this over, I realized something amazing: I had no desire to complete that project! I kept telling myself it would be cool, and perhaps it would have been – but I had run out of architectural ideas long ago, and it had become a subtle burden in my life, always hanging over me. I donated the parts, immediately stopped any consideration for the project, and have never looked back. The burden of that project left me. Sometimes our own projects are the very worst of the things we gift ourselves!
Right now, there are only two white elephants in my life that I’m aware of: my shop press, and my PS3. The shop press is super heavy and takes up a lot of space, but it could still be instrumental in changing my wheel bearings or my passenger side axle, as the carrier bearing is widely known to rust-weld itself onto the axle shaft. But neither of these need to be changed right now, as far as I’m aware, and I have long despised that shop press. As for the PS3, I find that video games can be a huge distraction for me, and there is very little I will ever play on the PS3 again, but I keep it “just in case”. Fortunately, neither of these is continuing to cost me any money.
I’ve even started to question my small collection of old mining trade catalogs, which I’ve discussed on this blog. They are cool, in a sense, but they are also expensive and take up a lot of space. The biggest problem is that I don’t believe I could bring myself to give them away without first scanning them and entering them in the public domain, and now that burden is the condition upon which my ability to be free of them rests! There is a certain pleasure to collecting, it’s true, and I won’t say there is anything wrong with that pleasure. But when I weigh this against the freedom from clutter, I find myself uncertain where the value truly resides: I have passed up adding several of those books to my collection, and I am subtly led to believe this is for the better.
One last example I’d like to share is my old custom computer. I kept it for the longest time because it just looked so awesome to me. But I built it to be a glorified Linux box, only to discover after a few years that I was not much of a “Linux guy”. But the parts were high quality! The case was so shiny! But no matter what I considered doing with it, every option involved spending more money to either improve it or make it more useful, all contrary to the very solid evidence that I truly had no use for it, and in fact never used it. I wiped the hard drive and donated the whole thing, and have never looked back. Funny thinking about that while writing this post – the case was white!
What are the white elephants in your life?