“

Why do you think families are unable to manage the influx of material culture?

We can see how families are trying to cut down on the sheer number of trips to the store by buying bulk goods. How they can come to purchase more, and then not remember, and end up double purchasing. We can see how an increasingly nucleated family structure contributes to this.

Can you explain?

It means we don’t have extended family households. We don’t live next to grandparents. And we are further away from our relatives. We go to work, we come home, and there is only four hours of time we spend together. We feel guilty about this, and oftentimes buy gifts as a result. Grandparents contribute to possessions in no small way. Here comes Christmas, here come the birthdays. The inflow of objects is relentless. The outflow is not. We don’t have rituals, mechanisms, for getting rid of stuff.

In the book you note how upgrading technology is also responsible for the glut of stuff.

We know how much we spent on those objects. But we’re confused about value: even though we’ve upgraded to a new fan, say, we don’t want to part with the old one because we don’t know how to recoup that value. Maybe we think we’ll sell it on eBay or have a garage sale. So it goes into the garage and there it stays because we’re so busy, we’re hyper-busy.

”

This last point about technology, value, and consumption is spot on. One of my pet peeves with the whole ‘technology helps consolidate the collection of material objects’ argument is that the actual practice of consumption remains in place. Just because you can’t see all the things you’ve consumed - because they live somewhere “in the cloud”- does not mean you are actually consuming less. Rethinking collective and personal meanings of value become increasingly important as we learn to navigate a world with more material and immaterial “stuff.”

Source The New York Times

Notes

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