So. I won the game (Crass Consumerism)

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Step one: You leave home, semi-permanently. All your stuff fits in a single carload with space left over.

Step two: You move into your first non-rented abode. You bring all your stuff in two truck loads. Furniture is hand-me-downs and cast aside wire spools. You consider cinder blocks to be good cheap furniture building blocks. Your futon was cheap.

Step three: Marriage. You and your spouse make more money then you ever have before. The crap that was your daily furniture gets moved to the ‘living room’ in your new house. Your furniture is now leather, and has a hide-a-bed for those rare sleepovers, just in case. (rare = never)

Step Four: Your leather furniture has displaced the crap in the living room…but your family room is now full of walkers, high chairs, Fisher Price toys, and Diaper Genies.

Step Four A: Your parents downsize into an apartment while they sell their house, looking for warmer climes. You store their stuff for free, in your basement and garage.

Step Five: Clothes. Lots and lots of baby clothes. Some never worn, but you now have a bedroom with 6 laundry baskets full of clean clothes. 2/3rds of which don’t fit the kids anymore, which never get put away.

Step Six: Enough is freeking enough. You hunker down and get rid of the baby toys and sub 4 year old support gear. Your parents come to pick up the stuff you stored for them(*), The Aquarium that served as nothing more than a Plecostamas and Algae breeding ground has finally departed via Craigslist.

Here’s where things fall down.

*The Parents have a weight limit in the moving van. You end up being GIVEN more stuff than you were STORING.

Your crap isn’t CRAP anymore. Your once voluminous basement is 360 degress worth of heirlooms, memories, collectables, hobby supplies, and things you can’t get rid of because ‘you never know when you’ll need them’…and 12 boxes of receipts that, in 12 years, you’ve never once referred to.

Somewhere along the line all the ‘easy’ discardables got replaced with Good Stuff, Stuff you Can’t Possibly Get Rid Of…and things that aren’t yours. (You can’t pitch the play castle, it holds all the costumes! Think if the children, man!)

So. Me and my middle-class dual discretionary income has won. We have everything we were told we needed. And there’s nothing we particularly want to get rid of. There’s just no longer any space.
I’m not particularly upset. I have zero need to zen-ify my life. I just wanted to bring up something Mundane and Pointless as a cautionary tale for those of you still accumulating stuff. The grass only looks green on this side of the fence.

2

I can tell you one thing you AIN’T got, slappy.

A bigger house. Then ya wouldn’t HAVE yer lil’ problem there, wouldya? :smiley:

3

Trust me, I understand. I’m in the process of sorting and packing stuff, in preparation for a move we’ll be making sometime in the next few months. I am discovering along the way that more things are disposable than I thought, but there will still be a lot left.

4

And I won’t. In order to get a bigger Garage (I mentioned it’s filled too right? right?) I’d need a MUCH bigger house… twice the furnaces, water heaters, and A/C’s.

I read a rather depressing article a number of years back asking you to imagine how much money you spend a month for ‘storage’ and Rooms you never use. Dining Room? Living Room? Guest Bedroom? Basement? After a lifetime of moving into bigger houses, 90% of your mortgage is going to storing ‘the unused’.

5

Now you just need a bigger house.
:smiley:

6

Me too. I’m having major problems parting with books, however. Specifically, I have a lot of hardcovers, many of which I will likely read again. BUT, these are books that if and when I do decide to read again, I could get at a library or cheaply on Amazon. So is it worth it to move them??? Clothes, on the other hand, I’m having no problem giving to Good Will.

Sorry for the hijack…

7

Not at all KSO it mirrors what I’m finding on the computer side of things. I’ve got a TON of storage space holding movies I never watch…it’s much easier to just have Netflix handle the storage.

8

You only win if you die heavily in debt. Er, are we playing the same game?

9

I dread the day when my parents start trying to unload stuff on us in earnest. It’s going to be mostly down to me, too, because my brother is in Texas and rarely comes to visit, so he won’t be coming into much stuff until they are gone.

