117-2008-07-21

Caution: The following article is about people with a lot of stuff and how that’s bad for you.  This stuff is pretty good, but it ranks nearest to a rant that I have written in some time (which doesn't 'feel' very kind to me).  If you’re attached to your stuff and you really love acquiring stuff, then you should not read this essay.

Too Much Stuff
By W. Owen Thornton

The rise in self-storage lockers is a sign that people have too much stuff in their lives.  Too much stuff hangs like a millstone around your neck.  The sudden rise in self storage lockers offers proof that we’re out of balance.  When we’re out of balance, we need to work longer and harder to spend $110/month to pay for a storage locker.  Perhaps we also need to work longer and harder to fill it … or perhaps to fill it with better quality excess crap!  Working more to have more stuff, which we keep “off-site” from our houses, creates less time for us, family and adds stress and reduces our ability to practice human kindness towards one another. 

It would seem the smarter option would be to give the extra stuff away and work less.  This plan gives you more time, makes you feel more in balance and affords you the ability to think outside of yourself, which makes you a kinder, gentler person.  Now I will qualify the need for self-storage lockers.  If you need a storage locker because you’ve been compelled to downsize due to job loss or a divorce or you’ve lost your home, those are different reasons and you must do what you need to do to make life work.  Self-storage lockers are not a scourge unto themselves, they are only a warning sign when we’re living normal lives and our houses and sheds and garages are already full of too much stuff.

To live a life of human kindness we need to “be real.”  Living outside of your financial means places stress on you and puts you in a dangerous emotional place where your focus is on the wrong kinds of things.  “I have to work more to pay for all this stuff,” becomes a mantra we truly believe but the problem is we don’t stop to consider if we even need this “stuff!”  Working to procure “stuff” is a treadmill to failure.  It seems too that the more we think about work and the “stuff” it buys, the less we think about the people around us.  Putnam’s “Bowling Alone” shows we’re no longer as civically engaged in our society as we used to be, that we don’t have family dinners together, and that we want to go to university to earn a whack of cash so we can be rich … and in the process we don’t really care about making the world a better place … as long as we’re rich.

The west has created a consumer society.  It works because we continue to buy stuff … stuff beyond what we need or require.  Don’t believe me?  In a June 11, 2008 article in Maclean’s Magazine called, “Getting Stuffed: Will the U.S. real estate crisis put an end to the self-storage boom?” by Jason Kirby, the facts are in!

In recent decades U.S. houses have doubled in size to an average 2,500 square feet.  Their homes are fully 500 square feet larger than those in Canada.  In addition in the past decade self storage units in the United States has doubled.  Today it is a US$22 billion annual business representing 2.2 billion square feet of space, 85% of which is occupied.  Fully ten percent of the home owners in the United States, living in homes larger than the typical Canuck are paying $110/month to cram extra stuff into a storage locker.  Stuff, if I’m any judge of human nature we probably never go back to and get or to use.  Once it’s off the property, it’s really as good as gone anyway.  We adapt and learn to live without it … but there’s some kind of hope there that one day … we will use it again.  And to pay for all that stuff?  The average individual debt in the U.S., outside of mortgages is thousands of dollars higher than in Canada.

We need to really think about what it means when we write the size of homes have doubled in the past few decades?  In the 1950s in Canada, with larger family sizes than today, the typical bungalow ranged from 800 to 1,000 square feet.  Today, with fewer kids in the house, our homes are 2,000 square feet.  Self storage units in Canada may not be as popular as in the U.S., but in newer subdivisions with these larger homes, you rarely see a garage with one of the family vehicles parked in it.  Why?  Because it is usually chocked full of stuff that can’t fit inside the house … and that stuff is more than the lawnmower and a few bicycles.  It’s full of beer fridges, old computer monitors, pantry shelves, kid’s toys, skis, and old stereo speakers.

The Maclean’s article introduced, but didn’t talk about an important side effect of all this stuff.  It asked, “What is all this saying about our souls?”  It said it didn’t know … they didn’t want to speculate what it meant for us.  They stuck with the facts and perhaps rightly let us think about that answer for ourselves.  Interestingly enough, here’s something odd.  Noam Chomsky has written about “Manufacturing Consent,” about how media continues to propagate the myth that we need to support the status quo and keep on buying stuff to keep the rich, rich and the rest of us placated … with all that stuff we can buy.  I wouldn’t say Maclean’s ran from that idea.  I’ve seen evidence that it can and will slam aspects of our culture when they think it needs slamming!  It simply may not have wanted to open that kettle of fish.  Most articles today are 800 – 1,000 words long and the notion that we’re all playing a role in a society that demands we buy more even at our own expense is the content of books, not short articles or essays!

