We are a “stuff” country, and stuff keeps the economy going
When I was born, American consumerism and our incredible accumulation of stuff was born, too. Up until then, our country was very frugal. We recycled everything, bought recapped tires, and grew and then canned our vegetables and fruit. Heck, my parents even used tea bags more than once.
Our soda and milk bottles were all made from glass, and we received pennies for returning them to the store to be recycled. My grandparents even reused the Sears catalog in their outhouse – I know, too much information.
Our Depression-era parents weren’t too big on showering us with stuff.
We got four or five toys for Christmas, and, except for the homemade birthday cake with used candles, birthday presents were limited to a silver dollar. They didn’t want us to be spoiled brats.
When we became parents, we filled our houses with things that were reflective of our upward mobility. This has reached a point where, if we want to raise the quality of living for all the people of the world today to the economic standards of the United States, we would need four more Earths of raw materials.
From the Greatest Generation to the baby boomers, the Generation X-ers, and beyond, the amount of stuff we have accumulated has evolved in a way that is very reflective of our lives. Some of that may have come from the women’s equality movement, where we became two-income families, or it may have been from Madison Avenue’s perfection of media and consumer manipulation.
After 9/11, when President George W. Bush said something like, “We should all go shopping,” it hit me. We are a stuff country, and that stuff is the economic engine that keeps things running.
One of Jerry Seinfeld’s bits is, “Your home is a garbage processing center where you buy new things, bring them into your house, and slowly crapify them over time.” His suggestion was to simply buy something, take it home, and immediately throw it into the dumpster. It saves us from all of the other steps. Buy it and toss it.
I used to encourage my wife to take the stuff we didn’t want or need anymore and shove it into our attic for the kids to sort through after we died. Then we moved when the kids weren’t around, and getting rid of all of that garbage was a real drag. Now our kids are verging on being empty-nesters themselves and are having the same problem with stuff.
The digital age has dramatically changed the landscape. Concepts like social capitalism, living off the grid, downsizing, and shared ride services, have created a different relationship between some of us and our possessions. There are digital books now and downloaded music. Both make for fewer possessions but more giant energy-consuming server farms that we euphemistically refer to as the cloud.
We already know the familiar pattern of admire, acquire, display, then store it, sell it, or just give it away. Our basements, attics, and closets are our repositories until we rent a unit where we forget it. That is until we watch “Storage Wars” and think, “Hey, I have a Mickey Mouse telephone like that. Maybe I can sell it on eBay.” We never do.
Okay, some things are coming back into style with the retro-oriented generations liking vinyl records, but most of our physical items have little or no sentimental value for the next group of consumers. So, our real china, which is too delicate for the dishwasher, real silverware, and other silver pieces that need regular polishing, grandma’s old mink stole with the mink’s mouth holding onto another mink’s tail are all going to be donated or tossed.
Family heirlooms are evolving simply into old junk for the next generation with little or no sentimental value.
Meanwhile, my rent is due on my stuff unit.
Nick Jacobs is a Windber resident.