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Storage problem
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We are a nation of consumers and buyers and hoarders. We buy houses as much for the size of the closets as for the size of the kitchen. We rent homes with big attics. We rent storage units. We build sheds. We spend our money on storage bins and vacuum-sealed zip-loc bags for sweaters and old dresses. We own more than we can use, and we are afraid to let it go. Some say this is just a symptom of the fantastic abundance of the American economy. Others call it a disease. No, really. A disease. Dr. David F. Tolin of the Institute of Living and adjunct professor at Yale University says if you have more storage space than living space, you have to look in the mirror:
“It isn’t a house problem,” he [said]. “It’s a person problem. The person needs to fundamentally change their behavior.” […] At its most extreme, chronic disorganization is called hoarding, a condition many experts believe is a mental illness in its own right, although psychiatrists have yet to formally recognize it.
If you need to “gauge the seriousness” of your clutter problem, then visit the National Study Group on Chronic Disorganization. But of course, you can also visit Goodwill or St. Vincent de Paul. If they won’t take it, then at least do this.
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A matter of life
Another alternative is to hold on to it for 100 years and then sell it on E-Bay.
I recently lost thirty pounds. I am so glad I didn’t throw away all my old clothes. Sometimes it is a matter of not wanting to waste.
For some excellent insights into this very matter, read “The Storehouse and the Clock”
by Gary North:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/north/north503.html
Although it’s true that Americans often have too much “stuff,” I think this is also evidence that we are a prosperous nation that has been blessed by God.
Rather than storing our extra belongings, Christians should be giving those extra items away to those who are needy.
Well, I have a double problem here. I have an old house, built in the fifties, and that means very little closet space. And I’m a packrat. It’s not that I save stuff that would be valuable to someone else; it’s that I have old magazines and stuff that needs periodic sorting, a tedious job that easily falls to the bottom of the list. If I had a walk-in closet I’d push boxes to the back of it, but I don’t, so I have boxes in my den and, between kids, in the second bedroom. But I’m gradually sorting through them and have gotten rid of most of them.
My “dream house” would include a library, though–floor to ceiling bookcases, lots of them, because I always “need” just one more bookcase….
My “dream house” would include a library, though–floor to ceiling bookcases, lots of them, because I always “need” just one more bookcase….
Oh yeah. My husband and I have already decided that if the next house has a breakfast nook and a dining room, we will turn the dining room into a libary study. Of course, I can always dream of having both one day.
Everyone needs to move every 10 years (I know this is a foolish comment) so that they see how much superfluous stuff they have. Why do my parents have an attic full of unused stuff? Because the attic is there to put stuff in.
First, Stuff is to be enjoyed and then recycled into the community. Both rich and poor need to do this. Second, the entitlement mentality needs to be flushed. No one owes you anything. Rather, we should try to give back to our communities on a voluntary and regular basis.
When my husband-to-be and I were dating, he showed me a floor plan he had drawn up of his dream house, which also included a library with floor-to-ceiling bookcases. I’m sure it helped me decide we were a good match - though I hardly expect to ever live in such a house.
We did build a library in our house in Michigan, by taking the mostly unfinished basement and building three rooms (tool room, library, and bedroom). One wall was built-in bookcases, with the lower shelves big enough to hold encyclopedias and yearbooks and all that stuff. The rest of the walls had our assortment of bookcases, except one corner which had a nice comfy recliner and a table-lamp (i.e. the lamp was built into the table).
Of course the drawback of such a room is that it stays with the house when you move…
We moved 13 times in 23 years, but I still lugged lots of unnecessary stuff with me–because I never knew when I might need those curtains I made for 60 cents a yard in 1979 . . .
For many years I bought jeans whenever they were on sale because with three boys someone would fit into them eventually.
Now that we’ve been here for seven years–the longest we’ve lived anywhere–I’ve finally started to get rid of things we’ll never need again.
But that was after I got my in-laws’ furniture and my parents’ when they all died. It’s been hard to remember possessions are not the same as people and tossing out my father-in-law’s desk is not the same thing as rejecting him.
