The Residues of Life

A journey to the depths of Big Yellow Self Storage

Moving home is always stressful. But in its own distinct, chaotic way, it is also a reflective process. It forces us to think about our possessions in a way we rarely do. For the most part, the things we own live in the background of our lives, arranged on shelves, packed away in drawers and cupboards, quietly structuring our existence like an improvised skeleton. Moving disrupts this fundamental order. We remove our belongings from their rightful places and sift through them, examine them, ask whether we really need them. We confront objects that have been resting out of sight for years, objects that transport us back to earlier chapters of our lives. We may realise that we are no longer the same person who once felt a connection with this forgotten thing. Whose terrible CDs are these? How did these ridiculous clothes end up at the back of my cupboard? This can be a difficult realisation, but it can also bring a kind of relief — especially if, like me, you carry from one apartment to the next an extensive residue of items that you know, deep down, you will never use again, but which you can’t bring yourself to part with.

Over the last 70 years, consumer products have become steadily cheaper and more plentiful, allowing us to externalise our needs, interests and desires into a cornucopia of possessions. At the same time, living space has become more scarce and expensive. So the material substance of our identities are increasingly overflowing their domestic containers, forcing us to hive-off superfluous parts of ourselves, box them up and store them away to be reckoned with later. At some point this material excess no longer fits under our bed. We have to involve ourselves with other settings – with garages, parents’ attics and rented storage units – where our belongings are unceremoniously reduced to a kind of stock, their emotional significance suddenly less relevant than their physical dimensions and weight.

And so it was that, in the course of helping someone move home, I recently found myself in a Big Yellow Self Storage facility. (Self-storage is a growing business in the UK especially, as population density drives down the size of apartments). It was one of those cavernous structures of lightweight steel that gather around the edge of every town, where the functional and transactional realities of modern life show themselves without trying to impress you or even to compete for your attention. It could have been a wholesaler, a warehouse, or a supplier of trade materials, except that its contents were not industrial products but personal possessions, miscellaneous details cropped from the lives of hundreds of people. The building was three floors high, each floor consisting of row upon row of identical metal boxes with bright yellow doors. Each unit was identified by a combination of numbers and letters, and could be located on a floor plan next to the elevators. Still, it was easy to get lost in those winding corridors, which reminded me of topiary mazes in the gardens of old country estates, or perhaps Borges’ library of Babel. The entire space was brightly illuminated like a supermarket or hospital ward, and though no one was there, quiet music was playing from speakers somewhere. When I climbed a ladder to access one of the lockers, I could look down into the units on the other side of the corridor, which were covered only by wire netting. I saw pieces of furniture, bin bags full of clothes, and what appeared to be the unsold inventory of a failed business.

It’s depressing to imagine our lives as the anonymous contents of a storage locker, but this institution has its reassuring side as well. As the philosopher Georg Simmel observed, complex societies give us autonomy but also alienate us from one another. The more scope we have for personal tastes and inclinations, the more varied our lifestyles and cultural forms, the harder it is to recognise in one another the same culture we ourselves belong to. Mundane, impersonal services like self-storage, which are not targeted at anyone in particular, have a way of breaking down these barriers. There are similarities in the kinds of meaning and value we find in our possessions, even if the objects themselves are very different. Someone else’s stuff may look like rubbish to you, but they have brought it to this suburban hangar for safekeeping just as you have; and in any case, the differences are no longer so obvious once everything has been crammed into those boxes.

Admittedly, Big Yellow Self Storage is not the most inspiring symbol of modern culture. But I find it positively charming in comparison to another kind of storage facility that is currently cropping up everywhere. Data centers, too, are vast metal sheds stuffed with the memories, affairs and unfinished projects of countless individuals. Here, on the servers of tech companies and cloud computing firms, are our photographs, emails, search histories and social media accounts, held in another kind of standardised container, binary code. This is the reality behind virtual life: we are all living out of rented storage units. The physical world may be in many ways more messy and inconvenient, but at least it can provide us with a home.