Self Storage

A friend recently described to me a poster he had seen for a self storage business in NYC. The tag line was, “Store your obsession here.” This poster may have been part of a series with different words filling in the noun/blank, another one being, “Store your childhood here.” (I haven’t seen these adverts myself so strictly speaking this is hearsay; no Pulitzer prizes on the way.)
In his early popularizing book on psychoanalysis, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Freud categorized a number of what are now called in English, slips, or faulty actions (in German Fehlleistung, or faulty function, which is broader and better actually).
There are various kinds of faulty acts, including forgetting things, slips of the tongue, misreadings, slips of the pen, and dropping, breaking, and losing things. Common to these errors is that some personal feeling or motive is revealed in the error that the person was not immediately aware of, but which becomes clear through the slip.
Take an example of a slip of the pen from Freud’s book: A newspaper was preparing a spirited defense of its publishers, who had been accused of corruption. In the proof stage, the printer caught an error in the editorial:
“[The draft says] ‘Our readers will bear witness to that fact that we have always acted in the most self-seeking manner for the good of the community.’ [Freud comments] It is obvious that it should have read: ‘in the most unself-seeking manner’. But the true thoughts broke through the emotional statement with elemental force.”
It seems that the author of this editorial piece may have actually shared the accuser’s view of their employer as corrupt and given an “unintended display of candour” as Freud puts it, which only careful proof reading was able to catch.
Let us imagine that similar errors may still occur in writing today. What if we were to speculate, just for fun, that the writers of the adverts described above had some thoughts about their self storage company clients which leaked through into the advertisements in a similar display of candor? In particular, what if we were to take the term obsession, as used in the tag line, “Store your obsession here,” seriously.
The word obsession can be used in a range of ways that one might call lighter to heavier. At the lighter end, the word means something like an intense hobby — people may be ‘obsessive’ Yankees fans or ‘obsessed’ with their favorite singer. At the heavier end, people who suffer from obsessive thoughts and compulsions to put those thoughts into action can be truly crippled by the paralyzing effects of their demanding routines and restrictions. Someone may go from being ‘obsessed’ with exercise to becoming seriously injured from over training. People may become obsessed with celebrities to the point of stalking them, or obsessed with video games to the point of ceasing to function in the rest of their lives. The heavier end of obsessions and the many kinds of addiction have a lot of overlap.
One well-known obsessive-compulsive symptom is hoarding: collecting and being unable to throw things away. Now again, there is a range. Some people have a closet full of clothes that they rarely wear but cannot bear to part with, but besides costing them some money this can remain a manageable quirk. Then there are people who clearly have much deeper problems who turn their apartments into labyrinths of piled high books and papers and junk, with barely space to squeeze through the door (this is not hearsay or ‘reality’ television, I’ve seen it). Some people find a temporary solution to having collected too much stuff that they cannot throw away by putting some of it into self storage. In doing so, they are perpetuating, and being aiding in perpetuating, an unfortunate hoarding problem.
Now doubtless there are times when a self storage unit can be used by healthy adults who are moving homes, for example, or have some other need to keep things that are important to them for which they have no space at home. However, these tend to be brief periods. When people end up with a permanent storage unit, there is often an element of hoarding behavior in play. I frequently work with people who have storage units and who tell me that they still have them not because they really want to have them, but because they cannot bear to get rid of the contents, or even go through what they have. Letting go of things can be difficult for many people, sometimes because they provide some sense of security in a world that feels unsafe, and because things can come to represent people, and feelings, and other entities which are hard to relinquish. But the solution is not paying a lot of money to keep those things in an air-conditioned box; it is learning how to let go of things that you no longer need, or never really needed.
Though it is possible to overdo the analogy, I think that there is a way in which the enormous expansion of self storage businesses is like the operation of the big tobacco companies. Both enable what is for many a kind of addiction and make good profits from doing so. One industry commentator (sparefoot.com) estimates that self storage is a more than 30 billion dollar annual business in the US alone and is projected to keep growing at more than 3 percent per year. I would not buy shares in the self storage industry for the same reason that I would not invest in big tobacco: because I think they both facilitate harmful addictions. Vulnerable humans are being fooled by self storage companies into thinking that it’s just part of reality to spend hundreds of dollars every month to rent a space in which to store things they don’t need. My guess is that, deep down, even these companies’ ad agencies know what’s really going on.
