A Nation of Stuff

My beautiful daughter turned 10 last week so on Friday we celebrated with family and 12 of her friends.

This picture doesn't even begin to show how many gifts she received for her big day.

We brought home these new treasures to recognize that she did not have any space in her room to put them. It forced us into an impromptu spring cleaning and I was surprised by how much she was willing to donate.

This picture doesn't show the items we ended up recycling or throwing away--things that are not accepted at thrift stores such as partially used coloring books or half a page of stickers. We could always lie to ourselves and say that we will eventually use these items, but as we wiped off several years of dust from them it was ridiculously obvious that they had to go.

But I look at the pile of stuff and I think about how much she didn't play with these toys. It killed me to see several pairs of shoes (and consider the associated price tags) that didn't have more than a couple weeks worth of wear--she had so many shoes that even when rotating through them she was never able to make good use of them before her feet became too big. Stuff! TOO MUCH STUFF!!!

And this leads me to thinking about the bigger picture. We are so focused on stuff. You send a kid to a birthday party and it is an expectation that he comes home with a goody bag full of pencils, cheap dollar-store toys and stale candy.  You know, STUFF. Through evolution it has become the natural inclination of man to hoard--initially a survival instinct, now a possible source of a mental health disorder, so we hang onto this crap. You don't want to throw the stuff away because somebody went out of their way to give it to you and someday you might actually need it.

But before we ever decided to hang onto this crap, we purchased it. We somehow had it in our minds that these purchases were necessary, it had to be done. And we gift-wrapped the stuff in fancy paper and plastic to try to impress the receiver with the burden inside.

Take it back even further and consider the amount of time Americans work. We work 40+ hours a week to have the money to purchase the stuff and the space to put the stuff in. In the meantime, we are exhausted, overweight and depressed. Those eight pairs of shoes in the picture weren't necessities but somehow I felt that they were needed at the cost of X number of hours at a job that is only so-so in my book.

This stuff will ultimately end up 1) in the garbage 2) in the garage or 3) at the thrift store. And while the last option sounds reasonable, even charitable, I don't know that some of the things being passed along and re-purchased are really favors and acts of goodwill(<--- "acts of goodwill," get it?! LOL.)

Then my last step (leap) takes us all the way to the national debt. It's the best of times and the worst of times, nationally speaking. I consider how people tell me that times are hard, but I'm thinking it's all relative. It's hard in comparison to the Clinton years, yes. But it's not hard compared to the Great Depression, or the pioneer days, or the Stone Age. We have redefined what necessities are, have become a country of STUFF and are completely unwilling to give it up no matter the debt and expense and overflowing landfills and polluted air and we say that times are hard.

We are slaves to our jobs. We are slaves to taxes. We are running out of room. We are slaves to our stuff. But we are volunteer slaves and I propose that we start a liberation. And more than anyone else, I'm telling myself that I should really start with not buying so much STUFF!