Are we still hunter 'gatherers'?

I recently recently rented a new studio space to sit quietly and research, to paint, but mostly to hold the huge amount of stuff I have gathered in just a few years. Somehow I have never had enough space, although have been blessed with more than decent homes. And it’s not just me, my husband has not given up on a single mobile handset, or his identity cards or papers and if possible he wouldn't throw a single shroud of cloth. We simply can't stop accumulating stuff. Our phone memories are always full; we buy extra space on clouds. What is this obsession of gathering that we have?

When I shifted out from my hostel I had so many books that had to cargo it back home, it was almost a century of kilograms! I was young, I presumed, didn't know better and kept buying stuff without choosing. Again when I shifted to my husband’s place post marriage, I had boxes and boxes of stuff, even when I gave up equal boxes away. It was crazy! But it was crazier when I started putting up by goods in cupboards in the new home, there simply wasn’t enough space for my things, a family had possessed that house for three decades and they had accumulated manifolds. My mother in law and grandmother in law had stuff from their median days and then had bought clothes and utensils and objects of no use and had never ever thrown away a thing. It’s been over five years and I am still getting rid of objects that mean nothing more than things occupying three dimensional space, many didn’t even possess emotions any more.

Why! Why did they buy so much? Or hold on to gifts they had no clue about? What was the deep rooted insanity in theirs, rather our minds that led us to hold on to so much? Every day as I sat quietly sipping my coffee in the overstuffed room on a recliner which obstructs more than eases, I wondered about these spaces that we call homes but use them as warehouses to shelter our goods. What was this instinct that we all had since generations?

And then I read a fascinating theory some couple of years back in Yual Noah Harari's Sapiens, and was surprisingly reminded of it recently in the book 'Gatimani' by D.G. Godse. Two people writing in different times, different contexts and very similar insight. And suddenly I sparked! However evolved we think we are with our ‘siris’ and ‘alexas’ we are those primal beasts who fought, wriggled and travelled for our survival. We are still on our insides the hunter gatherers striving to mark our existence in space outside us, in memories and objects.

The theory is about how we still hold the reminisces of our ancient past, of the thousands and thousands of years when we were lowest in the food chain. We had to gather food for times when nature wasn’t kind. Times when we had to hold on to food left over from the hunt of wild animals. Basically times when we had to gather eatables simple to be alive. We have not overcome it, not at all. This instinct of gathering is as instinctive as our need to live long. We gather with the same intensity that we find remedies for death threatening diseases, in our mind it is but fucking surviving! We are no better than our just above the ape ancestors. The jokes about still being monkeys come to mind and in my mind I begin jumping from one potent branch to another.

Guys, next time you click on free cloud spaces, or boxes that could hold more, larger refrigerators, cars with more good space, remember- you are more than your ape-self. Apes would seem more evolved in fact. Seems like we need to read evolution in a whole new light, and meanwhile, keep our luggage light too!