I’ve also learned that because we moved so often, our children tended to identify with the furniture not the house–so while my mother’s sofa was of much finer quality and theoretically I could toss our junker, the kids’ memories were with the junker. Now the kids are gone, I can throw things away a little easier . . . or, in the case of the couch, they took it with them!
I have always said that if we ever get to the point of needing to rent a storage unit, I need to get rid of stuff! I refuse to store things like that. If I can store them, never look at them and never use them, clearly I don’t need to keep them.
Keeping our house organized is a constant battle -one could be buried in just the paper that one accumulates! I have started selling on ebay, and it feels good to get rid of some stuff and get a little money in return. My husband is thrilled - although not so excited about the pile of empty shipping boxes in our living room…
A couple of years ago, I moved out of my home, and sold, gave or threw away, quite literally, almost every thing I owned. That included a nice business wardrobe and a large barn full of the remnants of an antique store I once owned and 4 30 foot dumpsters piled high with accumulated detritus. I bought an RV and set out to see the country.
Due to a quirk with the seller’s title, at one point THE ONLY tangible property I owned were the clothes on my back and the contents of my wallet and one manilla envelope. No home, clothes, furniture, knick-knacks, vehicle–not even a toothbrush, nothing. Even the two underbed plastic containers of stuff I intended to put in the RV were thought to have been mistakenly thrown out.
I spent a couple of nights in a motel until seller’s problem with the RV title could be solved
It was strange and very liberating. All the psychological weight of all those things is a remarkable phenomenon that we are mostly unaware of.
Since then I have managed to curb much of my acquisitive nature, though an objective person might still think I own too much for the small space I occupy.
As for the thrust of the posted item, those who are on the acquisitive but non neurotic side of the continuum will never change their behavior as long as they are presented every day with thousands of scientifically designed and placed messages urging them to acquire more.
I don’t know if it’s so much the “acquiring” that gets people excited (at least some people) as the “keeping” of stuff that they like. Or have to do. I have a coworker that has clothes and costumes and stuff you wouldn’t imagine in her closets. Stuffed to the gills! She cannot bring herself to get rid of things - too sentimental. I try not to attach too much feeling to objects, but not everyone looks at it that way. I don’t want to drown in all this stuff!
We started downsizing when we were down to the two of us, now we need some stuff back. Where is that twelve passenger van when you need it? And those books I send with the grown kids that we are rebuying for the second batch. Ah well.
I can even remember the time when we had more than one bathroom..
Mumsee,
That’s one reason I’m reluctant to get rid of stuff now. When we moved from NJ to MI, we sold or gave away all the clothing, toys, furniture etc. we had been saving for a second child, since after 5 years of trying we figured it wasn’t going to happen. As best as I can tell, our younger son was conceived our first night in MI.
I don’t expect to get pregnant again (the OB-GYN warned me that if I do, after tubal ligation, it would probably be an ectopic pregnancy). But we have talked about adopting. Not looking for an infant, but who knows…
Funny how this topic comes up at the start of a new year. I recently got the idea to try to get rid of as much unnecessary stuff as possible. It’s always a very incremental process for me though. Now if I could get rid of stuff my wife is hanging onto, and she could do the same for me, we’d might make some progress!
I’ve recently been thinking about this, as it’s come to my notice that I -really- love my stuff. When I was a little kid I said that I collected collections. Now I’m compulsive about periodically going through and cleaning out the stuff I’ll truly never use, but time has also shown me that there are a lot of things that will come in handy someday. Yet on the other hand, having recently moved abroad with the contents of a couple of suitcases, I see that I can’t always keep even what I might someday use–or even the things that I use everyday. I once met a couple whose house was so jammed with crap that they couldn’t take down their Christmas decorations, there was no place to put them. The children had to sleep on the couches when they visited because their beds were piled high with junk. The dishwasher and the stove and bathtub were used for long-term storage. There were narrow walkways around the house, but in some rooms you could hardly open the door. That’s why, now that I recognize the importance I place on material things, I am deliberately trying to pare down and love people instead of stuff.