Friday, May 22, 2009

Stuff, stuff and more stuff

It's not secret that we fill our homes, our lives with 'stuff'. There is an innate desire to acquire more stuff from early in our lives.

While many are making efforts to reduce the amount of stuff in their lives - it's not hard to spot our communal failure in this - the storage industry is booming and apparent as we drive through any community today.

Part of the problem with this is we disassociate the true costs of things we acquire. The video "The Story of Stuff" does a good job of pointing to some of the true costs of our stuff. Some of the rhetoric may go a little to far, please try to overlook that and take the main message to heart.

On YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLBE5QAYXp8
On it's own site: http://www.storyofstuff.com/
(You may need to cut and paste the links, have some difficulty this morning.)

Other small steps . . . the innate desire - my son strongly desires more stuff - most kids ask for stuff in stores, his went farther, he wanted more food than his sister, more toys, more paper-towels to dry his hands in public restrooms! One day I explained that the paper-towels had to come from somewhere and we should try to compete to see who could use less. Now, when we're drying our hands he'll often bust me - "dad, I used less paper than you!"


2 comments:

  1. Paul and I have an almost unAmerican aversion to stuff after we helped clean out our grandmother's house after she died. Yes, the vinegar grandmother.

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  2. And, I knew that I had heard about the video somewhere - read about it in the NYT a few weeks ago:
    http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/11/education/11stuff.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=the%20story%20of%20stuff&st=cse

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