I have too many things.  Most people in America do.   Vast amounts of things.  Just looking around my room, I see three computers, fifteen guitars, two amplifiers and various piles of music gear, a cupboard and desk with more office supplies than I will use in a year, a scanner I haven’t used in months, a printer, a fax, a television and a game console.  There are two crates of action figures in the cupboard and a desk full of craft related items.  There’s a rack of magazines I haven’t read in months and a display with 12 baseball hats on it. Aside from these goodies, every available shelf, drawer, nook and cranny are filled with decorative items of one sort or another in an effort to make sure no space sits empty.  And this is my workspace, supposedly optimized to remove distractions and get work done.

Things weren’t always this way. In my parents’ day, things were a little more rare, and thus a little more valuable.  There was one television in the house, where there are four in mine (and would have been five, had I not loaned one out).  In my parents’ house, we had tiny closets that still managed to hold our wardrobes, toys, vacuum cleaners, sports equipment, etc. My bedroom has two walk in closets and several dressers and chests, and had I not had a recent Salvation Army purging, would have been stuffed to the degree that I couldn’t find anything.   I thought I had an admirable toy collection in my childhood, but both of yours dwarf it by a factor of ten or more.  You’ve both had toys passed along to charity that were still new, simply because you didn’t have time to get to them before you outgrew them.

I know why it’s happened.  When your mother and I were young, we didn’t have a lot of money.  Material things seemed so valuable and desirable.  So when we gained money, we gained lots of things.  Having the power to accumulate all the things we desired and couldn’t have when we were younger was just intoxicating.

But as I get older, more and more I’m seeing these things as more of a burden than a joy:

  • When I had one nice suit, I kept it immaculate.  Now that I have several, some of them have problems – a missing button, a determined stain.  But they haven’t been taken care of because I can just pick up another suit from the closet.
  • When I had one guitar, I kept it in great condition – truly showcase quality.  With a multitude of them, I just don’t have time to keep them all sparkly.  Some are out of tune.  Several need string changes.  They all need dusting.  But who’s got a whole day to dedicate to keeping them up?  And in the end, I can only play one at a time.
  • I used to adore action figures, so I collected them.  Recently I packed them all up because they were so problematic.  I was so busy keeping dust off, re-attaching accessories, finding display options that I wasn’t taking any time to enjoy them.
  • Once upon a time, I could quote every lyric from every album I owned – I knew them intimately.  My collection is so large now, I’ve got a lot of albums I haven’t even heard, just taking up space.

I’m trying to turn this situation around for you, but not having a lot of luck thanks to doting grandparents and current culture’s burning need to keep putting things in your hands.  So this is a situation where I’m going to have to beg you to listen to my words instead of my example

What you don’t understand when you start to accumulate things is that the value in them is not the retail price or the volume, but the value you derive from them.  A new car in your driveway is worth a few days of pride and indulgence, and after the new wears off, the same value that your old car provided – a ride from here to there.

And worse than that, the accumulation of things becomes a burden in maintaining those things.  A big house full  of nice things takes a lot of work to keep up – time and resources that could be spent enjoying life instead of serving your possessions.  And if you decide to hire out the maintenance of your things, then you have to spend more time at work to earn money to do this – more time away from living life.

I can think of lots of things I bought that I would hesitate to buy again:

  • A big house.  I really thought we needed this much room, but as it turns out, we gravitate toward the same small spaces and a lot of rooms are just repositories and museums for nice things.
  • An expensive engagement ring.  This is a hard choice, because a lot of a girl’s ego is tied up in this little purchase.  But when you think of it, you spend several thousand dollars on a rock – and probably one that abused a generation of poor people to produce.
  • Flashy clothes, cars and other status symbols.  As soon as a peer gets one, or the first time it stains or dents, it’s just another piece of junk.
  • Toys, guitars, electronics and other distractions.  I really don’t know that they were worth what was put into them.  I don’t regret my passion and involvement with guitars, but I wish that several impulse purchases that turned out to be junk had never happened.

Why is America like this?  Because the people who sell you stuff are really good at it.  They research you, categorize you and send you messages designed to get you to pull out your wallet across every available medium.  We consume radio/tv/internet stuffed full of advertising. We get our food in carefully planned packaging designed to enhance its attractiveness.  Where once my GI Joes were loosely stuffed in a cardboard box, your toys today are bound in exciting positions with hundreds of attachments – even the dolls’ hair is sewn in place lest one shake of the box make it look less attractive.  We pay a premium for designer logos – they actually have us brainwashed to the point where we pay the manufacturer more for the privilege of  promoting their products for us.

It’s not easy to defeat this kind of onslaught.  But one thing I do these days when faced with a purchase is ask myself “Is this going to make my life better?”  Am I buying something out of need, or desire?  Will it make my life happier, or is it just one more thing to add to the collection.  And because I’m a bargain hunter, I remind myself that an object I won’t use is not a bargain, even if I got it at a significant discount.

It’s working so far.  And I hope it works better for you in the end.