If we actually had everything we wanted, where would we keep it all? This is our largest problem!

We all have way too much stuff, stuff in drawers, stuff in cabinets, stuff in closets, stuff in the garage, stuff in the attic and stuff in the basement – TOO MUCH STUFF. It sometimes seems inverse to me, the poorer we are the more stuff we seem to have. I guess we are poor because we spent our money on all of our stuff. Seems weird doesn’t it?

Here is a perfect example, houses built before WWII did not have a lot of closet space, if any. Why? Because everything they had would fit in the chest of drawers and the dresser. There was no need for 2 car garages and walk in closets the size of bedroom and bathrooms that are so spacious several homeless people would be proud to call the place home. As a kid I had what I thought was a huge of stuff, hot wheels, toy cars and Tonka trucks – what I thought was a lot is dwarfed by the amount of toys that kids have these days.

Where does this new found fascination with stuff come from? Is it driven by the marketing companies that inundate us with the latest stuff? I suspect so but that is driven by our economy, we need to buy and sell stuff so the money is always changing hands, it is the free market and capitalism at its best. So does that mean I blame the very foundations of our country for the need for all the stuff? I do not know the answer to that. AS I sit and look around at all the stuff I can see from this spot I wonder, why do we have that and better yet, why did we buy that in the first place. I can see a set of ugly (my words not Brides words) set of wine glasses on top of a hutch in the dining room. Now neither one of us drink wine so there is that, we got them at an estate sale because they matched a room décor, in a house we sold 10 years ago. So why do we still have those glasses and decanter – stuff, stuff with no use but stuff we spent money on. Hard to figure out sometimes.

Stuff continues to get cheaper too, allowing even the poor to buy more of it. Some of the stuff we have is not worth what we paid for it, some stuff actually costs us money to have. We have to buy the stuff, then transport the stuff to the house. We then have to take the time to properly clean the stuff, we would not want any cooties from the previous owners to make it onto our house, with our other stuff. Stuff we thought we needed and that we accumulated eventually gets a trip to the Good Will or SPCA thrift shop, it is the way here in our house. What seemed like a bargain at the time of acquisition always seems like a worthless item when it is on the death march to the donation center, we simply did not need it.

Stuff is really only worth the value we associate with it, or the value we derive from it – it is hard to quantify the actual value of stuff. How much money does that stuff save me in the long run, does it protect some other, more valuable stuff for us, then its value is closely tied with that stuff at that point. Stuff if almost the antithesis of a liquid asset, an illiquid asset if you will and in this case I might. The only way we are ever going to extract any value from it is to use it. The problem with that is that if you do not have any immediate use for that stuff, you probably never will and it becomes worthless junk getting ready for the death march to the donation center.

Another issue with stuff is that the more you have, the more it owns you. We have to look at a bigger house to keep all of our stuff from the weather, unless it can bear the weather. Our small houses full of stuff become our bigger houses full of more stuff. Remember when you moved into your current house, wasn’t there some area that you did not have enough stuff for? That extra bedroom with no furniture, the den with only old chairs that should have been thrown away. We will fill whatever space we have with all of our stuff, whether it is a 900 sq foot apartment to a 10,000 mansion, they are all full of stuff that we most likely do not need and or do not use. 

I find all the stuff to be tiresome, it takes a lot work to properly maintain all that stuff. Just the energy spent in determining the correct location for it is hard enough. Then you have cleaning and maintenance of all the stuff, this seems crazy to me. I have a garage full of stuff that I need to maintain all the other stuff i have, I have A LOT of tools. Work working tools for that hobby and to repair stuff. Construction tools for remodeling or changing ceilings. Mechanics tools for keeping the Jalopy and the Girl Jalopy going. It is literally a garage full of stuff to keep the other stuff going, shit man my stuff has stuff.

I vow to get rid of one thing of stuff this week, join me friends in dumping some stuff. Although my stuff is stuff, your stuff is shit, according to George Carlin anyway, so maybe I will keep my stuff and you should get rid of your shit instead.