Free From

April 20, 2025

“You should really take Nana’s dining room table.  It was the same table from when she was a child, somebody needs to take it, and you’re still eating on top of that gawd-awful patio furniture.”  

I used to think that when someone offered me something for free, no matter what their intentions were, it was considered poor etiquette to ask them, “Does it work?”  I don’t know, is it fair to ask if free clothes reeking of someone else’s life odor “work”?  Does the free trial membership at our local gym “work?” (not as much as they wish it would)  Does it make any sense to question whether or not a giant, 12-person dining room table we’ve just inherited from our grandmother actually “works” in our 750 sq. ft. apartment?

Life is Like a Box of Junk

The smelly clothes and the gargantuan table do actually function as they were naturally intended, just not necessarily for us.  Yet, we often feel obliged or even eager to accept them and find a way to fit them into our physical domain.  If it’s free, then what is the harm, right? I would posit that if it’s free, then what makes us think that it will be worth anything to us for purposes other than just having it?  

There’s no doubt that a lot of things today are expensive and that prices will continue to rise, so it makes sense that we cut financial corners wherever we can. But how often do we click on the “Free Offer Here!” block when we come across an advertising scam online?  Hopefully never.  Most of us aren’t that desperate because we don’t want to get hacked or we know it’s just a waste of our time.  

Sometimes the non-digital freebies do actually delay their own land-fill status by means of preservation and they provide a lot of people with access to useful or otherwise costly items that may improve their lives.  Yet, while many of us hold some level of moral obligation to our planet, unless we’re purposely devoting planned and scheduled chunks of our time to achieve this work, it’s a crap shoot.  It’s Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates, “you never know what you’re gonna get”.  And there most certainly will be a lot of it if we’re not careful.

I’m all for needs-based, sustainable practices such as thrift-shopping, re-using or hand-me-downs, but many of us generally feel like if we don’t take something that has been offered to us at a severely reduced charge, then we are missing out.  We’re all suckers for the SALE, but we should reconsider the approach of,  “How could I not take advantage of this deal?!” and instead ask, “What would I do with my life if I didn’t have this thing in my possession?”.  

In most cases we would just probably keep on living, unless it was something vital, like a respirator or food, if we were starving.  We also just might reconsider what we actually need versus “where am I going to put this?”.  But when the sale is a giveaway?  Heck, we can absorb material objects into our orbit like nobody’s business, because we have the space for it.  Or we’ll make room(s) for it.

The Old Ninja

A while ago, our Vitamix blender finally tapped out and upon hearing this at one of our family gatherings, one of my close, elderly relatives jumped in, “Oh! You should take my old Ninja blender!” (snob alert: it does not compare to the Vitamix).  It turns out that she had just bought a new blender and her old one isn’t really that old and we should really, no really (she was insistent) take it.

At the time we did not survey the urgency with which she was pitching this thing, nor were we keen to the fact that her blender was a piece of shit, having not actually tried it.  What, was I supposed to ask her if I could take it for a test drive? (the answer seems like a ‘yes’, but in hindsight that would have been embarrassing for everyone involved). So we took it home. 

It didn’t blend well: its blades were duller than a rubber spatula and it leaked out profusely from the “cosmetic” cracks and temperamental flap on the lid’s spout every time we tried to make a smoothie or savory sauce, putting our backsplash to good use.  So every time we blended I’d have the kids help me by pressing kitchen towels over the various gaping wounds of this defunct contraption, while the rings and other fixed components would often just pop off while drying or cleaning it.  

Only then did it become clear to me that I was probably the e-waste drop off point for this person who most likely believed she was doing us a solid.   At the end of the day, the new Vitamix would be about $10 over retail cost, after deciding to e-recycle the “free” old, new Ninja blender base in the process.  

When we analyze the time and energy it would take to drop unwanted items off at the Goodwill or even the amount of money it will cost us to have that TV or electrical appliance we never asked for (but, nevertheless accepted) properly disposed of, we realize that it’s much easier to just hold onto it.  Plus, we don’t want to disrespect or offend any gifters who might ask the next time they see us, how that new-to-you piece of crap is “working out?”  

It doesn’t matter whether this junk has been stuffed away into the myriad of crevices and corners of closets in our abode or if we’ve already managed to get rid of it, because most of us say something like, “Oh, it’s great!  Yep, mmhm”.  

This is actually a more truthful statement if we’ve already ditched that item, for it is great: we don’t have to deal with it anymore!  They might scoff at us when their charitable deed is negated 

but  sometimes it’s less awkward and downright healthier to just simply say “No, thank you” when it is offered to us in the first place.  Afterall, we’re not any more responsible for their feelings as we are for the stuff that they don’t want anymore.

Hoard-a-Culture

Not everyone is a hoarder, but there is now so much stuff being manufactured in order to occupy our spaces, that the idea of value has become absurdly ambiguous.  On top of that, we have pushed the very definition of the word “free” further away from the concept of acting of our own volition and more toward an epitomization of the word “cheap”.  This has inverted the entire meaning of the first definition, for instead of freedom, we find attachment.

There’s a reason salespeople are trained to use terms such as, “cost effective” or “inexpensive” when pitching products to their customers: it’s because cheap is just cheap.  But by now we can forget the idea of secondhand, for collectively we’re growing so many hands that they’re evolving into more and more appendages so we can grab onto more and more stuff; and often for no good reason other than the fact that it is cheap and we can have it in our possession, snap, like that.  In this case, “Possession” starts to sound like being under the control of an evil spirit; or the name of a free cologne that gets sprayed in our face while perusing a department store. 

I’m as interested in being the recipient and subsequent purchaser of some crappy cologne as I am being the middle-man in the re-imagining of people’s unwanted stuff.  And it’s not just material things which we may consider avoiding: The line for this free parking lot could most certainly make us late for the event; free, unsolicited advice from a boozed up uncle is absolutely going to cost us our time and usually a certain amount of our patience; and a free vacation with our in-laws might just cost us our patience and points with our spouse.

Most of us are aware of the fine print associated with freebies, so it’s important for us to bring this to the surface and exercise a little skepticism in an effort to assess whether or not we are willing to agree to the terms and conditions that apply.  Timeshares and even pyramid schemes have made billions of dollars off of unsuspecting folks who were just trying to capitalize on what they thought was a good deal.  

By refusing to accept anything just because it’s free, we may experience an internal power shift that allows us to create more space in our lives for the things that are significant.  This, however, is only the first part of the process, for in order to gain control over the power of stuff, particularly the cheap and the free, we must also be willing to let go of so many things that we have already hastily accepted in the past.  

If we find ourselves in the position of decluttering, then woohoo!  But let us do so with purpose, knowing that the thing we have works just fine, and we now have more than one of them and somebody else might benefit from this thing as much as we have.  

We must not assume that because somebody needs to replace a physical item, they are younger, dumber or poorer than we are and therefore won’t mind the hassle of cleaning up a daily smoothie massacre or a piece of furniture that functions better as a blockade than a surface for dining.  We can all do better in the practices of intentional giving and receiving, it simply requires that we take a deep breath and understand how attachments work…and not the kind that come with an old Ninja.  Those don’t work either.