Too Much of Everything

I have too much of everything. First, there are the band shirts I’ve collected from each concert I’ve attended since high school. It’s the shoebox full of pens, pencils, and markers that still work. Then I’ve got all the holiday décor and small collection of bags. It’s all the books I’ve found and purchased, read and left to collect dust on big bookshelves.

Part of the situation is my fault. I buy too much clothes. I read too many books (and like them enough to keep). I make small impulse purchases at the checkout of Target. Whenever I swing by the Dollar Tree to pick up random essentials like a toothbrush or cheap athletic socks, I end up grabbing an extra tube of mascara, sunglasses or a cute pad of notepaper. It has taken years, but the amount of stuff has slipped out of control.

It’s not a hoard. Nor is it a mountain of garbage. This is an accumulation of too many t-shirts to fit into a dresser comfortably. This is a large stack of unused notepads collecting dust at my desk. It’s a little bit too much clutter that’s bothersome at times, but definitely won’t pack a U-Haul truck.

This is over-consumption. By purchasing a new pair of sunglasses whenever I forget mine at home, by collecting cute keychains from Disney World and Universal Studios and the gas station in Kentucky, I’ve created a problem too much stuff.

I can’t be the only person with this problem. It is this issue that gives life to resale websites like eBay and Poshmark, who are both thriving. This ridiculous accumulation of stuff (not garbage) has added clutter to our lives in so many ways.

Every Christmas, we exchange gifts and add more stuff to our lives. That extra blanket, the holiday makeup bag, those cute fuzzy socks, they’re not desperately needed. They’re useful at times but of course, they’re not necessary. I have a half dozen blankets living across various rooms in my apartment. I just bought a high platform bedframe that boasted the ability to fit full-size plastic storage bins underneath my bed. I cleaned the house and filled the entire area. I have too much stuff. So does America.

With fast fashion and cheap production, things are being made constantly. Even during the pandemic, there are companies manufacturing things besides face masks and hand sanitizer. With the accumulation of stuff and the constant production of even more stuff, what gives?

So I sell some stuff on eBay. I donate the rest to charity. The stuff is just sold again in circles. The buying and selling and donating and buying to sell has become a strange modern economy. Things not only have one life but many lives. And while it’s great to see old clothes and toys get resold and reused instead of being trashed, there’s just another cycle of stuff making its way around. More stuff, more stuff, more stuff.

Add in the newly manufactured mystery boxes of toys and this season’s fashion trends and we’re buried in even bigger mountains of stuff.

This is a product of a lifetime of advertising convincing us to buy more, spend more, shop more. There’s the sales, the Black Friday specials, and the limited time offers. There’s the collectables and the special editions. Gotta catch ‘em all, right?

Wrong. These things don’t really make us happy. There’s some happiness in fond memories of vacations and special gifts from our grandparents. Then there’s the thrill of bargain hunting or getting that commemorative gift. It’s our consumer culture that’s convinced us that we need these things in our lives, that by spending and spending we gain some sort of value in our lives, and that these things can somehow add meaning. Until they don’t have meaning. Or maybe they never really did.