I was trying to explain to my boys a little bit about the problems with all of the “stuff” we accumulate. How our world only has so much space to put our old stuff that we throw away. I tried to keep it simple but in a way to explain why it’s important not to just keep buying more stuff without a good reason. We have SO MUCH stuff in our house – it’s crazy. I was talking with a friend about how amazing it is that we can just fill up a trash bag of total junk out of the toy closet every few months – stuff that doesn’t work, random pieces that used to go to something etc.

Ugh. I just cleaned up after having a couple of my 2 boys’ friends here. I came to the conclusion I come to nearly every time we clean up toys. We have too much stuff. It’s ridiculous. And we really have no one but ourselves (meaning my husband and I) to blame. Now don’t get me wrong, we don’t go out and buy toys all the time, by any means – and we do limit what they get and when. But we do somehow accumulate. Some of it is good, some of it WAS good at some point but has lost pieces, and much of it was and always has been just plain old junk.

Every few months or so I really dig in (when the boys are out, of course) and get 2 bags – one to give to charity, and one to just throw out. And it’s all well and good for a couple of months, then the junk starts creeping back in. It’s like rabbits – it seems to multiply. We get one cool game, but then start losing a couple of pieces. At first we find them all each time they get scattered and dutifully put it back where it belows. Then slowly, the pieces start getting lost. And we now have a true piece of junk. Or we go to a birthday party and get the standard bag of junk to take home and add to our piles of junk. The progression of junk returns.

It makes me think. What kind of society do we live in where we have so much excess? How is it that we can so easily accumulate such levels of “stuff” while so many nations have so little? Why do we consume SO much compared to other nations?

Our advertising spend as a nation is nearly triple that of any other nation. Even when you look at it on a per capita basis, it’s enormously out of whack. When and how did this happen?