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The hazards of too much stuff

bbc.co.uk

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Re: The hazards of too much stuff

#51

Post by iamwithnail »

anon012012 wrote: post #49
jqm wrote: post #39

I would love to own absolutely nothing, but have a portal follow me around, and anything I needed appeared through the portal, then disappeared as soon as I didn't need it anymore. I bet something like this is one day possible and it happens. People hoard for the same reason they overeat. Because scarcity has been the rule until very recently. When scarcity hasn't been the rule for for a long time I think these thing…

When there'll be drone delivery, you could imagine a service where you rent for example a hammer for one hour, when you need one, for a few cents it'd fly to your window, then you send it back.

Definitely waiting till the tech is a tiny bit better before I request drones fly at my windows with hammers...

;)

Re: The hazards of too much stuff

#52

Post by mathgeek »

greggman wrote: post #25

By choice I've been living out of a suitcase for 19 months now. As a stuffoholic and someone that kind of likes fashion it's been an interesting experience. Dumb stuffoholic examples. I hate that I can't have more than 2 pairs of shoes. I need one dress pair for when I go to a wedding etc and I need one pair I can hike in, exercise in etc. I'd really prefer 2 or 3 more but there's no room. I can't buy anything withou…

> So sure, we can have too much stuff (I had 44 pair of shoes of which I only ever used 5 or 6) but it's hard to say where the balance is.

I'm pretty sure the balance is 5 or 6, for the shoes anyway.

Re: The hazards of too much stuff

#53

Post by mathgeek »

thrownaway2424 wrote: post #37
bcks wrote: post #34

We live in a four unit building and one of the units just went on the market. The former tenants cleared out everything for their open house and just brought in some minimal, modern "staging" furniture. It was astonishing to see essentially the same apartment layout but with none of the stuff — a kind of bizarre alternate reality. It prompted our new year's resolution: we will get rid of (at least) 5 things a day for…

You really have thousands of things you can get rid of? My house is a mess because my wife won't stop buying things for the kids but even so, I'm sure there's not 365x5 things in here I could get rid of, unless I could every sticker and crayon separately.

The goal is just 5 * 365 = 1825 things. I'd wager that most of us over the age of 30 have/had at least that many things we could get rid of before our first experience in purging.

Re: The hazards of too much stuff

#54

Post by mathgeek »

jqm wrote: post #39

I would love to own absolutely nothing, but have a portal follow me around, and anything I needed appeared through the portal, then disappeared as soon as I didn't need it anymore. I bet something like this is one day possible and it happens. People hoard for the same reason they overeat. Because scarcity has been the rule until very recently. When scarcity hasn't been the rule for for a long time I think these thing…

> People hoard for the same reason they overeat.

Personally, when I overeat it tends to be because the food just tastes too good and overwhelms my self control. It used to be the same with stuff ("that will be awesome, too!"). I've managed some success on both sides, but the idea that over-consumption is driven by scarcity only applies to a subset of the population.

Re: The hazards of too much stuff

#55

Post by wstrange »

I have a large collection of auto repair tools, gardening equipment, etc, that have an insanely low utilization. And my neighbours are the same.

A large community shed where we could all pool our stuff would make so much sense. But alas most communities are not organized to make this happen.

Re: The hazards of too much stuff

#56

Post by pjc50 »

yassam wrote: post #18

I wonder to what extent a lifetime of exposure to advertising contributes to our craving for stuff. The article claims an evolutionary psychological explanation: anyone know of any research to back that up? Our ancestors were nomadic, so acquiring a lot of stuff wouldn't have made sense, would it? I wonder whether the super rich of the 17-century wanted to acquire stuff as much as we do. They would have had the means…

super rich of the 17-century wanted to acquire stuff as much as we do

"Stuff" is very different when everything has to be handmade: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8940950 That kind of sets an upper limit on how much you can have.

The "collector" instinct certainly predates the 20th century. A lot of our museums are built around the personal collections of rich individuals amassed in the 19th century when antiquarianism became popular.

Conspicuous consumption for competitive social purposes is hardly new either. The example that comes to mind is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_of_the_Cloth_of_Gold

Prior to C20th it was more common to acquire people, by hiring them into your retinue or domestic staff.

Re: The hazards of too much stuff

#57

Post by crdoconnor »

malingo wrote: post #35

I really enjoyed this related post from a few years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5371253 "Poor people don’t have clutter because they’re too dumb to see the virtue of living simply; they have it to reduce risk. When rich people present the idea that they’ve learned to live lightly as a paradoxical insight, they have the idea of wealth backwards. You can only have that kind of lightness through wealth." E…

There might be something to this, but I still think simple loss aversion (for rich and poor alike) contributes more to clutter.

Also, kids.

Re: The hazards of too much stuff

#58

Post by yabatopia »

Not only have we too much stuff, a big part of it is crap: low quality but cheap, often produced with obsolescence in mind. If you focus on quality items you automatically buy less. An excellent example is clothing.

Re: The hazards of too much stuff

#59

Post by gdubs »

jweir wrote: post #3

If you have a problem with stuff you could do worse than reading up on Mari Kondo - http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/23/garden/home-organization-a... Never did I think I would be interesting in house tidying, but her techniques are effective.

Came to post this, actually. It's an incredible technique. She recommends doing it all at once, though we've had to split up the work over several weekends. I've tried in the past to reduce clutter, but her method is the first I've tried that works.

We donated a ton of clothes, and the best part was that afterwards I had a new appreciation for the clothes I kept -- like, "oh, I've got some really nice stuff and I hadn't realized it for a while, because there was so much clutter."

It might be largely due to the fact that her technique involves actually holding every item you own before you decide whether or not to keep it. And you end up keeping the stuff that matters to you _now_.

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