STUFF ~ Dave Harris
When you're home tonight take a
moment to look around and check out your stuff… What do you see? If you’re like
me maybe you see milk crates filled with 968.5 books, which only 101 or so of
them you've actually read, but wouldn't dare get rid of any of them, because well you know, you want them around just in case you find some time to read 30 or
40 of’em some weekend off work with nothing else to do. Even though honestly,
when you actually want to know about the information in them you will probably just
Google it anyway (like the article below), but you keep these books, regardless of the clutter they
create, to remind yourself the information is at your disposal, and yes they are neat to have around too because they make you look smart when friends come over…
This is the bane of having stuff.
We love our stuff, we are inspired by our stuff, we are genetically wired to
bring stuff back to our lair, store it and make it available when we need it,
but there is a cost to all this stuff, it’s called environmental taxation. The hidden
costs of objects we place around us in our personal and public lives that yield for us relatively little economic or emotional return for the expense they create. Expense that originates in mining raw material, processing materials into stuff to manufacture stuff with, marketing stuff to masses of people, delivering stuff to our homes and business, using stuff (often only once or twice), then paying storage fees to keep stuff around, and eventually if we’re psychologically
able, like leaving a religion, we agonize over getting rid of the stuff we believe in...
As we people of planet Earth increasingly become conscious of how we
interact with our immediate and global environments, understanding the emotional connections we have to our stuff is paramount to sustaining wholesome living conditions. The following article is psychology research about people and their stuff. If you can identify yourself in this research how do you relate to your own stuff? What do you call clutter and what would you get rid of?
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