The Tyranny of Stuff

The seasons of our discontent

An urban legend factoid has it that the average American household contains 300,000 discrete items of stuff. Whether the claim includes loose screws is unknown, and it’s probably wildly inflated. But let’s not let the facts obscure the truth—we are awash in stuff.

Why do we have so much of it?

Some of it is useful

We don’t all eat finger food all the time, so cutlery is handy to have. A four-piece setting will sufficefor daily purposes if you don’t put off dishes. But what about the service for 12 received as a wedding gift that has appeared on a Thanksgiving table once in ten years? Along with the accompanying china and glassware it lies dormant taking up the cabinet space that figured so large in the house or apartment you chose. How about cars? They are undoubtedly useful for laboring under return-to-work mandates in cities without adequate public transportation. And for the occasional Sunday drive it’s nice to be able to escape to the countryside. But where is the real utility edge of the expensive Lexus over the more affordable Toyota? The beauty of the Lexus is skin deep—it is attractive because you, and the Joneses, know it is expensive. The interior is luxurious, especially the scent of leather when new, and the whisper quiet is legend. That is, when you are not rocking to the subwoofer of the audiophile sound system.

Some of it is pure status signaling

Even though when stuck in traffic there is no way of knowing that the driver of the cheap used car next to you is gazing upon your wheels with envy of your superiority, you like to think so. This is an example of “conspicuous consumption,” an argument advanced by the American economist Thorstein Veblen in his book The Theory of the Leisure Class. Veblen wrote in 1899, an exemplary year of the first Gilded Age of a great gulf between the winners and losers of the huge economic expansion following the Civil War. He takes as prime example the matter of apparel.

It is also true that admitted expenditure for display is more obviously present, and is, perhaps more universally practiced in the matter of dress than in any other line of consumption.

Think fast fashion.

How we came to afford it

Before about 1870, Bradford Long argues in his recent book Slouching Toward Utopia, the economy was largely concerned with problems of poverty, providing the basic necessities of life. As advances in technology, organization and directed innovation began to take hold, the surplus over the bare necessities began to grow at much faster rate. Long estimates that it began to grow more than four-fold. It’s no surprise that the surplus came to be concentrated in a relative handful of market winners. (And, for there to be winners that must, perforce, be losers.) John Kenneth Galbraith takes the argument further in The Affluent Society. By affluent, he means by the long historical standards of poverty. Within the past century one-third of the United States was “ill-housed, ill-clad and ill-nourished” (FDR in his second inaugural speech, echoed in his 1944 inaugural).

The grandparents and great-grandparents of today’s discontents, who wish for a McMansion in nice suburban neighborhood with amenities such as home theaters that were available 20 years ago due to cheap financing, had different desires. Our near forebears had economic needs that could, in theory and partially in practice, be alleviated. Necessities can be satisfied. Desires cannot. That’s why it’s feasible to satisfy the one and impossible to satisfy the other.

The seasons of our discontent

If we have a living room, we have a place to put a TV. If we have a TV we want something to watch. If we’ve had our fill of broadcast TV we want to watch videos. If we’ve exhausted our collection of DVDs, we get cable or internet streaming. If we grow tired of scrolling the vast wasteland of formulaic dreck, we may develop a taste for the theater. When the quality of local theater disappoints, we may incur the inconvenience and expense of traveling to New York. When we learn that for variety and quality of plays London is where to go, we venture further afield at even greater expense. This is the stuff of the attention economy.

How to support the expense of the unscratchable itch

The primary limit on how much we can consume is not income. It’s leisure time. Income devoted to physical stuff requires the time to acquire, use and store. Think collectibles. For the attentional stuff, there’s no leverage. The time is minute for minute. However, in the attention economy, the content must be paid for. The form of payment takes either the form of money or of the payment of attention to subjects, such as advertising and propaganda, in addition to the primary content. We resent work for just this reason. The time to commute and perform our physical or imaginary tasks detracts from our leisure. The bosses know this too, which is among the reasons for the hostile reaction against work from home we are now seeing. They know that workers are goofing off on company time because no one is watching. They goof off even at work but at least they feel guilty about it and are more easily caught.

So, the paradox is that we subject ourselves to the various miseries of our jobs in order to support the habits of acquisition and attention that we can never satisfy even if our jobs afforded us the leisure to try. And it’s not just us. It’s hard to imagine a billionaire, whose expenditures are without practical limitation and who can maintain wealth without the necessity of labor, who is content. Maybe Warren Buffet is content. He has lived in the same home in Omaha, which is nice but not extravagant, for 65 years. As far as I know, he doesn’t have a megayacht and his primary luxury seems to be a Netjets timeshare.

What is to be done

We can’t all decamp to a Walden Pond to live lives of self-sufficiency like Thoreau. For one thing, patrons like Ralph Waldo Emerson are hard to come by and it’s unseemly to crash with your parents most of their lives. Still. In my own case, possibly sour grapes, I’m happier now than I was 20 years ago when my income and savings were vastly higher. My quarters aren’t capacious enough to store as much stuff. I don’t get around much anymore. I have enough in the way of unread books to see me out the door and my model 2010 car will probably last as long as it continues for me to be safely able to drive. Same with my formal wardrobe and probably my casual wardrobe, as well.

Plus, there’s no one left whose opinion about anything beyond my ideas that I care about. So there’s that.