There’s little wonder why we’re reluctant to throw stuff out or give it away.  It may be about less than what it cost us at the time, and more about what it represents.  It represents a great deal of overtime and stress incurred while we paid off the debt to cover it.  Throwing it away seems like throwing out the time and effort required to accumulate it.  And some city governments make throwing it out totally inconvenient … an additional waste of time and energy.  What do I mean?  I mean that a computer, its monitor, some old paint from the living room, a couple of batteries, some yard waste (might as well while we’re at it eh?), our son’s old mattress and a couple of expired compact fluorescent bulbs could well mean driving all over the city for hours as each item can only be taken to a specific waste-recovery depot.

But there’s something else being said about us if we’re all becoming pack rats.  We’re afraid things are too good to last … that we won’t be able to manifest all this wealth a second time, so we’d better hold onto the stuff we have for fear it won’t come back to us should we get rid of it?  What’s that sentiment saying about us?  We’re living in fear.  Fear that things are too good to last.  We have to store it away in case of a rainy day that may never happen.  In some ways, it’s a silly thought, really.  If we manifested it the first time, we can do it again.  We have evidence that it happened and that we could do it the first time because we still have all the stuff!  Though, naturally we’re never sure we’ll have the good job to do that again. 

Our companies have definitely proven to us that they can function without us.  Either we’ve been right-sized (fired) or we’ve watched someone be fired after an amalgamation made jobs redundant.  If we’ve survived the purge(s) we still know that the office next door is empty where a friend used to sit.  That could be us at any moment!  Better buy the stuff while the getting’s good.

Or maybe all that stuff says something different about us altogether.  Maybe we’re just a greedy culture.  How did we get there?  Covetousness has a large role in this I think: keeping up with the Jonses.  I sometimes believe people have stuff, expensive stuff, they don’t even really want or need because they think their self worth is somehow attached to that stuff.  AND, if our self worth is attached to our stuff, then we cannot throw it out.  If we buy a new HDTV to replace a perfectly fine working older model, we don’t throw out the older model … because it still works.  We didn’t ‘need’ the HDTV, we simply desired it.  But the older model was given to us by grandparents when we first married, so we don’t want to separate ourselves from it for sentimental reasons.  Really … sentimentality about a television?

But then, the size of our houses too says something about us.  The bigger our homes, the bigger our paychecks must be, the bigger woman or man on campus we must become.  It’s all about status, people!  To hell with the environment!  We’re paying lip service to it if we’re living in homes twice the size they used to be a couple of decades ago with fewer people under their collective roofs! 

And there’s something else about these large homes on post-it sized lots.  We’re all living inside all of the time.  The lots are too small to even play a game of catch on them, so there’s not much point in going outside!  We want our homes at 21 degrees centigrade 24/7 every day of the year.  We don’t want ambient noise from the street to interfere with our screen-time: whether it is on one of the three or four televisions or computers in our houses.  Houses have to be larger to contain all the screens we possess.  And larger houses do not speak of family togetherness, but more about family isolation.  We’re almost afraid to be together anymore.  We may come together in the hallways, but we often retreat to our private demesnes to watch our favorite show or play a game, or surf the internet.  Shoot!  Young teens now sit in rooms together and text one another.  Talking is free, but we get to spend money texting one another … and naturally we need to buy the coolest cells … or other such “stuff”, in order to send and receive the most complex images and videos, so that we can spend more money on the cell phones and on the air time sending all that … stuff!

But maybe there’s a ying-yang to all this stuff which we still haven’t explored.  First, we make stuff to be thrown away in five years.  If I were to use a voice that makes me sound like an old codger, you’d hear inside your minds, “I-I remember when, back in the ooooold days, people used to take stuff to a repair person and get it fixed!”  Now the base charge to fix something costs as much as the item would to simply replace it.  So why bother getting anything fixed?  But things don’t have to break more frequently simply to get us to buy more stuff.  Technology grows by leaps and bounds suggesting we have to continue to upgrade.  Computer games make computers obsolete.  Why own a computer to play games if you can’t play the games, so, you’d better buy a new computer!  Phones are smaller with more features, refrigerators come with ice makers, water dispensers (there is something called a faucet, but the water is not ice cooled … and naturally it’s too much time to waste to walk over to the old fridge to get a cube or two out of the tray of ice!), and refrigerators now have televisions built into them.  We have to have the best of the best and nothing else will do.

The saddening rise of the self storage lockers is proof that we’re out of control with our spending habits.  We’re machines buying stuff for reasons we’ve long forgotten what they are!   We’re making ourselves sick over it!  There may be only correlation and not “causation” to suggest this last point but all this stuff which takes all this time and money to acquire must be placing stress upon us.  Something’s causing our stress levels to rise.  In Putnam’s Bowling Alone, a graph demonstrates that malaise and stress are on the rise for each generation, and as the generations grow younger, the malaise and stress is higher for each younger generation than the last.  So while seniors are finding more stress in their lives, their children find even more and grandchildren have more still.

