Lately it seems that I have been focusing on how cluttered our lives have gotten. It seems the more money we make the more STUFF we buy. I have observed that many of us seem to have a fetish for certain items. For me, especially when I was working, I was constantly looking out for ties. I must have at least 75 ties in my closet of various styles and colors and from an assortment of famous designers. I even have a tie made out of wood - yes wood. My wife on the other hand must have gotten bit by the Imelda Marcos bug; because she was always buying shoes. She must have over 100 hundred pair of shoes stored throughout the house.
For my mother, who is a product of the 20’s, 30’s and 40’s, when people had so little, her so called fetishes are in the form of having plenty of linens and having a pantry stocked full of non perishable items, enough so that she could survive at least six months in case of a nuclear attack. I tremble at the thought of having to move. The last time she moved, I made at least six trips with my car transporting just the canned goods and paper goods that filled a huge pantry. If the Scott Company ever goes on strike and you run out of paper towels, facial tissues or toilet paper just knock on my mother’s door and she’ll take care of you.
Just stop and think for a moment and imagine flying overhead in any neighborhood with X-ray vision that could make you see what was in each house and or apartment. I would imagine that you would find a disgustingly overabundance of STUFF that could probably supply all the needy on at least one continent. Some people seem not to have enough of this STUFF that they travel to flee markets and garage sales to purchase other people’s unwanted STUFF. I’m astounded at how much the earth can hold. I often get caught up thinking that we have so much that at some point the earth is going to fall out of the gravitational pull of our solar system and go dropping off into some abyss causing our end.
I was a product of the 50’s and 60’s and have some wonderful memories of how things were so simple. Unless you were from a family of ten living in a three room cold water flat you weren’t subjected to all the clutter that you find in today’s homes. Everything was simple. You had just the basic necessities. You were considered among the privileged if you had your own bathtub or for that matter your own bathroom. Some apartment buildings had one common bathroom per floor shared by two apartments. Now the new homes have one bathroom attached to each bedroom.
Back then you were lucky if you had more than one closet per apartment. You didn’t need it because you couldn’t afford the amount of clothes that people have today. You had a few things for everyday use and a set of clothes (your so called good clothes) that you wore on Sundays, Holidays, weddings, wakes, funerals etc. And if you were part of a larger family you definitely wore hand me downs. You didn’t throw anything away. If you had a hole in the sole of your shoes and couldn’t afford to go to the cobbler to get them resoled you would get a piece of cardboard and insert them into the shoe until your mother and father had enough money to take care of them. You wouldn’t throw them out until they were totally destroyed. Old worn out clothes were turned into rags for cleaning.
It’s interesting how this generation prides itself on coming up with recycling programs to help our ecology. That was our way life growing up. You see being poor helped the ecology. I never remember seeing the enormous amount trash that is put out nowadays back when I was small. We had a milkman deliver milk in bottles door to door and he would also pick up the empty bottles along the way. He did that as part of his job. Now you have to pay an additional 5 to 10 cents per container and have to store them and take them back to recoup the amount of your deposit. That’s progress, I guess.
We have so much STUFF nowadays that we are running out space. The average home in 1970 had 1500 square feet of space whereas today the average is up to 2400 square feet and still you hear people complaining that they don’t have enough closet space. I have a two family house that was built over seventy years ago. It is big enough, with a walk-in attic and large basement, that it can be converted into a four family house. Not having enough closet space, we have the luxury of storing items not only in the attic and basement but also the garage, which is not used for the car, and also a large storage, area crawl space type, over the garage. The downside to having all this space is that one gets attached to their STUFF and never wants to part with it. If I don’t periodically go weeding through the STUFF and occasionally toss out something that is of no use, I would soon suffocate.
Well for some that can’t part with their STUFF, we have seen a new phenomena over the last 20 years that have sprouted like stalks of corn in the field. Metal sheds are now popping up alongside interstates and roadsides which are called self-storage facilities. You run out of room in your house, no problem; just go to one of the 45,000 facilities and rent out part of the 2 billion square feet that’s available just for your gluttonous use. For some if they take the time to do a cost ascertainment, they’ll find that they are paying more in rental cost of these spaces than what the entire contents of their STUFF is worth.
The pack rats have created whole new industries. For an hourly fee you can avail yourself to one of 3,900 members of The National Association of Professional Organizers to help you free yourself of clutter. If that doesn’t help you can even join Clutterers Anonymous or Messies Anonymous and avail yourself of their 12-step program.
This whole rat pack thing is now being treated like many other addictions. For a number of years, I found myself storing reading materials such as the magazine inserts of the Sunday newspapers saying to myself, “I’ll get to reading that.” Ninety nine and nine tenths percent of the time I found that I never got to reading them and instead found myself adding to the pile and getting depressed each time I saw them. I had a hard time parting with them until a few years ago I made the ultimate sacrifice and started to throw them out. I guess there are people who start arts and crafts projects and don’t complete them always saying to themselves, “I’ll get to that someday.”
Before you end up in Clutterers Anonymous let me pass on a bit of advice that my mother-in-law always told her daughter, “If you don’t need it, don’t buy it. If you can’t afford to pay for it, don’t buy it.”
PS: By the way, let me tell you that cardboard was not a good insulator; it did not keep your feet dry when it rained.
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