I had thought they were slowly paring things down on their own, but I went out to their storage shed to get something out of the freezer last time I visited. I hadn’t really been in there since they built it. There, hanging neatly on one wall were their golf clubs. I am 47 years old and if either of my parents ever played golf in my lifetime, I was too young to remember it.

10

I forgot…we have FIVE sets of china. And a BIG china cabinet chock FULL of crystal. I don’t remember the last time we used any of it… But if we wanted to, we could host a party of about 200 without resorting to the Chinet.

11

Simplify, simplify.

12

If you mention the game, then you haven’t won. Now you made me lose also.

13

No kidding. 15 years ago, we lived in a 1 bedroom apartment. Everything fit.
13 years ago, we lived in a 2 bedroom condo with 2 (yes TWO) walk in closets, and everythign fit.
10 years ago, we lived in a smallish house, and everything fit.
last year, we lived in a 3 bedroom, bigger-then-we-need house, and we’d managed to come close to filling it in the last 8 years.
This year, we moved into a 4k sq ft house (including an apartment for my parents) and we’ve started the process of filling it as well. Just bought a new sofa and loveseat last weekend.

In 10 years, we’re either going to have go move to an entire apartment complex, or have the garage sale of the century. Maybe I should start looking for buildings for sale now.

14

Years ago I saw this book, can’t remember the title just now, but it was very interesting.

It was basically one large photo essay, from all around the world. The photographer had gone all over the world and taken photographs of average families, all of the members, standing in front of their dwelling with all of their possessions spread out before them. I have never forgotten the book as it was quite a message and well delivered.

An African man and woman, with 2 small children stand before a mud hut, with a goat, a few cooking bowls, a couple of thread bare blankets and some mats, maybe a spear. And Indian slum family, an Asian rice growing family, etc. etc…

I have never forgotten it as I would burn with humiliation if all our ‘stuff’ was piled up before us. Yikes!

Whenever I visit my Chinese friends in Singapore I am always struck by how much simpler their lives are simply by virtue of having less crap to clean, stack, store, wrangle, rifle through etc. I always return ready to start clearing out the house. The difference between my friend’s eight-year-old’s bedroom and the bedrooms of my friend’s kid’s, here in the west, is really remarkable.

I’m coming to believe the reverse of “He with the most toys wins!”.

15

elbows, I know what you mean. Talk about an embarrassment of riches. I would like very much to throw about 1/2 to 2/3 of our stuff out (give it to charity, whatever), but my husband is a pack rat. It makes me feel good to go through the stuff in a room and just get rid of all the junk. Oh well, at least my husband saw my hoarder dad’s house full of crap after he died - if anything can cure a mild pack rat, that’s it. Jim’s been a lot more open to the idea of not carting everything from move to move now.

The only way I’d ever let anyone store anything at my house would be with the understanding that after an agreed-upon length of time, I’m going to start chucking things. In other words, don’t store anything at my house that you can’t stand losing.

16

Ha- Just wait until you have to move 23 years of crap out of your attic!!

That’ll learn ya to travel light.

17

I left about 2.5 metric shitloads behind when I moved from Chicago to North Carolina. Some of it was furniture and household stuff that wasn’t worth hauling that distance. There were a few things that I thought hard about (like a buffet and dining room set that had been my grandparents’) but knew that I had no room for it at my new residence.

Now I’m getting ready to move again, and I’m taking a look at a few things that I brought with me on my last move and wondering if they’re worth taking with me this time. And I know that after I move I’m going to be giving some serious thought about simplifying my life, which include decluttering my possessions.

18

My daughter won’t come visit me anymore. She says I always make her take stuff when she leaves. Last time it was pillows. “You’re having company – you’ll need these pillows!”

That’s how you do it. Everybody who visits leaves with something. :smiley:

19

Are you overloaded on cash?

20

Don’ wanna…just want to stop accruing the kipple

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kipple)