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Someone: works hard for the money, manages to put a little aside after necessities, makes a tough decision to buy a thing Author: Useless, American Crap ... m

Someone: works hard for the money, manages to put a little aside after necessities, makes a tough decision to buy a thing Author: Useless, American Crap ... materialism with a certain shoddy complexion Someone: Not to me, not when I bought it. And if you don't like my style, I can live with that. Also, if you can afford classy, high quality stuff, congrats on your privilege. But there are good reasons for me to be a ruthless value shopper.

Daishiman 6y ago
This isn't the point of the article. The point is that if you look at middle-class Americans, they do have an astounding amount of crap in their homes, even when compared to equivalently wealthy people in other nations. Having been around the world a bunch, the material excess of the American middle class is real and true. Precisely _because_ people don't give much thought to the creap stuff they're buying and, frankly, because the suburban middle class lifestyle isn't exactly rich in the aesthetic appreciation for high-quality goods when 90% of the stuff you buy comes from department stores that have appeared in the last 50 years. Not to say that there _aren't_ enormous benefits to having access to a gigantic market of every material object you could ever possibly need. But as I look at most boomer's houses, the vast majority are drowning in a sea of totally useless objects, half-broken, that have never found great use and are just sitting there taking up space. Most of my friends in their 30s share a similar opinion about that generation's attitude towards consumption. I do think the Internet has made for better consumers when it comes to niche objects, and after material overflow was no longer a status indicator, we decided to drill into higher quality, "nice" things. But consumerist culture lives on.
- megameter 6y ago
  I see in my boomer parents a combination of unfulfilled aspiration and protectiveness of their useless goods which I have finally seen fit to start resolving, little by little, through gradual reorganization and compression of the items - first my own(because I have to teach myself some habits, given that they didn't), and then increasingly their stuff as I get a handle on it. For some reason they have spent their adult lives in a sea-of-crap state of things and can't bear to part with most of it. There is no point at which these items can be let go of, which of course means I will someday have to do the deed, and the more ordered a state I put it all in, the easier disposal will be on the day. Of course, organizing things so that they are ergonomic to access instead of piled in a sea of boxes is a significant expense. I started small, with binders and bins to start managing small items, manuals, reciepts and warranty cards. This immediately cleared out over a cubic meter of gadget boxes. Then I got book bins, over-door hooks and spice rack shelves, cable ties, and other miscellaneous things which have had similar small, incremental effects. I made a big leap forward in rediscovering the cafeteria tray - for a cost of about $2.70 each depending on size and brand, it's possible to quickly restructure most piles of small objects as a slide-to-access open drawer, and then further divide it with pencil bins. This has tamed most of the immediate stuff around me, but still leaves the piles of boxes. I realized that part of the problem of working on boxes is that you can stack them, and to access any one you have to unstack, which creates a friction to persistent ongoing effort: to actually organize instead of "shove around the pile" means paying attention to the ergonomics. So the next big leap will be in structuring the piles with additional shelving. The goal of these shelves is assistive - to eventually not need them because I have cleared out so much redundancy. And spending on all this does come with the irony that I am a consumer who buys even more to ameliorate the effects of overconsuming. But it does so in a narratively palatable way, one which develops a new respect for each object as I create the place for it. And I think that's really the way forward for me - to extend the KonMari idea of "brings joy" and thanking the item towards some kind of mutual support where you improve access and therefore usage. In contrast my parents' generation mostly focused on presenting a clean uniformity for socializing while shoving any excess crap in the closet, holding out hope that it would one day find its use - a uniformity that was in fact quite specific to their generation. My brother has a slightly different perspective on this since he has family and kids, and I have been there for the Christmas present unwrappings. They end up with far too many toys, but the relatives are all too eager to be seen doing something for the kids. It's a battle to overcome that and select a few favorite toys, and I can see my own difficulty as a "too many toys" kind of thing, too.

Daishiman 6y ago

This isn't the point of the article. The point is that if you look at middle-class Americans, they do have an astounding amount of crap in their homes, even when compared to equivalently wealthy people in other nations. Having been around the world a bunch, the material excess of the American middle class is real and true. Precisely _because_ people don't give much thought to the creap stuff they're buying and, frankly, because the suburban middle class lifestyle isn't exactly rich in the aesthetic appreciation for high-quality goods when 90% of the stuff you buy comes from department stores that have appeared in the last 50 years. Not to say that there _aren't_ enormous benefits to having access to a gigantic market of every material object you could ever possibly need. But as I look at most boomer's houses, the vast majority are drowning in a sea of totally useless objects, half-broken, that have never found great use and are just sitting there taking up space. Most of my friends in their 30s share a similar opinion about that generation's attitude towards consumption. I do think the Internet has made for better consumers when it comes to niche objects, and after material overflow was no longer a status indicator, we decided to drill into higher quality, "nice" things. But consumerist culture lives on.

megameter 6y ago
I see in my boomer parents a combination of unfulfilled aspiration and protectiveness of their useless goods which I have finally seen fit to start resolving, little by little, through gradual reorganization and compression of the items - first my own(because I have to teach myself some habits, given that they didn't), and then increasingly their stuff as I get a handle on it. For some reason they have spent their adult lives in a sea-of-crap state of things and can't bear to part with most of it. There is no point at which these items can be let go of, which of course means I will someday have to do the deed, and the more ordered a state I put it all in, the easier disposal will be on the day. Of course, organizing things so that they are ergonomic to access instead of piled in a sea of boxes is a significant expense. I started small, with binders and bins to start managing small items, manuals, reciepts and warranty cards. This immediately cleared out over a cubic meter of gadget boxes. Then I got book bins, over-door hooks and spice rack shelves, cable ties, and other miscellaneous things which have had similar small, incremental effects. I made a big leap forward in rediscovering the cafeteria tray - for a cost of about $2.70 each depending on size and brand, it's possible to quickly restructure most piles of small objects as a slide-to-access open drawer, and then further divide it with pencil bins. This has tamed most of the immediate stuff around me, but still leaves the piles of boxes. I realized that part of the problem of working on boxes is that you can stack them, and to access any one you have to unstack, which creates a friction to persistent ongoing effort: to actually organize instead of "shove around the pile" means paying attention to the ergonomics. So the next big leap will be in structuring the piles with additional shelving. The goal of these shelves is assistive - to eventually not need them because I have cleared out so much redundancy. And spending on all this does come with the irony that I am a consumer who buys even more to ameliorate the effects of overconsuming. But it does so in a narratively palatable way, one which develops a new respect for each object as I create the place for it. And I think that's really the way forward for me - to extend the KonMari idea of "brings joy" and thanking the item towards some kind of mutual support where you improve access and therefore usage. In contrast my parents' generation mostly focused on presenting a clean uniformity for socializing while shoving any excess crap in the closet, holding out hope that it would one day find its use - a uniformity that was in fact quite specific to their generation. My brother has a slightly different perspective on this since he has family and kids, and I have been there for the Christmas present unwrappings. They end up with far too many toys, but the relatives are all too eager to be seen doing something for the kids. It's a battle to overcome that and select a few favorite toys, and I can see my own difficulty as a "too many toys" kind of thing, too.