Not so many years ago, it was commonplace to be subjected to the idea that you needed to buy stuff. If you don’t buy stuff, you aren’t supporting businesses that make stuff for you to buy. If you don’t buy it, the workers have no place to work because they aren’t making stuff. If that happens, they are out of work until they find a new place to make stuff that you might actually want to buy. This concept of needing to buy stuff in order to keep the economy going is failing. People don’t want to have to manage a load of stuff anymore and they certainly don’t want to have to work their lives away to obtain the stuff.
There’s a huge market for paying to put stuff in storage so people do not have to deal with the stuff they have accumulated. It’s easy to differ the decisions of what to do with the stuff that has been acquired by stuffing the stuff into a storage unit and forgetting about it. If it’s dealt with directly, there is the fact that we must deal with the pain of accepting responsibility that we may have wasted energy on the acquisition of some object that now must be disposed of once we realize it’s not truly fitting into our lives they way we were told and believed it would. After all, if it did fit, why would it be in storage?
Another conceptual reason to buy stuff was that if you had “X”, you had essentially done what today’s speak might be “Leveling Up” Back then, it was said that you “Made it”. Owning a Cadillac was at one time a status symbol and having an expensive set of China was also considered the same. Color TV’s were fancy and Hi-Fi systems were also signs that you “Had it Made”. These were luxury items that only a certain class of people could afford. This concept of having the status symbols started before the concept of acquiring things on credit. Once credit came along, it seemed that you couldn’t tell who had real wealth and who had borrowed their way into the appearance of wealth. The difference was that there had to be some way to show you had really “Made It” and people became easy targets for marketing. They were told the needed to buy more on differed payments, low interest rates or easy payments. This would allow the less affluent family to acquire all the stuff that they were told they needed to show they had achieved a position of status that somehow was supposed to provide a sense of comfort.
What it brought was payments and interest rates that would have them indebted to creditors for very long periods of time. It meant people had to go to work to pay for the things they were convinced they needed. They soon learned that the stuff they thought they needed had to be replaced by newer and better stuff because what they had was “old” stuff. This meant you had to buy the latest objects in order to continue to present the image of “Having Made It”. Those low monthly payments just kept coming and the people just kept buying, never fully paying off the last object. Now the people were enslaved to the lenders.
Some became enlightened to the idea that they could acquire all that stuff and not pay for it. This brought the guys who would show up at your door and collect the stuff you didn’t pay for. The lenders sent those guys. After that, the lenders would share notes with each other about your tendency to not pay for the things you purchased with credit. This was and is the way they tell each other if you are at risk of not being able to pay your bills. There’s another entire industry for collecting information about peoples personal habits and locations. It was with this payment history information that lenders would decide how much interest you should pay. After all, it’s not like these borrowers were going to stop buying things. They were convinced they had to have stuff and they were convinced that the acquisition of stuff was to meet a need. This was no longer about buying stuff due to a desire….it’s became a full on need and the interest rates no longer mattered. After all, the payments are “easy”…..aren’t they? Higher interest rates meant it would take longer or higher payments to get rid of the debt for the stuff. But they just kept borrowing.
Enter the next generation. One that saw the fall of the acquisition of things that people were told they needed but later discovered that they didn’t. Some of this next generation was passed some of the stuff from their predecessors for “Safe Passage”. That was to preserve the stuff so it would somehow carry on being of some value. It was too difficult to acknowledge that not passing it on would mean it was not as valuable as once believed. Thus the “Safe Passage” burden. This passing along of heirlooms became a way of handing down stuff so the next generation would be saddled with taking care of stuff that the previous generations were convinced was/is valuable. It became multigenerational stuff.
There’s another issue with not dealing with disposing of stuff once it has reached it’s end of life. Hanging on to what ever stuff you bought because it “was so expensive” is choosing to not accept the fact you spent money and will not be able to recover that “loss”. This is known as Sunk Cost. Keeping this kind of stuff/clutter is “Poor Minded Thinking”. It says you are buying things that you were convinced you needed and once the realization sets in that you don’t, you are unwilling to accept you just may have wasted money on some object and now you will hold onto the object in order to recover your loss. Recovery never happens and you just end up managing it or looking for a place to store it. Either way, it will become a burden when you are willing to continue to allow it to consume your resources (Time, Money, Space, Personal Energy) because you don’t want to let it go and accept the loss in the form of Sunk Cost.
There’s a new promoted movement that is happening where the younger generation has rejected the idea of collecting physical stuff. Instead, they consume. Newest phones, latest technology and most relevant social platform(s) are a sampling of what’s being sold now. The idea is the same, sell stuff to the people. The difference is that it’s now virtual. It doesn’t pile up and just expires and eventually “goes away on its own”. It’s still accomplishing the same thing. Extracting money from the consumer and replace it with stuff.
Embrace the freedom from collecting stuff and let the stuff you are no longer using go. “Making It” is a lie and it’s never been defined. That’s how you can be tricked into trying to achieve an undefined state.
Rowland Ramble - 