KH Thinks #2 Why Every House Has a Bag of Bags
In praise of Britain’s most universal cupboard secret.
KH Thinks is where I take the strange little behaviours we all do and run them through the lens of Kinetic Humanism.
Every British home is hiding the same shameful relic.
A quiet little confession stored behind a cupboard door.
The Bag of Bags.
You never decide to start one.
You never sit down and plan it.
One day you open a cupboard and discover you have built a small archive of carrier bags that could stock a corner shop.
They are folded, scrunched, looped, tied, or stuffed into one another like Russian dolls filled with environmental guilt.
And the real joke is that you hardly ever use any of them.
We tell ourselves the same comforting lies.
“I will need these.”
“For bin liners.”
“For lunches.”
“For something.”
Yet when the moment arrives, when the bin is full and your hands are full and your mind is full, you still buy a fresh forty pence bag at Tesco because remembering to bring one from home feels like emotional paperwork.
KH Thinks calls this the Inherited Scarcity Reflex.
An instinct carried forward from a time when saving everything made sense for survival.
Now it misfires in the form of domestic carrier bag hoarding.
Every Bag of Bags contains its own characters.
The premium Waitrose or John Lewis bag you feel oddly proud of.
The indestructible Co-op bag that has survived weather it should not have.
The Wilko bag that feels like a relic from a fallen civilisation.
And the suspicious bag from a shop you do not recognise and quietly do not trust.
We refuse to throw them away because it feels wasteful.
We do not use them because it feels risky to run out.
So they sit untouched, ageing quietly in the dark beside an appliance we forgot we owned.
The Bag of Bags is not storage.
It is reassurance.
A tiny shrine to “just in case.”
A soft guarantee that if life surprises us, we will at least have the correct number of carrier bags to face it.
Our habits tell stories.
Some of the funniest ones rustle gently behind closed doors.
KH Grade: B+ Behaviour
Highly stable. Mildly compulsive. Emotionally functional.
Low practical value and high psychological coherence.
KH Explanation: Why This Happens
Kinetic Humanism sees the Bag of Bags as a coherence preservation loop.
Awareness spike: “I might need this one day.”
Coherence check: “Would throwing it away feel risky.”
Regulation: fold, stash, store.
Implementation: repeat whenever a fresh bag appears.
Stabilisation: feel prepared even if nothing ever gets used.
Keeping the bags is not logical.
It is protective.
It reduces the tension of uncertainty and gives a feeling of readiness that is much larger than the object itself.
It is motion through reassurance.
A system holding itself together one carrier at a time.
Even in the smallest household absurdities, something inside us is always negotiating safety. Often by keeping bags we have not touched since 2018.
Notes
Header photo by Photo by Gianluca Gatto on Unsplash (A responsible bag. Unlike the 31 in my cupboard.)