Across our country, churches are being abandoned to the wrecker’s ball or re-purposed into hip businesses and condominiums. Meanwhile, self-storage units are breeding like the Japanese beetles in my garden because we own more stuff now than we can shoehorn into our homes. It appears we have forsaken the spiritual goal of becoming one with everything to embrace the consumer creed of having one of everything.
Statistics don’t lie. Self-storage facilities have become a $40 billion-a-year industry with over 49,000 storage facilities nationwide. More than 10% of Americans now rent units, giving each of us 5.9 square feet of storage space, if divided up equally.
This trend defies logic. When I was growing up in the 1950s, families were larger than they are now, but our houses were half the size yet still big enough to hold all our stuff. Why then, one must ask, do we need off-site storage now? One primary reason is that Madison Avenue, in cahoots with Wall Street, has conned us into buying ever more stuff. It’s been said this corporate advertising campaign is the largest single psychological project ever undertaken by the human race. And one that will have a sorry ending.
Back in the day when houses were small, we fixed old stuff when it broke. It’s empowering to use our ingenuity to restore things to working order. After all, having evolved from tool-using primates, it’s in our genes. It’s a great feeling to be able to fix things. I get particular pleasure from working on my Farmall Cub tractor that I inherited from my father, who bought it in 1946, after coming home from fighting in WWII.
Things were built to last back then and because customers did much of their own repair, they were designed to be easy to work on. In the process of ratcheting up the disposable society, we have lost all that, and in the process stripped away the sense of dignity and integrity that comes from living a simple lifestyle based on self-sufficiency, a way of life fundamental to our forebearers.
If it’s no longer the newest and coolest on the block, today we can neither sell nor give away our stuff because no one else wants it either. At least we could take those excess possessions to the landfill for a proper burial. But no, that would force us to face up to our mindless addiction. So we do the easy thing and put it in self-storage — out of sight, out of mind. And in the end, all too often, abandon it to the auctioneer’s gavel.
In the big scheme of things, what good is all this stuff? We are born on this earth without stuff and will leave it without stuff, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. That being the case, why do we mindlessly accumulate it?
Paul Wachtel has a compelling answer in his book, The Poverty of Affluence, written back in 1983. He suggests our commitment to consuming is a frantic attempt by us, as individuals, to buy stuff as a substitute for the group solidarity and sense of community that used to give our lives meaning. That is until economic growth tore it apart.
Buying more stuff can be an escape from tedium. But in the end, our precious possessions will mean nothing, as they lay scattered haphazardly about the landscape like bones beneath an owl’s nest from what was left of her prey.
(Jean Stimmell lives in Northwood. His blog can be found online at jeanstimmell.blogspot.com.)