How many individual objects do you think you own?

In My Humble Opinion
1

If one goes back to the earliest civilizations, one imagines that the total number of one’s possessions were fairly small in number: clothing, a few items preparation and eating of food, maybe a few tools and weapons. Nothing like that today, of course.

I guess one of the symbols of our time, for an average American at least, is that each of us practically has our own solar solar systemn of manufactured objects that surrounds us. Surely we must have the largest amount of stuff per person of any population in history, and just thinking about it makes me a bit queasy.

I’m currently sitting in my home office typing this, and without counting everything, I can still guess that there are at least several thousand individual objects in this room, from various bits of furniture, computer and keyboard to several cameras, a bunch of magazine archives, dozens of CDs, pens, stacks of bills, a box of Sight Savers eyglass cleaning tissues, little pads of Post-it notes, the list goes on and on. My house has six rooms, plus kitchen, two bathrooms, several closets, and a garage, so extrapolating, I’ve surely got at least a couple hundred thousand objects under my, er, control, and that’s NOT counting all the individual pieces that makes up assemblies of objects, such as my printer.

All this crap does seem to contribute to a relatively comfortable life, but I must admit I sometimes think it might be better to pare back until I have little more than the clothes on my back and an eating utensil. Anyway, is my situation normal for this time and place? How many objects do you think you have?

2

Strangely enough, when I moved across country last year with only my small Chevy Aveo to fit all my worldly possessions in, I counted. If you don’t include paperwork like old copies of bills and such, and can count board games as one item rather than the hundreds of tiny items they contain, I had approximately 150 items. That was counting each sock, each fork, each book, each PlayStation game, etc, which I assume is what you mean. I live light.

3

Yikes! I have 500 books alone. Probably more by now. . . and items of clothing? I have at least 50 socks. . .

4

I’ve never actually counted, but I do know that when we lost our house last fall, and I had to condense the contents of a 7 room house to fit into a 2 bedroom single-wide, the local secondhand store carted away a full pickup load + trailer load of stuff I decided we didn’t need anymore - and that’s not counting the full pickup load of crap that went to the dump, or the furniture I had to store at my dad’s house!

I could probably go through our current dwelling and get rid of at least another pickup load of junk, but my husband’s a packrat. Between his 15mm figs, paints, and brushes, and my knitting supplies, and all of our books, our object count is probably already in the thousands, without even going into clothing, dishes, etc.

5

I own many thousands of objects. Hundreds of hand tools, Hundreds of pieces of clothing. Many thousand photographs, all unsorted and unloved.

6

I’ll just mention that although I sometimes get weirded out about how much stuff I have around, there’s always someone else who is worse. Case in point: My late mother’s best friend, and best friend’s husband, a university professor. Their house is crammed with books, magazines and bric-a-brac to the point where most of the rooms have pathways to get to specific locations, like, say, one of the beds. At least 50% of the dining room is stacked floor to ceiling with plastic tubs full of note pads. My sister once mentioned that she had asked what that was about, and was told that the Professor had a habit of writing notes to himself, and would only ever use the first page of each pad, “because that made the note easier to find.”

Last time I was there, the stacks of magazines that have been gradually taking over the living room had increased to the point where some are now being stored in the center of the sofa.

I pity the son and daughter who are going to have to go though that place when their parents eventually pass away.

7

In my shop alone, I have tens of thousands of things-from individual screws on up to my lathe and table saw. Four years ago I had to move my shop one floor in the same building. It took a week of packing and another of unpacking to go 30 feet straight down.

Then there’s all the crap I have at home.

8

I guess it depends in part on how far you want to disassemble various appliances into their component parts. Is my car a single item? If you break it down, it probably consists of thousands of parts: pistons, O-rings, screws, washers, panels, etc. Same with a cordless drill or microwave oven.

Apart from a generous collection of spare screws/nuts/bolts and scrap metal/lumber, I try to avoid keeping tons of junk around that will never get used. Christmas frustrates me sometimes because my mom has a compulsion for gift-giving to the point of giving useless/redundant gifts because she has to give something. I regularly sell useless (to me) items on Craigslist or give them to Salvation Army. Even so, I do have a lot of stuff: A massive collection of hand/power tools, hundreds of books and CD’s, appliances, a closet full of clothes, and so on.

A neighbor has so much stuff he can’t park his cars in his garage; they sit out in the driveway. Interestingly, he apparently commutes by bicycle or bus, because for the three years we’ve lived in our current house, those two cars have had flat tires. They haven’t moved in all that time; they just sit there, slowly depreciating. My assumption is that he is something of a compulsive hoarder and can’t bear to part with his cars - even in exchange for money - despite the fact that he hasn’t used them in 3+ years.

On the acquisition/possession of stuff, Paul Graham wrote an interesting essay.

9

Think about this.

How much did you pay on average for each of these items? How much could you sell them for, if anything?

I knew someone who had a big garage sale every year. They would gloat about the hundreds of dollars they made every spring. All I could think of was the many thousands they spent for the crap they rarely used or needed in the first place.

Where’s all your money going? All that crap around is you is where!

10

How far do you drill down? If I count the individual grains of rice in my pantry and work up from there, this is going to get crazy quickly.

11

/CarlSagan

Beellyins and beellyins

/CarlSagan

12

I’d say probably fewer than 500 items (if you count things like socks individually). I wouldn’t even have that much if not for my books.

Basically, every one of my possessions fits more than comfortably in my bedroom. I use about half a small closet and two bureau drawers for my clothes. My books fit in the bottom portion of an old computer stand.

I spent too many years in foster care. I feel uncomfortable with too many possessions. If I ever move into my own place, it will probably be a studio because there’s no way I could ever fill a house.

13

My family of four lives in a 900 sq ft, two bedroom apartment. We live pretty lightly compared to most people we know - we don’t buy a lot of stuff and people frequently remark how uncluttered our house is when they come over. That said, my boys have over 200 Matchbox cars (most of them were given to us by my cousin, who saved his toys from childhood). We have hundreds of books. I have fifteen items sitting on my dining room table right now (laptop, mouse, mouse pad, ipod charger, camera, telephone, napkin holder, candle holder, candle, bowl, plate, pen, address book, glass, coaster). I would say we have a hundred thousand items altogether, at least.

14

True. I mentioned this earlier, but assemblies of parts constitute one item. So, your car is one item, stove one item, a pen is one item. We’ll say boxes or containers of food are each one item.

[Mitch Hedberg]

I like rice. Rice is great when you’re hungry and you want 2,000 of something.

[/Mitch Hedberg]

15

Thousands. We’re moving tomorrow, and I personally boxed most of it. Probably close to 10,00 individual things.

It’s sort of making me want to run away and become a desert hermit.

16

Well, for a start, I have about 7,000 comic books. And then there are the books and dvds.

17

In the thousands if I don’t count Magic cards. In the 10s of thousands if I count each card individually.

18

You too? We’re moving at the end of November, and at least half of our stuff is already packed. At the moment, I think I own 400 cardboard boxes, each holding anywhere from one lamp on up to things from the sewing room like the organizer that holds roughly 2,000 pins, plus at least five of each kind of sewing machine needle ever invented to fit the serger, sewing machine and embroidery machine.

Then there’s the books. And the DVDs. And the kitchen utensils… We’ve got at least 150 individual bits of eating utensils - forks, knives and spoons.

Scary thing is that this is AFTER condensing, culling and weeding stuff out!