I have wondered now for some time why countries without all our “western stuff” want to ramp up their economies to parallel ours.  We’re killing our environment with throw-away appliances and other stuff, and we’re killing ourselves in our attempt to house it and acquire it.  Those who hate us for our wealth don’t need to be jealous of it!  They should be running from our greed and spending habits.  They should be looking for another key element to base a society upon other than consumerism.  We’ve made consumerism our God and it’s killing us, but now we don’t know how to stop and we don’t want to look foolish in admitting that we’ve barked up the wrong tree for the last hundred (?) years.  There seems to be a notion that we might even be able to buy our way out of … well … spending!  Throw enough money at something and all problems go away eventually … don’t they? 

Look.  Meditation, quietly focusing on a flame, a flower or even the sound of your regular breathing does more to make us feel better than any toy will.  But we don’t think we have time to stop long enough to meditate for five minutes.  Meditation is stupid!  That’s a waste of time.  But mediation will go further to balancing us than working harder to get the next toy so we can have more stuff ever will. 

Meditation is only one answer that begins to challenge our consumerism.  Meditation restores balance faster than any new purchase ever will.  But we won’t have anything to do with it!  Time with family … really connecting with those we love … that could be a place to start … if we could ever peal each family member away from their large room and their glowing box to make that time.  But ‘family’ is stupid!  Dumb!  A waste of my time.  We’d rather be alone in our rooms … apart from one another.  But it’s proven that a single, gentle, meaningful touch from someone we love will do more to restore our positive brain chemistry (we’ll be happy, warm, nurtured, cherished, loved) than any degree of ‘fun’ we have watching a television alone in a room by ourselves will. 

Playing cards or a board game is less about the game than the social activity around it!  How long has it been since you played cards?  Bowling Alone proves that we do far less of it than we used to … that and a host of other things that all make us more kind to one another … like having friends over for dinner or a visit.  We can’t do that because we’re too busy working too hard and feeling too tired to get together.  But we can work hard and buy stuff to fill storage lockers.  Yeah!  That’s the ticket!  That’s the way we want our society to work!  We want elevated blood pressure, increased stress, and estrangement from our family members.  These are the things we ‘get’ from our stuff.  Storage lockers aren’t evil.  They’re the lynch-pin to the entire scam of buying stuff to feel better … which really means feeling worse!

Here’s something that is proven.  If we suffer from more stress today, than in the past, which is true, and we know that people lived in smaller homes and rented fewer storage lockers, then people lived with less stuff and were happier 20 years ago than we are with more stuff and less happiness today.  (Correlation, not causation, but are we willing to BET on that?)  Consumerism is on a cascade effect that seems unstoppable.  There are a lot of great toys and things to own.  I want some of them.  Really, I do.  But I try to save for those things before buying them and my wife and I often have the conversation of, “It would be nice, but where are we going to put it?”  And if we can’t answer that question, we can’t buy the stuff.  I hope to want less stuff, so I don’t have to save so much, so I can be more available to the people in my life … and to me … so I can meditate … all too infrequently.  I fail at this stuff too.  I’m in this world.  It sucks me in.  I swim with the current.  What’s important at moments like this for both you and I is that I bounce out of that track from time to time to see its real impact on me and you and all of our society so I can write an article about it to make you think a little. So you can go out and spend some quality time with your family without fear of having to work to buy something because you haven’t been spending enough time with them!

And lest you think I’m coming up with anything new … well I’m not.  Aristotle said most of these things (and probably better) than I have here and he did it 3,000 years ago.  Friendship, he said, was the greatest external good.  And he said that those who live a life of contemplative study require the fewest things.  But that most people would look at someone like that and think they were very strange.  People who only measure a person’s value by their stuff, won’t ever get it!

I don’t really know all that much.  But I do know that unless you own a storage locker because you’re forced out of your home, or going through a divorce, or maybe you have a large, once-a-year hobby that takes lot of gear that you can’t really store at home, then a US$22 billion dollar a year business in storage lockers is all about all the wrong kind of stuff.

So, ditch your stuff.  GIVE it away (yes give) and don’t sell it in a yard or a garage sale.  You won’t need the money for more stuff and there are those out there who do need your excess stuff.  So you’ll get a two-fer: you’ll feel good about your stuff having a good home and you may stop worrying about buying more stuff and where you’re going to put it and how you’re going to pay for it.  And all of those things lead to human kindness!

Cheers

Owen