October 22, 2005
Quote of the day: “Homes are an orgy of consumption.”
I’ve visited some homes in the Bay Area that totally fit this description:
U.S. Material Wealth Leads to Clutter - Yahoo! News
To many observers, clutter reflects the mind-set of the modern household — overburdened, disorganized and compulsive. To others, clutter is a broader symbol of a ravenous culture dependent on easy credit, piling up debt and consuming a lion’s share of the world’s resources without considering the consequences.
“People’s homes are a reflection of their lives,” says Los Angeles psychologist and organizational consultant Peter Walsh. “It is no accident that people have a huge weight problem in this country, and clutter is the same thing. Homes are an orgy of consumption.”
The obesity analogy isn’t a joke. While personal spending drives much of the U.S. economy, the resulting clutter from all that shopping is so pervasive that some researchers wonder if it might have a deeper, biological component, similar to overeating.
Their speculation borrows from evolutionary theory.
In some of my jogs around Sunnyvale, I’ve noticed that there are garages that are simply overflowing with stuff. Or, you see a two car garage, with 3 cars in the driveway.
I wonder how these people find stuff - do they ever? And is there anything technology can do to make finding physical stuff easier? Where is RFID when you need it!
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One Comment to “Quote of the day: “Homes are an orgy of consumption.””
October 23rd, 2005 at 2:18 pm
Boy, I’m astonished by the amount of crap people keep in garages here. At first, when I moved here, I was amazed that everyone has a garage, it’s so different from back in DC. I figured that it was the California car culture at work. But then I noticed that the streets here were filled with parked cars — everyone uses their garage as a storage room for boxes and boxes and boxes filled with stuff that they obviously don’t need! I mean, to get to it, they’d have to empty the entire garage.
I keep papers and stuff, mostly because when i’m working I never get around to emptying the trash can in my office. But why the attachment to stuff, why? I just wrote a contract on a tiny little 800sf bungalow in San Jose. I’ll be forced into living a slimmed-down, less cluttered life. Except… the house has a garage.
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